Christian Morality and Public Law – The Henry Forums

The Henry Forums

Capitol Hill Baptist Church

May 8, 2004

Mark Dever:

Good evening.

Congregation:
Good evening.

Mark Dever:
This feels liturgical. My name is Mark Dever. I’m the pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church and it’s good to have you for this last in our spring series of Henry Forums. The Henry Forums are sponsored by the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in honor of one of our own long time members who served this church and the wider evangelical movement in America for over half a century and who died just this past December., Carl F.H. Henry. The purpose of these events is to try and follow his example as we consider thoughtfully some of the implications of being a disciple of Jesus Christ today and to do so with more specialized and concentrated attention than is normally possible in the average schedule of the church. These events are open to the Capitol Hill neighborhood and the public at large, and it is hoped that they will be used to provoke both thoughtful and energetic reactions to the truth of the Christian gospel in today’w world.

We anticipate having more of these forums in the future, though this spring series is done, if you are interested in being notified about future forums, do sign up on the signup sheets near the doors as you go out afterwards tonight. There are books for sale afterwards on this evening’s topic that are set out on a table and there will be tapes or CDs of the talk afterwards as well as previous forums and not for sale, there is also coffee to encourage us to stay around and talk a bit afterwards. Our format will be to hear our speaker and then there will be a period of me asking him some questions and then finally having an open time of questions and answers in which you have the opportunity to question and our speaker we hope will answer.

Christianity in today’s world is always in one way or another, the theme of these events. So this spring we’ve had Don Carson here giving us a provocative and helpful lecture on just war, David Wells analyzing our popular culture in his insightful lecture, Spiritual But Not Religious, and Ligon Duncan here to address the same topic we’re considering this evening. The topic is Christian morality and public law. Christian morality has always had implications for public law in whatever culture we live. So for example, we gather this evening on the 59th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, on May the 8th, 1945, Germany officially surrendered. Why had an ostensibly Christian nation generated such horrible enormities? Centuries before on May the eighth in 1657, Oliver Cromwell had refused to make himself king of England. England, though he was Lord protector. What Christian morality had justified his own public actions from inciting rebellion against the king to even cutting King Charles’ head off, but then himself refusing the crown when offered to him.

The interaction of Christian morality and public law has always been challenging. In this talk we turn to some particularly difficult issues that have been made more complex for Christians in our own country over the last few decades by a number of factors. So for example, the number of cultures and the percentage of our nation’s population from varying cultures has grown markedly since the immigration reforms of the mid 1960s. Our nation is less homogeneous in conclusions about what is moral and immoral than it was a hundred or even 50 years ago, certainly than it was at the founding of the nation. Religion has always been interwoven into the very fabric of our society from the weekly calendar to the national religious holidays that are legally recognized. Questions about the role of religion in the American experiment have existed since the beginning of our republic. Those questions have only been heightened by recent events.

The Pledge of Allegiance mentioning God, the 10 Commandments being prominently displayed, judges redefining marriage, state legislators giving non-criminal legal recognition to homosexual relationships, questions about the nature of human life and our need to legally define its beginning and ending, the justice and morality of war, I could go on and on. Our perceptions of other nations too, raise questions. How do we export our concern for religious liberty guarantees into the constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq and if we are not able to, does that raise an objection to the universality of the American experience? Can we as a nation have an increasingly diverse population religiously and still expect to value and enjoy the same liberties? Is the answer a Christian establishment? The majority opinion in our nation has been that religion is essential to our freedom. The congregationalist heirs of the puritans in New England and the dissenters in the south both preached for liberty and sow the seeds of the American Revolution.

From the first gathering of the continental Congress in 1774, God has been acknowledged and appealed to for aid both by the continental Congress and in the continental army. Thomas Jefferson, in his notes on the state of Virginia, asked the rhetorical question, can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis? A conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they’re not violated but with his wrath. What does our morality as Christians have to do with the law of the land? What can it have to do? What should it have to do? And how are we Christians to think through such moral issues, not simply for ourselves, but for the good of our non-Christian neighbors as well? Well, to help us think together about this, we have a special guest. He is a native of Florida, a graduate of Samford University and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, our speaker has lived in Lakeland in Pomade Beach, Florida, Birmingham, Alabama, Louisville, Kentucky, and Atlanta, Georgia. He has two children, Katie and Christopher. He is married to Mary. He teaches systematic theology and has since 1993 served as the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is in the middle of a typically intense schedule speaking this week at a number of events here in Washington, including a conference of talk show hosts. He can himself be heard daily on the radio here on weekdays from five to 6:00 PM He is Lord willing preaching here tomorrow morning and in Cleveland at Alistair Begg’s church on Monday.

I first met our speaker during his doctoral work in 1986 at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the years when he was sharpening his biblical and theological critical faculties. He is a frequently interviewed figure on everything from culture wars to Christian theology. He’s the author of numerous articles and has a number of books in the pipeline and writes a daily online column, usually from midnight to 2:00 AM, of amazing breadth and carefulness of thought. Our speaker is an active Christian and church member, husband and father, and a committed disturber of the theological peace. I am thankful to count him among my friends. It is my privilege to introduce to you our speaker for this evening R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Albert Mohler:

Thank you Dr. Dever. As always, it is a great privilege to be here on Capitol Hill and at Capitol Hill and I’m always invigorated by the presence of so many of you I have known in the past and also the opportunity to meet, I hope tonight, some new faces and names as well. This is a place where ideas are regularly exchanged and as we are very now engaged in a battle of ideas, a national conversation focused even on a national election with issues of very prominent and unavoidable social inconsequence being debated all around us, thinking Christians gather together to ponder the question addressed by our theme, what should could be the relationship between Christian morality and public law. An interesting background issue before us is the fact that this is a quintessentially modern question. In other eras of Christian history or of the history of Western civilization this would’ve been an impossible question.

For an understanding of Christian morality and of law would’ve been to speak of either one thing or of an understanding of the law as an aid, a definition and a structure in the service of Christian morality. But even if they are not understood as one thing, throughout most of Christian history in the history of western nations, they have been thought of as indispensable parallel tracks, the application of a moral worldview in the codification of law. The scope and background of our problem today is occasioned by the advent of modernity and now the postmodern age. We look back and understand that significant shifts in the mentality and in the worldview of Western societies has occurred in such a way as to not only raise this question but to raise it in a very urgent way because there are those who are now absolutely convinced, completely assured that there should be no relationship whatsoever between Christian morality and public law.

It is as axiomatic for those who hold such a position to think that public law must be essentially secular as it was once axiomatic to believe that it must be essentially Christian. So we are in a day that is completely changed, the shift almost now thoroughly accomplished and the question posed to us in a very clear and inescapable way. Why? Because we must deal with moral issues. The law after all is not merely a dead letter. It is a living set of expectations. Those expectations form a normative worldview, a normative set of social constraints and social expectations that have to do with issues that are inherently moral and irreducibly. So, but where should we find the morality? What is its authority? How should it be located? How should it be defined? The secularization thesis that became popular in the modern age sought to explain modernity in terms of a liberation of society from Christian norms.

Christianity was not always named as that which was understood to be overcome in a modern worldview, but belief in God, theism and especially what is now known as the Judeo-Christian heritage we’re always in the background of these discussions. At the center of the secularization thesis is the belief that modernity arrives in such a way that God is no longer needed in the social equation as human beings gain control over the forces of nature, harness the power of rivers behind hydroelectric dams, split the atom create technologies, electricity, the digital revolution, and all the rest, come to understand disease in terms of germ theory and come to understand how antibiotics and modern surgical techniques can be used to address the problems of health and wellbeing, as the entertainment culture takes root and as time for leisure and other opportunities are brought about by an industrial revolution and then a post-industrial reality.

The idea of the secularization thesis was that God would no longer be useful socially, and as society progressed along a greater path of technological progress, as society moved towards a greater specialization, a more hyper modern mode, God would disappear from the equation and we’ll be left with an essentially secular public space. The secularization thesis appears to work. If you look at Western Europe as the laboratory where exactly what was predicted has taken place. Looking especially at the nations of northern Europe, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Now also increasingly Spain and Portugal, you see a very clear secular pattern. As a matter of fact, it is now taken as the social and demographic landscape of much of Europe. It is accurate in virtually every way to describe much of Europe if not the entirety of that landmass as post-Christian. As a matter of fact, if you notice some of the debate about the expansion of the European community, some of it has come down to the fact that the eastern nations now being welcomed into the community of Europe tend to be more Christian, more self avowedly Catholic.

They tend to have social and demographic patterns that fit that reality. They are less modern and thus in the eyes of some such as the French, they’re less welcome. But in Europe we see the secularization thesis basically at work and the comfort level of the European community, even in welcoming their Eastern neighbors has been that the technology will there arrive, the social progress will soon come, they will catch up and soon they will be just as secular as are we. The big problem is that the secularization thesis did not carry well over the Atlantic Ocean, at least not in the United States of America. It must not be the water because it does seem to pertain in Canada. Canada’s following a European model just in the recent past, just in the last 10 days, Canadian parliament has adopted a law known as C-250, which makes it a hate crime to preach or to speak against homosexuality.

The attorney general of the nation of Canada has advised that it may well be a crime for a pastor to mention that homosexuality is a sin. For instance, in preaching on a text like Romans one. That is the kind of hyper secularization that of course shows that the secular space is not a neutral space that we would expect in Europe but is now in North America, right across our northern border. But here in the United States of America we face some kind of exception. Abraham Lincoln once described America as a nation with the soul of a church. GK Chesterton picked up on a very similar theme. It appears that America is a bit different than these other nations. Certainly technology can’t be the issue because the United States is at least as technologically advanced as these other nations. It can’t be matters reducible to economics and other facets of the social landscape for America is, if anything, in a form of hyper modernity and post modernity.

But still the American people refuse to show themselves to be fully secularized, nor do they show themselves to be fully Christianized. Poll after poll and survey after survey will reveal very high levels of Christian identification. Those who are confessionally Christian recognize that there is something lacking in so many who would make an identification as Christians and yet are not members of churches, are not faithful Christians in terms of biblical norms of Christian involvement, but nonetheless, it is still significant socially that they do identify themselves as Christians when those in other advanced democracies and technologically advanced societies would not. But where do we stand in terms of American morality? Secularization is one thing, secularism is another. Secularization is a social theory, provable or disprovable with phenomenal logical observation over time. Secularism is an ideology and as an ideology it not only seeks to explain the way things would be if current trends continue or could be under certain situation prevailing, rather secularism suggests that there is an ought to the secular space, that there is an oughtness to the fact that the culture ought to be established on secular norms without any references to a theistic reality or a theistic accountability.

Secularism has never been popular in America at the popular level. It has however, become rather pervasive at the level of the cultural and symbolic elites. At that level, secularism becomes a necessary facet of the worldview in order to advance the values and the norms of the elite class. It just so happens that the persons who tend to sit on federal judiciaries and to hold those posts and to be in a position of symbolic management and cultural influence tend to hold to this worldview at least in percentages and with a tenacity far beyond that of the general public. What do they see as the issue at the intersection of Christian morality and public law? For the secularist who believes that America’s space should be essentially irreducibly secular? The question is very easy. There should be no relationship. There should be no dependency. There should be no subsidiary influence between Christian morality and public law.

Much less should public law be determined by anything that is self-consciously tied to a Christian morality or even unselfconsciously derivative of a Christian morality. I want to give two examples of those who hold to such a position. The first and most recently, Robert Wright, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. He is a thoughtful person, former faculty member at Harvard University. We are indebted to Robert Reich for his writings and even when we may disagree with much of what he has to say, we understand that he is a keen observer of things, social, economic, and cultural. It was Robert Reich who coined the phrase symbolic analysts, referring to the knowledge class in America, suggesting that the future of America’s economy was in the hands of those whose professions would be reducible to the analysis of symbols rather than to the manipulation of material. But Robert Reich has written a new book entitled Reason: Why Liberals Will Win The Battle for America.

