Undeniably, Christianity’s cultural impact in America is waning. Religious “nones”—those marking “none” when asked to indicate religious affiliation—are now the largest cohort in the United States, comprising 28% of the population. This rapid and momentous shift in religious affiliation coincides with a parallel shift in cultural values and norms. The theological foundation that has long upheld America’s constitutional order is being replaced with a secular alternative that often starkly contradicts its predecessor. For Christians, this swift cultural transformation has been jarring. We can no longer assume that our unbelieving neighbors agree with us on even basic ethical and anthropological assumptions. As a result, the future of the American experiment seems tenuous.
In response to this secularizing shift, R. Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently begun advocating for what he calls explicit government “acknowledgement” of America’s theological foundation. Because “our constitutional compact [cannot] exist without the basic theological presuppositions that gave birth to the country,” Mohler wants “certain religious assumptions” overtly recognized by the government. “Without those assumptions,” he says, “the entire project is very much undermined and subverted.”
Mohler believes that the American founders made a mistake. They assumed America’s tacit Christian ontological foundation would hold and failed to foresee the secularist dilemma in which we now find ourselves. Taking the Christian moral framework for granted, they omitted explicit acknowledgement of God in the nation’s founding documents. Consequently, the founders “left the American constitutional order vulnerable to misrepresentation and subversion.” In Mohler’s view, “the only path to recovery is the emergence of a robust doctrine of acknowledgement that affirms theism as an a priori to the American experiment.”
Protestant concern over secularization is hardly controversial. Neither is the insistence that effective political conservativism remain grounded in theological truth. Controversy ensues when we begin to ask the natural follow-up questions: How should Christians respond to secularization? How do we ensure that conservative political actors act from theological conviction?
Baptists have typically responded to these questions by not only emphasizing the mission of the church, but also the need for Christian citizens to represent our values in the public square. Changing culture starts by making disciples. Faithful churches precede faithful politics. Mohler has long been an ally in this mission, but in his repeated call for government acknowledgement of Christianity, he seems to be shifting his focus.
Mohler is quick to point out that his call to acknowledgement does not violate historic Baptist distinctives regarding the relationship between church and state. American Baptists, he argues, never needed to call the government to acknowledge Christianity because they assumed Christianity would continue to provide the moral framework for the nation. I believe Mohler is right in his insistence on the assumption of a Christian framework by previous generations of Baptists. However, I do not agree that his call for acknowledgement coheres with historic Baptist distinctives. At the very least, Mohler’s argument suggests that the primary arena for cultural transformation is congress in session rather than the church on mission.
I have great respect for Dr. Mohler for many reasons, not least for his role in leading the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as well as the entire Southern Baptist Convention toward more confessionally conservative theological commitments. However, Mohler’s proposal for explicit state acknowledgement of Christianity merits theological and practical critique.
Baptist Theology
In 2000, Mohler served on the committee for what he later described as “one of the most significant events in the history of American Protestantism—the conservative revision of the Southern Baptist Convention’s confession of faith, the ‘Baptist Faith and Message.’” Twenty years later, Mohler celebrated the “recovery of confessionalism” within the SBC, stating that it was needed to identify who is qualified to lead and teach within SBC entities, including Mohler’s own SBTS.
Article 17 of the BFM2000 states: “The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. In providing for such freedom no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others. … A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.”
Baptists have long argued that the state has no jurisdictional authority in the “sphere of religion.” Rather, the state’s role regarding religion is to ensure that every church or “ecclesiastical group” has “full protection and full freedom in pursuit of its spiritual ends.” Baptists from Thomas Helwys to Carl F. H. Henry have extended this protection to atheists, Muslims, Hindus, and anyone else willing to live peaceably alongside us in society. We have advocated for this freedom for all, not because we believe in the legitimacy of false religions, but because of our confidence in the gospel to transform lives. Baptists, who uniquely practice regenerate church membership, have persistently insisted that cultural transformation does not transpire top-down from government decree, but bottom-up as faithful churches make disciples through gospel proclamation.
