On April 30, 1789, at Federal Hall in New York City, George Washington took the very first presidential oath of office. At the very end of the oath, he improvised a single, brief phrase that became part of the oath itself: “So help me, God.” And then he kissed the Bible upon which he had sworn it.ⁱ In that one small vignette is represented one of the most vital, most powerful, most debated, and most unique dynamics of life in the United States of America: the dynamic of the role of religion in public, civic, and political life. We are in the midst of a series of sermons about a Christian’s life in the real world, and part of the world in which you and I live is the political and civic world. We are citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, a democratic republic founded 230 years ago. We enjoy religious liberty, something not everyone on earth can claim. To be responsible Christians, therefore, we must think deeply about what it means to be both Christian and American in the modern world. As we engage this topic today, we do so having just seen the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. We do so in a political climate that is already being supercharged with energy around the next presidential election, though it is almost 2 years away. We do so at a time in American civic life where the nature and role of religion is being observed and discussed and even battled over at every turn.

The question of the appropriate role of religion in public life is not unique to Christianity, of course, nor is it unique to the United States. To some extent or other, every significant human society has struggled with this question. The great biblical scholar John Stott has identified the 4 basic models of church/state relations in human history. The first is Erastianism, wherein the state controls the church. The second is theocracy, where the church controls the state. The third is Constantinianism, where the state favors the church and the church accommodates to the state in order to retain this favor. And the last is what Stott calls “partnership,” where the church and the state recognize and encourage each other’s distinct God-given responsibilities in a spirit of constructive collaboration.ⁱⁱ It is this last system that Stott believes most closely reflects what God himself prefers as the healthiest way to combine religion with politics, but let’s look for ourselves at one of the pivotal scriptures in this discussion.

At a time when Christianity as such was not even a blip on anyone’s radar screen, much less a major social force that could influence international politics, the Apostle Paul took on the topic as he wrote to the Christians living in the capital of the western world, in Rome. After building an elaborate and detailed case for the truth of the Christian gospel, Paul looks at some of the real-world implications for those who had a new-found faith in Jesus Christ. One topic that deserved comment was the topic of the relationship of faith to the state. And the first thing Paul would say can be restated this way: Government is a gift of God for the ordering and well-being of human society, therefore a Christian gives due respect and regard to governing authority. In this very fundamental way, faith and politics, religion and government, are not at odds with each other. In fact, people of faith will recognize the proper existence and authority of government as a part of the divine order. In American history, religion has always been part of the civic life. The story is retold by Jon Meacham in his new book, American Gospel, that “when Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being a ‘scoffer of religion’…because he belonged to no church. During the campaign, Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by his opponent in the race, Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. At a dramatic moment in his performance, Cartwright said, ‘All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.’ Only Lincoln kept his seat. ‘May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?’ the minister asked, glowering. ‘I am going to Congress” was the dry reply.”ⁱⁱⁱ Going to heaven is surely a worthy Christian goal, but on this side of death, going to Congress is also a worthy Christian goal, if seen within the light of Christianity’s high regard for the good and proper role of government to provide ordering for human society.

Paul continues, and notes that the authority government exercises is a gift from God, even when government does not recognize it’s authority as such. Certainly the Roman government did not recognize Paul’s God! But Paul believed in a God who was in control of the world and the world’s governments in ways more profound than most people realized. As a good Jew and then a believer in Jesus as the Messiah, Paul knew of the faith history of his people, how God worked in and through the events and personalities of history to accomplish his purposes in the world. God created a world in which the proper ordering of society was part of the goodness of his creation, and God saw to it that governments existed for the purpose of creating such order. God’s blessings can come to those who do not even know God. Paul was a Roman citizen, a fact which often helped him in his missionary travels, and even though Rome would later become Paul’s enemy, still Paul believed that—at its best—Roman law and structure was a good thing.