In this book, the Opposition, those he identifies as holding to a worldview that should be defeated and countered, he identifies as the rad cons, a short compound for radical conservatives. The individual who is symbolically most identified as a rad con in his book as William Bennett, former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar. By the way, there is no small amount of irony in that. For most conservatives would not identify William Bennett as a radical conservative but rather as a neoconservative. I assume that Robert Reich being a very intelligent person, knows that, but for the purposes of his book then it becomes rad con. What do you do with the rad cons? Robert Reich said this, “It is perfectly fine for rad cons to declare strong personal convictions about sex and marriage convictions, often based on sincere religious beliefs, but it’s something quite different, it’s quite another thing to insist that others must share these same convictions. As I’ve said, the liberal tradition has wisely drawn a sharp boundary between religion and government. We’ve got to stop the rad cons before they impose their narrow-minded agenda any further.” Well, there we have it, a second quote from the same book just released this week, “Here is a real slippery slope,” by the way, he’s responding to what he parodies as the rad con understanding of a domino theory or slippery slope down the moral descent here he says, “is a real slippery slope that does concern me. Once we allow rad cons or anyone else to decide how we should conduct our private sex lives, where would it end? If we accept the idea that one religion’s view of proper morality should be the law of the land, how do we decide whose religious views should prevail?” Robert Reich is a first witness.

The second is Robert Audi, professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska, and the philosopher in America who is perhaps on the ascent more than any other in terms of public policy as an advocate of pure secular space. He offers some principles and practices for what he calls civic virtue in a liberal democracy. The first he calls the principle of secular rationale. I quote him here,”This is a rationale that has as a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts human conduct unless one has and is willing to offer adequate secular reasons for its advocacy or support.” Secular reasons must be the sole point of advocacy. There must be he says, “a secular rationale,” that’s understood to be a secular reason, which he defines this way, “roughly one whose normative force,” that is its status as a prima fascia justificatory element, “does not depend on the existence of God or on denying it or on theological considerations or on the pronouncements of a person or institution as a religious authority.” That’s his principle of secular rationale. The reason submitted for public policy must be irreducibly secular, manifestly secular, entirely secular, so secular that there can be no reference whatsoever to any existence of a God or non-existence of a God or of any authoritative pronouncement of anyone whose authority is religious.

Secondly, he suggests a principle of secular motivation. “One has an obligation to abstain,” I’m quoting him here, “from advocacy or support of a law or public policy that restricts human conduct unless one is motivated by normatively adequate secular reason, whose sufficiency of motivation here implies that some set of secular reasons is motivationally sufficient roughly in the same sense that, A, this set of reasons explains one actions, and, B, one would act on it even if other things remaining equal one’s other reasons were eliminated.” Give him credit for very careful writing. His compound sentences do flow. He eliminates any possible misunderstanding. Secular motivation must be that there’s a subjectively secular element to public advocacy. Now, when one should advocate any position on public policy, the first principle of secular rationale must be combined with a principle of secular motivation, but that’s not the end.

His third principle is the principle of ecclesiastical neutrality. “Churches,” and I’m quoting him here, “committed to being institutional citizens in such a society have an obligation to abstain from supporting candidates for public office or pressing for laws or public policies that restrict human conduct.” So, here you have a principle of ecclesiastical neutrality that says the churches may do whatever churches may wish to do so long as churches do not endorse political candidates, most of us will be quite satisfied with that, or he then goes on press for laws or public policies that restrict human conduct. I think most of us would wish to restrict human conduct. Kathleen Sullivan, another law professor following the same mentality said, “the correct baseline theory is not unfettered religious liberty And rather religious liberty in so far as it is consistent with the establishment of the secular moral order.” and that’s fascinating. Here you have a redefinition of religious liberty. She says the baseline should not be unfettered religious liberty, but for those God believers, it should be rather religious liberty in so far as it is consistent with the establishment of a secular moral order. I bring these two witnesses because I believe both are honest and I said two and really delivered three when I mentioned Kathleen Sullivan, but Robert Reich and Robert Aldi, with Kathleen Sullivan as a buttressing witness, hearsay that we need to have a secular public space that is so definitionally secular that not only must it be objectively secular in terms of the shape and content of the arguments, it must be even subjectively secular in that the motivation for making arguments must be entirely secular. That is, he says, without reference to whether or not there is even a God who exists and without any reference to anyone who might make any pronouncement or argument on anything that will be considered a religious basis. This honesty is helpful because it sets the issue very squarely. However, it’s also honest because I believe it demonstrates the implausibility of such proposals on their face. I’ve spoken of two witnesses and I want to speak of three myths.