In Tom Nettles’ exposition of Article 17 of the BFM2000, a document Mohler commissioned at SBTS shortly after the revisions, the distinguished Baptist historian writes, “The article strongly implies that creeds enforced by a civil power would be unwarranted and outside the bounds of legitimate government: ‘The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind.’”
The Baptist insistence on maintaining a strict jurisdictional divide between government and church does not arise from compromise with Enlightenment philosophy. Rather, Baptist observation of this boundary line is rooted in our understanding of the new covenant. Jonathan Leeman writes, “With the new covenant, God no longer ties his name to a geopolitical people, but to his Son, and then to everyone united to his Son, the church.” Across the scope of revelation, God expresses deep concern over the question of who he allows to identify with his name. God’s name goes exclusively with God’s people, and God’s people are now identified exclusively as those who are “in Christ.”
Mohler is right to disparage formulations of “separation of church and state” that relegate the influence of the church to the private lives of citizens. Christian citizens have every right to enter the public square with their theological convictions in full view. When we act as citizens, we do so unapologetically as Christian citizens advocating for laws and policies that uphold justice and protect life—laws and policies that lead to genuine human flourishing. However, God has not entrusted acknowledgement of theological truth to any state on earth.
At the National Conservative Conference earlier this year, Douglas Wilson expressed his desire that Donald Trump give glory to God in the name of Jesus Christ in the event of his re-election to the office of president. It is unclear whether Wilson’s plea qualifies as the kind of “acknowledgement” Mohler has in mind. Verbal acknowledgement does not signify a life or a nation submitted to the lordship of Christ. Confession of Christ belongs exclusively to those in whom God abides (1 John 4:16). The acknowledgment I want to hear from President Trump—and every other unbeliever on the planet—is “Jesus is Lord,” accompanied by biblical repentance and belief in the gospel.
Baptist Practice
Immediately following his address at NatCon, Mohler and Wilson participated in a discussion in which Mohler elaborated on what “acknowledgement” would look like in practice: “I want to maximalize the Christian commitments of the state—of the civilization, and I would call that ‘acknowledgement.’ In other words, I’m not claiming that everyone in the state, every citizen, is going to be a confessing Christian. I’m going to say that does not mean they’re not obligated to the acknowledgement of the Christian structure of this civilization and its commitments.”
In response, Yoram Hazony, a Modern Orthodox Jew, asked, “How do you approach thinking about a maximally committed Christian state in a world in which the partners for getting there, quite a few of them are not going to be Christian?”
Mohler responded by extending his full respect to the “Jewish people,” “traditional Roman Catholics,” and “conservative Protestants” because these groups “basically already live in the same world and acknowledge that and have a mutual dependence and appreciation.” However, he would not say the same regarding “Hindus and Muslims,” declaring, “I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments. That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community, but it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgement that this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological commitments. Those coming should respect that, must respect that, understand that, and so the kind of modern secularist dream is, I believe, a constitutional nightmare.”
Mohler implies that the way out of our secular cultural malaise is a steady dose of cultural Christianity. But monotheism never saved anyone. Agreeing on basic ontological truth claims does not a disciple make. Figuring out the least common denominator of theological commitments we can share with Roman Catholics and Jews isn’t going to move the needle forward in de-secularizing our culture or our politics. I’m a proud two-time graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—each time under Mohler’s presidency. I was trained to believe that we need to lead our Southern Baptist churches out of the doldrums of soul-destroying cultural Christianity and back to the life-giving theology of our confessions. I still believe that.