Because government is a God-given thing, a good thing, Paul would teach that the freedom of the individual person needed to be subject to the larger power of the state, that the needs of the many and the collective good often trumped the needs of the one. The United States has always been a place that emphasized the rights of the individual over against the power of the state, but our country also has been characterized by the cooperative and collaborative nature of its people. Individual rights are balanced with the common good, and that balance always is being tested and refined and applied in new ways to new situations. This country has always trusted the wisdom of the individual, as expressed in the individual’s power to vote and to hold office, over against the power and authority of the few. As Jon Meacham puts it, “What separated us from the Old World was the idea that books, education, and the liberty to think and worship as we wished would create virtuous citizens who cherished and defended reason, faith, and freedom.”^iv

If the freedoms of the individual are relativized and subordinated to the power of the state, however, it is also true that the powers of the state are themselves subjected to the higher power of God, and this is part of what guarantees that the state does not itself usurp the freedoms of the individual. In his few words to the Romans, Paul does not explicitly say this, but implicit in his comments that principle exists. If the role of the state is to carry out a God-given purpose, then it follows that when the state does not live up to that purpose it is not acting in a way that is consistent with God’s will. God has the priority here. In other parts of scripture, particularly in the stories of the Acts of the Apostles which tell of the disciples’ willingness to go against the authority of the government in order to obey God, this principle is more clearly stated. In America, this principle has often been recognized as well. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution acknowledge that freedom and human rights are from God. Our system of laws is based on the original law of God as given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. And shot through our history, our culture, our political and civic rhetoric, are references to the divine will and law. As just one example of this, consider this story. To commemorate the founding of Pennsylvania as a haven for religious dissenters by the Quaker William Penn, in 1751 a bell was made in his honor. The inscription on the bell was a quote from the Old Testament book of Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The bell would later crack, and it would become famous as the Liberty Bell, a symbol of both political and religious freedom, drawing its message and authority from something higher than the state, namely, from God.^v

Finally, we note from the Romans passage that the role of government in the world as God has designed it is both to punish and thereby suppress evil and also to reward and thereby to promote goodness. Paul here says that the state is to be a diakonoi of God, which is the same word that Paul uses in other letters to refer to ministers of the church, literally, to the deacons of the church. The state is to play a positive role in ministering the justice and righteousness of God as expressed in civil matters. Indeed, the role of government is to be a physical and tangible expression of the blessings that God intends to give to his people. And here we need to be very careful and precise in our understanding. Our Founding Fathers, Jefferson chief among them, believed strongly that there should be a definite separation between the church and the state, a wall between the institutions that would protect both. But that is not the same thing as a separation of religion from politics, of the expression of religious faith and religious principles from political and civic debate and life. In today’s society, some try to say that a person’s faith and principles have no role to play in their political and civic life, but that is not what the Founder’s intended nor is it what the Bible teaches. But we must also say that the Founders were careful to insure that the institutional church would not be controlled by the state or that the state would be controlled by the institutional church. There is a balance between the two.

As with every topic worthy of our thought and consideration as people of faith in Jesus Christ, this topic is not possible to discuss fully in just a few minutes. But these points from Paul’s counsel to the church in Rome are central to the discussion. And it seems to me that in all of them we can learn that government is supposed to be a good thing, that Christians are called to respect it as such and to hold it accountable to be such. It is vital, for our day and age, that Christians learn and relearn how to engage our faith with the world of politics and government, in ways that respect the faith and feelings of others while still standing strongly for what we believe to be the revealed will of God. It is not American to force faith out of the public sphere, nor is it American—or Christian, for that matter—to force faith on the public sphere. It is a Christian thing to practice the best values of Christ in the context of our political and civic life, values like integrity, fairness, respect, and truth. It is a Christian thing to encourage and promote the ethics of Christ within the public sphere, but never at the expense of confusing the role of the state with the role of the church. No doubt, the relationship between faith and politics will continue to be debated and adjusted, as it has been for all of our history as a nation, but this, too, is part of what it means to be faithful followers of Christ living out the implications of that faith in the real world. All of human life is a grand process of growth into the deep ways of God in the world, and we should count ourselves doubly blessed, that we can live this life in a land that values our freedom to pursue that growth. On June 23, 1775, when George Washington left Philadelphia to take command of the Continental Army, the Reverend William Smith preached at Christ Church in that same city, saying that, “Religion and liberty must flourish or fall together in America. We pray that both may be perpetual.”^vi That should be our prayer, too.

Amen.

Amen.

ⁱ Free Press, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2006.