The first is the myth of the secular state. Secularism is not a positive construct. By its very nature, it is only secular when it denies the existence of God. That’s where Professor Aldi’s definition begins to break down. One cannot be genuinely secular, and be indifferent to the existence of God, because the existence of God would bring an incompetent demand upon the society, even such issues as obligation and obligation that the society would not be able to ignore without understanding that it is only tacitly or operationally secular. This is a call for an absolutely secular state and I believe the existence of such a state is a myth. Why? Because states must deal with fundamental questions. The moment a state begins to deal with a fundamental question, it is no longer secular. Secular isn’t defined only as the advocacy or perhaps be able perhaps better to say the belief or disbelief. In a theistic God would be one thing, but secularism in this positive sense means something much more than that, especially when someone like Robert Aldi moves to a subject development even at the motivational level.

When states begin to affect laws and encapsulate a morality, they’re dealing with ultimate questions of life and death. Ultimate questions of meaning in the universe. Ultimate questions of existence, as associate justice Anthony Kennedy is recently written in two US Supreme Court decisions. There’s no way that can be purely secular. For any question that fundamentally addresses itself to the meaning of life has to think in terms, conceive of terms larger than the secular theory will allow. There is no truly secular state. In fact from a Christian perspective there can be a pagan state, but no secular state. For if the state is attempting to be purely secular, it must set up itself as the greatest end and the source of all meaning and truth in a universal plane. That is by definition a form of idolatry.

First, the myth of the secular state. Second, the myth of a secular argument. There are no arguments that are truly irreducibly secular. Again, you have the problem of a negative reference, but beyond that, you have the problem that if you’re going to deal with arguments about anything beyond procedure, you have to deal with a level of meaning and morality and value that ask questions larger than an individual human frame of reference can bear and there are no arguments that are on issues of this importance, genuinely secular. As a matter of fact, those who most seek to advocate a secular argument on questions of ultimate meaning, if you notice the structure of their arguments, they’re sometimes more essentially religious than what are recognized as the religious arguments. In other words, they’re making claims that they believe are not religious, but even in the extremity of these claims, they end up being religion by anti-religion or again, a form of positing.

Something is an ultimate good in order to determine value. The third myth is the myth of secular motivation. This myth is very complex because first of all, none of us is aware of our own motivation. One of the problems behind this is the reality that we do not even know ourselves well enough to know how we might be motivated if we were not motivated by what centrally motivates us. That’s the problem with the circular reasoning of Robert Aldi’s third principle, or this is the second principle, secular motivation. How do you know that you would continue to be motivated to advocate the same position if you no longer believe in God or if belief in God were simply bracketed from the equation, how would you know? Furthermore, those who believe themselves be driven by a secular motivation allow themselves the conceit of knowing or believing that they have full possession and consciousness of what their motivations are.

Once you in the level of public policy jump from the objective content of an argument to its subjective motivation, you’re no longer engaged in public policy discussions. You’re involved in some kind of communal therapy session. There is genuinely no secular state, no secular argument and no secular motivation even among those who consider themselves secular. There is no neutrality. On the question as ultimate as the existence or non-existence of God or the binding or non-binding character of his dictates and commands or on the objectivity or subjectivity of morality or on the absoluteness or non absoluteness of truth, there are really no mediating positions. There is no neutrality. The law must deal with ultimate issues, insofar as the law deals with what is most important. The law certainly does deal with issues of mere procedure and of policies that are not inherently weighted or freighted with moral worth. However, we do not have intense, public, civic controversies over such issues. America is not now in danger of being rendered, of being divided in two, over parking policies in the nation’s capital, but over the institution of marriage, not over how certain issues in the tax code could be rewritten on a purely procedural issue while on questions of normative sexuality, not on issues of how the federal budget should be printed on one side of the paper or on two, but on questions as to whether a fertilized human egg, then a fertilized human embryo is deserving of protection, recognized as bearing the dignity of life. When you deal with ultimate issues, you are far above a secular plane. And once you reach this plane, you are now arguing at the level of moral ultimacy, some from one perspective and some from another, but none genuinely from a secular perspective.