Given the choice between cultural Christianity and cultural secularism, like Mohler, I’d choose cultural Christianity every time. I would much rather live in a culture that reflects some of the values of Christ’s kingdom, albeit imperfectly. But cultural Christianity is no substitute for the real thing. When the two are mistaken for one another, the Christian message gets contaminated. Instituting cultural Christianity is not our mission. As we preach the gospel, make disciples, plant churches, and enter the public square as Christian citizens, the culture will inevitably become saturated by our values. But this work is leavening work. It cannot be instituted from the heights of political power. Cultural Christianity is thus an accident—downstream from our real work—and never our immediate goal. Why settle for cultural Christianity when Christ has given us the mission of pursuing the real thing?
The esteemed Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller said it well when he wrote, “The disinterested testimony of a few people, who are united together, not by a sectarian, but a truly catholic spirit, and whose life comports with their doctrine, speaks a thousand times louder in the consciences of men than the decrees of a council, enforced by all the authority, ecclesiastical or civil, which the greatest nation, or all the nations of the earth, can muster up.”
Our Baptist forerunners argued for religious liberty because they believed that, once the state removes itself from the domain of religion, they could work toward converting the nations. The turn by Christian theologians toward political power to solve our cultural problems is a turn toward a lesser power. Forcing citizens to “acknowledge” Christian theological principles will not change their hearts. It will not make them submit to God’s word. It will not bring them into conformity to the truth they acknowledge any more than printing “In God We Trust” on dollar bills.
We don’t need our seminaries producing Christian nationalists. We need our seminaries producing courageous missionaries, church planters, and pastors who will eagerly take Christ’s message to the ends of the earth. We need faithful local pastors in our own nation and in every nation leading their church members into the public square to advocate for truth and justice as Christian citizens, even to remind our secular neighbors of what Mohler has so eloquently called for—the Christian foundations of our constitutional order. We do not, however, need the state defining and enforcing acknowledgement of theological truth.
As an alternative to a renewed Constantinian union between church and state, perhaps we should look instead to the example of the early church. Stephen O. Presley has recently presented such a vision, arguing that our present struggle against a secular culture “reflects a revival of the ancient struggle between paganism and Christianity”—the very struggle the early church faced in its first three centuries. The early church changed the world, not by harnessing governmental power in service of the church’s goals, but by faithfully following Christ in a hostile world. That same option remains available to the church today, but only if we can resist the allure of political power for the greater power of cruciform witness.
Conclusion
Mohler suggests that Baptists historically assumed government acknowledgement and would affirm his proposal today. While there’s no way to know for sure, I don’t think they’d be too impressed by a Baptist call to state acknowledgement of monotheism. They understood that the church on mission is the true arena for cultural transformation. For cues on how to pursue our mission in a paganized culture, we should probably look to Carey in Serampore rather than Calvin in Geneva.
Baptists have not argued for religious freedom and separation of church and state out of pragmatic convenience. We hold these beliefs from conviction. We can’t allow the state to define right doctrine because it’s not our right to hand authority to the state that Jesus gave singularly to the church. The “keys of the kingdom of heaven”—which includes the authority to define right doctrine—belong exclusively to the church (Matthew 16:18-19; 18:18-20). The state cannot institute credible theology because it has not been equipped or authorized by Christ to do so. The church must never cede these precious keys to the state, for once they’re handed off, we lose control over how they’re used. Baptists of all people should know that when the state defines theology, we eventually find ourselves the worse for it.
Editor's Note: As a part of its commitment to fostering conversation within the Southern Baptist Convention, the Baptist Review may publish editorials that espouse viewpoints that are not necessarily shared by the TBR team or other contributors. We welcome submissions for responses and rebuttals to any editorials as we seek to host meaningful conversations about the present and future of our convention.
Casey McCall
Casey McCall is Lead Pastor at Ashland Community Church in Oldham County, Kentucky. He writes a weekly column for the Oldham Era and has contributed both popular and academic articles to a wide variety of publications. He is married to Niki, and they have five children. He received a B.A. from Samford University and a Master of Divinity and Ph.D. in Church History from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.