There’s been a lot of mingling of Christianity and politics since Charlie Kirk was murdered. Tucker Carlson opened one of his shows with a straight-up sermon: “This is a religion committed to love above all and to living in peace and harmony, truly. It’s a universalist religion that believes that every person has a shot at heaven. It’s not exclusionary at all.”
Erika Kirk used her time at her husband’s memorial service to forgive his murderer, which is one of the more radical things Christians are commanded to do. At the same service, JD Vance told the crowd that he has traditionally been uncomfortable talking about his faith in public but that “I have talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life.”
Some people are made nervous by this mingling of God talk with politics. They legitimately fear that religion is such a divisive and explosive force or that it’s being imposed on them, that it should be kept from the public square and practiced in the privacy of church and home. Keep God and politics separate.
I wonder how much such people know about American history. The founders believed that democracy could survive only if citizens could restrain their passions, be obedient to a shared moral order and point their lives toward virtue. They relied on religious institutions to do that moral formation. As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “For the Americans, the idea of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other.”
I’d add only that a naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.
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