A Christian Nation?

Can America become a more Christian nation through public school prayer and higher wages for workers? Senator Josh Hawley offers this counsel in a recent First Things article, “Our Christian Nation.”

Commendably, Hawley firmly rejects a “Christian nationalist” desire to inscribe the Apostles’ Creed into civil law or seek a “Protestant Franco.” He rightly warns that self-identified Christian nationalists “regard America’s constitutional project and our long-standing commitment to individual liberty as misguided, as the children of Enlightenment liberalism and somehow foreign to Christianity,” which is “deeply mistaken.” Contrary to Christian nationalist assertions, he points out, “individual freedom” and “constitutional government” result from Christian culture and merit defense.

Hawley wants a nation of “biblical Christianity” and “Christian politics” but oddly omits the church’s role in shaping society. An over 4,000-word article only mentions “church” 3 times, and even there, peripherally. How does a Christian nation emerge, much less endure, without strong churches? Civil Society is missing from his analysis, implying, maybe unintentionally, that the nation’s religion is chiefly an expression of governmental policy. A more traditional American perspective would originate religion in civil society but understand and affirm that the population’s religiosity inevitably is reflected in public policy. For example, if most members of a community strongly want to restrict alcohol sales on Sundays, their local government will likely oblige.

Spirituality is also largely missing from the article. Instead, his “Christian nation” project is described as a cultural-political endeavor. But how successful can such a project be when Christian affiliation and vitality in America are decreasing? Are not our culture and politics largely reflections of that decrease? Aren’t churches and individual Christians, in their failure to transmit the faith more widely, ultimately responsible for this decline in Christian influence?

This failure is not mentioned by Hawley. Instead, he describes growing “arid secularism” in America as an imposition of the left, leaving “no moral order to bind us together.” He accurately notes that the “rights we cherish, the freedoms we enjoy, the ideals we love together—all are rooted in and sustained by the tradition of the Bible.” He insists our country’s future requires renewing the “influence of biblical faith in America.”

Hawley derides the “fusionism” of the past combining “anti-communism, free-market economics, and social conservatism,” which incorrectly taught “Christians that their faith was relevant only to ‘cultural issues.’” This perspective disconnected “social norms and economic policies,” he claims. Every society needs a specified moral order. And renewal for America means seeking a society that again reflects the “principles of the gospel.”

In contrast, Hawley says, “liberal intelligentsia” and “some conservatives” now believe government “must be neutral about competing conceptions of the good life.” Any nation’s life is a “moral enterprise.” A mere “procedural republic” offering rights that allow free individual choices is a “mirage,” he says. “Neoliberals,” he claims, think the free market can unite society through “moneymaking,” while other conservatives think the Constitution by itself can operate without moral purpose. Citing James Madison, Hawley says no constitutional order can endure absent a “common conception of the good.” Christians are dutybound to “work for a just society leavened by the gospel,” now more urgent than ever, including “the rights to worship, to marry, to pursue an honest profession, and to live generally in a manner pleasing to the Lord.”

America has never had a Christian “national establishment,” Hawley admits. But our national habits were “Christianly shaped,” he notes, “which is a good thing, maybe especially for Americans who are not Christians. Precisely because of this Christian influence, American society has protected the liberty of all to speak, to worship, to assemble and petition, to share in self-rule.” But the “atheist left” advocates a “religion of secularism and state.”

Continue reading at Law & Liberty here.

Mark Tooley is the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence.