The U.S. Senate recently passed the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA) creating a raging fire storm across Christian Twitter. Much of the incoming targeted David French, an evangelical center-right commentator and one I often quote in this blog. French began his commentary by confessing how he had flip-flopped on this issue over the years before finally landing in support of RFMA. His supportive rationale stemmed, in part, from a desire for Americans of different faiths and socio-political locations to live and work together in peace and harmony. He saw this legislation as necessary in a pluralistic society by protecting both religious liberty and the dignity of all Americans including LGBT families. (For a more in-depth description of the legislation, click here)
Al Mohler Weighs In
Then the fiery arrows began, launched by evangelicals who questioned French’s Christianity, compared his support for the bill to slavery, and demanded church discipline or expulsion. Theologian Carl Trueman laments how evangelicals no longer “own the country” and sees French as an accommodating force towards that end. Prominent evangelical leader Al Mohler proclaimed French’s views to be “hogwash” and “dangerously wrong. ” He said French’s “view would undermine any stable public morality based on any objective moral truths” and then ended his piece with an apocalyptic warning: “This is how conservatism dies, and this is how marriage is surrendered.”
(Yet some of the same certain people advocating for “stable public morality”…have also told America that a vote for a thrice-married, multiple adulterer who faces multiple, corroborated claims of sexual abuse, and who appeared in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins was an urgent moral imperative.)
Yet French’s view is in the mainstream of America’s tradition. French’s question: “when should we import our religious values into civil laws and how should we choose between competing religious and moral values when deciding that law” is the same one asked by our founding fathers before inserting the no establishment clause in the constitution. Rather than insuring America would be Christian, they chose to “guarantee that Christianity and other religions, including various versions of secularized beliefs, all should be permitted influence in public discourse.”
Jake Meander’s Response
Jake Meander, editor of Mere Orthodoxy, tries to thread the needle. The two sides, he believes, reflect good faith differences in what a “prudential” posture should look like. He laments on how these issues have become “hopelessly constrained and conditioned by the culture war.” More “interesting and vital questions that the post-boomer church in America will have to take serious” he says, “get “backgrounded.”
At the top of Meander’s more interesting list is whether or not we should separate a kind of privatized religious morality from the real public morality that governs common life together. To wit: is Christian morality only valid for Christians or should Christian morality dictate human morality?
In the meantime, Meander thinks French gets the morality questions wrong. He sees the subtext of French’s position as “an under-developed doctrine of creation, which allows for Christian morality to exist at a remove from questions of public order and common life.” Here, “Christian morality exists atop the world, as it were, and tells individual Christian people how to live in the world. It guides Christians in how to engage with the world when they step down into it. But it doesn’t itself shape the world in any sort of direct, tangible way; the world is governed by other laws.”
Sola Conservativism
The most striking feature of Meander, Mohler, and Trueman’s (MMT) responses is what they don’t say. Trueman never mentions the ekklesia’s salt and light calling for influencing society and changing culture. Mohler says even less, with nary a word spoken about the power of the gospel and the church’s Kingdom mission. Conservatism is all he offers, where virtue is the “conserving the permanent things.” Meander mentions the role of individual Christian engagement, but then dismisses this as something not “tangible.”
Nobody mentions Jesus, nor the life-changing power of the cross to bring about societal change. Nor the witness of the early church in changing a truly depraved culture through the “faithful presence” of Christ-like followers.
Meander, Mohler, and Trueman (MMT) seem to espouse similar versions of a faith and culture worldview driven by a top-down legislative role in God’s redemptive story. Their eggs are placed into the basket of state power while the basket of a salt and light witness by those called to be “His workmanship” stays empty. They’ve reengineered the straight and narrow to have guardrails of politically conservative values. And any Christian who votes “wrongly,’ according to Mohler, is being “unfaithful” to God.
This is at best a category error through its omission of gospel verities. But it’s even worse as it changes the essential nature of Christianity through its privileging of a conservative ideology wedded to political power over Christ’s calling for the church to join in His “Kingdom” mission.
To be clear, MMT’s basic sin isn’t a desire to see Christian influence in governmental policy and legislative acts. Most Christians, outside of those culturally disengaged like the Hutterites, believe government can have some type of role in the promotion of faith-based moral values.
MMT’s sin is a form of secularism, arising from a first-order reliance on political power and ideology. It disregards the faithful presence of Christ-like people as the first-order biblical response to reforming moral shortcomings. It disremembers that Christianity is cruciform-shaped, centered about a King whose throne was a cross. And like Peter walking on water, it detaches our eyes off of Jesus and the culture changing gospel message he brought.
Sola Christendom
In response to Mohler’s accusations of lacking “objective moral truth,” French provides examples of moral positions he has taken in recent years, promoting values like honesty, kindness, just treatment of citizens through by a worldview privileging Micah 6:8 and the fruits of the spirit.
French sees a nation’s religious character as defined by the “interaction between the individual faith of the citizens and the institutional expression of the nation’s values. A functioning “Christian nation” is going to combine both a robust private practice of faith with a government that is committed to basic elements of justice and mercy. In other words, when determining the identity of a people and nation, by their fruits you shall know them.”
Yet both Meander and Mohler see French’s moral universe as annulling Christian moral values. Here’s Meander: “That Christian moral norms would supply the moral content that actually defines our common life in the world is to him [French] anathema and to most in the historic church so obvious as to be banal.”
Meander asks: “is Christian morality only valid for Christians or should Christian morality dictate human morality.” He then uses the divergent perspectives of C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien to explain why he chooses the latter. Lewis had argued for two marriage institutions in the United Kingdom, church and civil. Tolkien strongly objected, saying that “Christian morality is the correct way to run the human machine.”
Meander gives the game away when he pairs his rejection of French’s moral universe with the welcoming of Tolkien’s yearning for a society dictated by Christian values. To paraphrase a James Bond movie’s title, the world of faithful presence is not enough. To wit: the promotion of essential Christian values (e.g., fruit of the spirit) and the advocacy of essential Christian living (salt and light mode of influence) is apparently an under-developed doctrine of creation which doesn’t “itself shape the world the world in any sort of direct, tangible way.” The “world is governed by other laws” and we need to make those laws Christian.
MMT may believe that some form of Christendom must provide the solution for cultural regeneration. But in doing so, haven’t they’ve merely affirmed Kierkegaard’s observation that “Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it?”
Isn’t it Time?
Isn’t time we stop living in a flattened world where the power of the Spirit must step out of the way so that the big guns of political power can shoot away? Doesn’t such reliance on a top-down, ideologically driven, state-focused, moralistic world suffer from, in the words of the apostle Paul, “Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.”
Isn’t it time we escape from an under-developed doctrine of creation, caused by the “blinding and binding” of our political tribes. Which then leads us to prioritize the secular over the culture changing message of the cross?
Isn’t it time that we recognize, in the words of Grenz, that “At the heart of the biblical narrative is the story of God bringing humankind to be the imago dei, that is, to be the reflection of the divine character, love, where we show the world what our God is like.”