With the 2016 presidential campaigns getting underway, we're hearing a lot of talk about God, faith, and Christianity. In fact, in the first debate among GOP candidates, moderator Megyn Kelly asked on behalf of a Facebook user if the candidates had "received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first."
I think we all should be wary of God-talk in a political campaign. I'm not concerned with the authenticity of candidates' faith -- be they Republican or Democrat. I'm concerned when their religious faith becomes a central talking point while they're seeking public office.
As the great Baptist preacher George W. Truett once pointed out, the church and the state have different functions, and James Madison, one of our nation's founders, wrote, "Religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
Citizenship and Christianity are not the same thing, and, while, of course, people bring their religious convictions to the voting booth, the goal of Christians should not be to use the state to advance the goals of religion. Citizenship belongs to all Americans, and the government is responsible for ensuring conditions for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. Our shared values are around citizenship, not religion, although one of those shared values of citizenship is religious liberty -- which includes both freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
In his "Plea for Religious Liberty," Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, the first colony founded on the basis of complete religious liberty, made this case:
[I]t is the will and command of God that... a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish or antichristian conscience and worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's Spirit, the Word of God.
Another founder, Thomas Jefferson, argued passionately for religious liberty, but he also warned against the dominance of religion over the state. He wrote, "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." For Jefferson, the sectarian and exclusive nature of much of religion often made people hostile to full religious liberty, and he worried that sectarian religion would align itself with despots in order to protect itself.
So wary were the founders that when the first draft of the Constitution appeared, its sole mention of religion was that there could be no religious test for public office. Only when Baptists agitated did an articulation of religious liberty appear in the Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
In more recent times, even archconservative Senator Barry Goldwater decried the influence of religion on government. He warned that certain Christians, believing they were acting in the name of God, would be incapable of the kind of compromise necessary to a functioning government for all of the people. He scorned attempts to impose particular religious views on public policy and saw the mixing of religion and politics as a threat to freedom for all Americans.
In the United States, the President is the President of all the people, and the President's job is protecting the freedoms of all the people, not forcing the will of any religious group on others through law and public policy. These days, many voters seem willing to impose their own personal religious tests on candidates for public office, and many candidates seem willing to pander to those tests by flaunting their Christian faith on the campaign trail.
Jesus himself had strong words about public religiosity: "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them" (Matthew 6:1). For him, piety was to be practiced in private; love in action was to be the public display of faith.
When candidates use proclamations about their Christian faith to curry favor with particular voters, they blur the lines between religion and government and put true religious liberty at risk. Professing Christian faith should not be a campaign strategy. And we voters should be skeptical of the intertwining of religion and government, as were my Baptist forbears. As E. Y. Mullins once said, our duty is "to protect with all our souls against religious oppression. Baptists believe in religious liberty for themselves. But they believe in it equally for all people."
Our concern should not be whether or not a candidate is a Christian; rather our concern should be that any candidate can uphold the Constitution and the shared values of citizenship for all people. We should not ask candidates if they are Christian; we should not ask them if God has told them what to do. Rather, we should ask them what their values are, how they will practice those values as President, and how they will apply those values to enrich the lives of every person, not simply the people who are like them.