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Barry Creamer’s advice to Christians navigating an increasingly pluralistic America is found in 1 Timothy 2:2, where the apostle Paul urges his readers to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”
Such a framework allows for freedom of conscience, which should be the ideal in a government system where Baptist Christians can live out their calling, he said.
Amid other Christian groups, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a variety of pagan and atheistic Americans, the 1 Timothy 2 prayer is mostly in effect here—even as challenges to religious liberty loom, said Creamer, professor of humanities and vice president for academic affairs at Criswell College and the host of a call-in radio show in Dallas called “For Christ and Culture.”
“We don’t even necessarily need a government occupied by Christians. We just need a government that doesn’t hinder Christianity’s practice,” Creamer said.
“Now, would it be desirable to have only political leaders who are Christians? Yes—if they actually lived it out. The more Christians you have in any vocation, the better off society is, but restricting it to Christians would be a huge mistake and a violation of the freedom of conscience, which is what we really want in a society that is compatible with Christianity. We want freedom of conscience.”
While America is not a “Christian nation” per se, Creamer argued, America has an undeniable cultural heritage rooted in Judeo-Christian morality. That is what most people mean when they speak of America being a Christian nation, he said.
“You get a whole variety of answers to that question based on what you are talking about when you say ‘Christian nation.’”
“The idea, for example, that you could have a uniquely Shiite community in the United States would be completely different because their community standards would be a violation of everyone else’s freedom of conscience. So again, I think the whole measure is freedom of conscience. … The laws apply to everyone and it has to allow for freedom of conscience.”
Craig Mitchell, chair of the ethics department and associate director of the Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told the TEXAN that America is best understood not as a Christian nation technically, but as a nation with a distinctly Christian identity. From that Christian identity flows the liberties Christians and all other Americans enjoy, he said.
Mitchell cited the late Harvard University professor Samuel P. Huntington as writing that most countries have a core or mainstream culture with subordinate subcultures. America’s foundational culture has been an Anglo Protestant culture, Mitchell said.
Again citing Huntington, Mitchell said America, without that dominant Anglo Protestant culture that built it, would instead resemble Quebec, Mexico or Brazil.
“Most people, when you ask them, would say they are Christian,” Mitchell said. “That doesn’t mean they are born-again believers. But they identify with Christianity.”
All other religions account for less than 10 percent, he said.
“We must take every opportunity to evangelize but we should also give others room to practice their faith,” Mitchell said. “That does not mean we should allow Sharia law, for example. But what that does mean is we realize there are saved and lost people, and we must allow them room to be wrong. We have to give them room, show the love of Christ when we can, and give them the gospel when we can.
“That does not mean we have to help a Muslim group build a mosque, but it means we don’t go to war with them over it either,” Mitchell added.
CHURCH & STATE
Separation or Intended Mixture?
In the book “One Nation Under God? An Evangelical Critique of Christian America,” by Southwestern Seminary’s John D. Wilsey, he cites writers popular in evangelical circles over the last 35 years—Presbyterians Peter Marshall and D. James Kennedy, Baptists such as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, and Pentecostal David Barton—as proponents of what Wilsey calls the “Christian America” thesis (CA).
This view, using gathered quotations from sources dating from Columbus to the early American pilgrims, the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and their successors, generally casts America as founded as a Christian nation with a government, at the least, giving favored status to Christianity.
Overwhelmingly, they argue for a return to “original intent,” meaning what they would deem a return to explicitly Christian principles in government oversight and law.
Barton and fellow Texan Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, have been among those who have challenged the separation of church and state concept—long held as a Baptist distinctive.
Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist church in North America, in Rhode Island, used the “wall of separation” language to speak of a hedge to keep the “wilderness of the world” from encroaching into the “garden of the church.” Nearly a century later Thomas Jefferson borrowed the term in his famous 1802 letter to ease the concerns of the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut of a rumored tightening of religious liberty.
Barton expounded on his views in his 1994 book “The Myth of Separation,” as did Scarborough in “Enough is Enough,” published in 2008, and a booklet called “Mixing Church and State God’s Way.”
In “Enough is Enough” Scarborough wrote: “When the Supreme Court justices ruled that the Constitution erected a ‘wall of separation’ between church and state, they lied. … The framers of our Constitution never erected such a wall. In fact, we have demonstrated that they saw the necessity for a union to exist between church and state, without which there could be no morality.”
Wilsey cites Barton’s use of an 1892 Supreme Court ruling, Holy Trinity v. United States, in which the court called explicitly called America a “Christian nation” based on what it termed a line of “organic utterances” dating from Columbus until that day. Barton also traces court decisions from 1824 up to as late as 1931 that cite America as Christian in nature.
But in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Barton says a new line of thinking emerged as the court appealed to Jefferson’s “wall of separation” language from his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.
Barton and LaHaye, a Southern Baptist, and other CA proponents have argued that for 150 years the government upheld Christianity as the preferred religion.
Baptists who argue for a separation of church and state and those who call for a return to what they deem the intended mixture of Christianity and state seem to agree on at least one thing: Secularism’s onslaught has threatened religious liberty, particularly for orthodox Christians.
The sticking point seems be the question, “What should patriotic Christian Americans do about it?”
Southern Seminary’s theology dean, Russell Moore, wrote in an essay for the book “Why I Am a Baptist,” that a renewed interest in Baptist confessionalism should revitalize a commitment to church-state separation.
Given a “biblical vision of the church” and avoiding fear on one hand and the “ultimate answer to the culture wars” with elections on the other, “we will engage the culture politically and theologically, but we will also demonstrate kingdom-righteousness within the walls of our churches. We will submit to the governing authorities even as we wait for the One who will come, not to praise Caesar but to bury him,” Moore wrote.
Criswell College’s Creamer commented: “I think the fundamental issue there is when Christians act out of fear rather than confidence in the gospel, then we start thinking we need to use power or policy in order to impose Christianity rather than promote a free society where we can put Christianity in the free marketplace of ideas.”
“Again, I think what we are supposed to pray for and therefore work for is a society with a free conscience. I think that’s what 1 Timothy 2’s prayer equates to—a society that allows us to live with a free conscience.”