If we accept the argument that Christian moral arguments are then forbidden entry into the public space, we have just decided not only to violate the clear intention of our constitutional framers, not only to reject the inherited civilization that has brought us to this point, not only to redefine what it means to be a liberal democracy, but quite frankly we have privileged one form of a religious discourse over another. That is we have at a bare minimum privileged irreligious religious discourse over self-consciously religious discourse. Furthermore, this raises the question of how one can deal with ultimate issues if genuinely the only participants who are allowed into the discussion are those who believe there is nothing more ultimate than human life, that is, our own existence, nothing more ultimate than our own communal negotiation of what we would recognize as moral questions. Of course, when we reach that point, we are not in a civilization even remotely recognizable as being that established by our founders.

Notice when you listen to Robert Aldi, as I have cited him here, that when it comes to every one of his principles, his precise concern is with laws that restrict human conduct. Now that really gets to the issue. It is a libertarian motif behind this, and I mean that with a little l rather than a partisan label, it is a basic idea of the liberty of human conduct that is at stake here. The suggestion is that any limitation on human conduct has to be justified. This is the Justificatory principle now discussed in law. The justificatory principle implies that any restriction on human conduct has to be socially mandated by the political process on purely secular grounds. Here again, we have a problem. Where do we gain an adequate rationale for restricting human conduct on purely secular grounds? Now, most would believe that murder is inherently wrong.

At least that is not a question that yet divides America. But why? Once this issue is pressed back the secular, or would be secular, the claimed secular, a validly secular theorist, has very little ground for argumentation. The question why begins to press back the secular argument to its irreducibly unsecular form. Why is murder wrong? Of course, the worldview behind this is resurgent pragmatism. Now not just William James and John Dewey, but Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty and others arguing that all issues of ultimacy have to be adjudicated on what are essentially pragmatic grounds. The problem is that life in terms of any sanctity or dignity, oops, you can’t say sanctity at all, let’s just try dignity. Human life, just even at the level of dignity is very difficult to define in purely pragmatic terms, and the obvious issue for that is the debate not among Christians, let’s leave the Christian realm of discourse for a few moments, let’s enter into what is putatively a secular realm of discourse about an issue such as when life begins.

Now of course we have as Christians, I speak to Christians, a principled axiomatic answer to that question, but how does a putatively secular theorist come up with an answer to that question? Well, of course in the pragmatic world, the regime of science gets to come in and seek to adjudicate the issue. But of course, science can’t answer that question because in order to answer the question, there must be some definition of life and it is the definition that science cannot offer. So you have a spectrum among the secularists of what life would be, how it should be defined once then defined where it would begin when it is worthy of protection. Of course, this ranges all the way from some secular or would be secular theorists who would hold that it must begin at conception and there are others who go all the way to Peter Singer and beyond who would argue that even infanticide should not be considered immoral because after all, a woman’s right to choose is a woman’s right to choose, and life he says is not worthy of protection until the human being has obtained the ability to relate and use language, which would mean that there are some adults I know who would be in danger from Peter Singer’s definition. And thus when it reaches that point, it’s worthy of dignity of life and thus of legal protection, but not before.

How can Peter Singer be wrong, according to a secular rationale or secular analysis? He may be distasteful according to secular aesthetics. He may be embarrassing according to secular politics, but he cannot be wrong according to a purely secular analysis or evaluation. The law must deal with ultimate issues and so must each of us in life. As Christians, we have to face the fact that we enter a public square that many expect to be purely secular and many allow themselves the intellectual conceit to believe that it actually is. So what should we do? I offer five theses after two witnesses and three myths, five theses very briefly.

First, a liberal democracy must allow all participants in the debate to speak and to argue from whatever worldview or convictions they may possess. So that means all participants, a liberal democracy should say yes to the entry of all citizens into the public conversation. The citizens will come from very many different backgrounds representing very many worldviews, some more and less religious, some more and less secular, some in terms of the religious backgrounds, some more and less Christians, some more and less something else, but all would be allowed equal entry into the conversation. This is a national conversation that is at the very heart of a deliberative democracy and thus my first thesis is that each must be allowed to be what they are and to speak out of each citizen’s deepest convictions and to identify those convictions without fear of prejudice or being eliminated from the public debate.

Second, citizens participating in public debate over law and public policy should declare whenever possible the convictional basis for their arguments. This is where intellectual honesty enters into the public debate. When I debate these issues in the public square, of course, given the fact that I’m president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, generally I do not have to stipulate that I’m speaking as a convictional Christian, but I try to find some way to do that anyway. And not only that, when I make the rationale, I feel the necessity morally and ethically to be very clear about the fact that I come to this conclusion following a certain train of argument that begins at A and ends at B. It is not always possible to articulate such a moral argument comprehensively, but one should at least be honest and that means never dishonest about the basis for the content of the argument and insofar as we know ourselves for its motivation as well.

Third, a liberal democracy must accept the limits of secular discourse even as it accepts or stipulates the limits of religious discourse. That is to say it’s perfectly allowable in the liberal democracy to say that we will not take the church covenant of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and make it the municipal law of Washington D.C. We do have a law codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution that disallows the government from a religious establishment. It cannot say that because this authority says A, we will then codify that immediately into law. We do follow a deliberative democratic process and there are some limits upon the imposition of a religious worldview, certainly the structure of religious law and religious culture. But even as we all in terms of the social contract, accept there are some limits in a liberal democracy, in a deliberative form of government, we also recognize there are limits upon secular discourse. Most importantly, the secular discourse does not have the right to eliminate the right of Christian discourse.

Fourth, a liberal democracy must acknowledge the commingling and mixing of religious and secular arguments, religious and secular motivation, and religious and secular outcomes. This co-mingling takes place because we as Christians understand that we are in the world and not of it, and the world itself is continually tossed back and forth according to its own motivations in ways that are sometimes more consistent and sometimes more inconsistent with what we understand to be an objective norm. Now, that means that there is a co-mingling of religious and secular arguments every time we speak to issues of public policy, and we should not be embarrassed by that when we make arguments. We should make arguments about the normative moral basis, the cognitive moral content, but also about social effect and about the likely outcomes that will result from this moral decision over against some other. There are political considerations for all of us to make as we frame policy deliberative arguments, and so we need to recognize that all participants need to recognize this co-mingling.

Five, a liberal democracy must acknowledge and respect the rights of all citizens, including its explicitly religious or confessing citizens. Now, one would think that would not be necessary since the First Amendment to the Constitution, not only disallows establishment but specifically protects religious expression. But if you listen to Robert Aldi and Kathleen Sullivan, that means a freedom of religious expression insofar as this is consistent with a secular political state. That insofar is the critical problem because that insofar means that we are free to articulate, at least for now to ourselves why we would do one thing or another, but we are not free to articulate that in terms of any public policy form outside the confines of the church in any way at all. That cannot possibly be reconciled with the founding vision nor the language of the Constitution, nor can it be reconciled with the actual operation of homo sapiens, thinking, acting, and speaking.

Now from Christian conviction, last, I would suggest just a couple of principles for our consideration that come directly from the word of God and from the command of Jesus. In the great commandment, we are told that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind, and that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our motivation speaking as Christians for entry into the public square and for advocacy of public policy is love of neighbor. That is the motivational check for us. Our concern in Christian political, moral, social, cultural engagement should not be to impose Christianity as if the simple imposition of a Christian code will be sufficient, but rather should be motivated by love of neighbor. We should be motivated by love of neighbor believing that health and welfare and happiness and common wheel are dependent upon society being ordered in such a way that the creator’s intention and the creator’s best will for human happiness is realized among us.

From the Christian worldview, we understand the law of the harvest, as we sow so shall we reap and thus inescapably, we must make arguments about action and consequence that deal not only with demographic and economic and cultural realities, but with issues far more ultimate than that will be experienced merely here on earth. Love of neighbor means that we are compelled out of concern for fellow citizens to see the law and public policy rightly ordered in such a way that maximum human happiness will be achieved. The honesty in this is to acknowledge that that will require restrictions on human conduct. In the end, any putatively secular scheme would require restrictions on human conduct. The question for the secularist is what conduct, why, for how long, on what basis, to what effect. The question for those who would make a Christian argument is, why. Why must the issue be framed in such a way that there is not merely an is but an ought to our argument? That’s the burden for the Christian engagement in the public square and that is our motivation charged and fueled by love of neighbor that is derivative of love of God. We enter into the process of cultural engagement and we contend in the arena of public policy because we have no choice. When we show up, we must show up as citizens, and when we show up we must show up as Christians, and must speak as both.