Is It What You Think?: The Separation of Church and State

The Symptom

One of the symptoms of secular humanism is that we have flipped the separation of church and state on its head. Many claim that this distinction requires us to keep our politics free from our religious beliefs. This was not the original intention. The original intent was to ensure that the state never asserted its authority in an improper manner over the church of God. It was a safeguard to ensure that the state retained its moral framework by inviting the church to keep it in check. Just as the national government in America was split into three branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – to create a system of checks and balances, the separation of church and state worked as an additional safeguard to ensure that the civil authorities did not assume too much power. Today, the separation of church and state is used, not to keep the state in check, but rather to keep God and morality out of the public sphere. As Francis Schaeffer noted,

Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, and all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state. The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent. It is not rooted in history...It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas.

The effort today to make politics completely free from Christian ideas, and therefore morality, is based on a false assumption that the public sphere should be a neutral space. People, however, are never morally neutral. Neither are the laws that govern them. And therefore, neither is the public sphere, no matter how many kinds of people are gathered there.

People are moral or immoral, and any attempt to govern them will necessarily reach into the realm of ethics. This means the government is de facto moral or immoral, depending on what laws it establishes and what policies it puts into practice. But the government is never amoral or morally neutral. Laws by definition tell us the way that we “should” behave, the way life “should” go if we stay in bounds. And where there are “shoulds,” there are implied “oughts.” And where there are implied “oughts,” there are morals. The government can’t opt out of ethics no matter how hard it tries. And it should not try. History indicates to us that the harder the state tries to become morally neutral, the harder that attempt backfires. The question is not whether or not the state should be moral or amoral, but rather what kind of morality it will establish and uphold. There are two bases for morality–the law of God and the ever-changing law of man.

Two Options

The morality of the state will either be based on the law of God or the law of autonomous man. If the government is based on the law of God, it becomes properly subordinate to the law of God and falls into place on the right side of history. If based on the law of man, a different phenomenon occurs. With man as the base of authority, the state over time swells into the supreme authority. It displaces God and, as the final arbiter of what is acceptable or not, begins legislating its own morality, which is inevitably a perversion of and contradictory to the law of God. Think of the Israelites' golden calf or the animals in Orwell's Animal Farm. "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." When God is no longer the King, man's tendency is to vie for power and lord it over each other. Only in Christ and under God’s law can a man truly view all other men as his equal.

Any Better Now?

If Schaeffer was right forty years ago, what is the current state of the state in America? It is clear that the humanist state and media have not changed their mentality. They have not returned to the original intention of the church and state distinction. Rather, they have gladly assumed greater power and control over the church and general populace, such as the shutdown of churches and other "non-essential" institutions during the COVID lockdowns. There has even been direct collusion between the state and the media to control the thinking of the people in an attempt to maintain and increase centralized power by “controlling the narrative” on issues such as COVID, vaccination, and climate change. One is left to wonder if anything on mainstream media is anything but smoke and mirrors, and many have abandoned various news sources that were previously thought trustworthy. The dictum “Question everything!” is the motto for our day, and for good reason. We are immersed in a culture saturated with propaganda. In response, we must doubt what we see presented to us on screens and compare it critically with what we see and hear in the real world. If we fail to do this, those who control the narrative will continue to become “more equal” than the rest of us.

We are not in a better condition than we were in Schaeffer’s day. Our state is much worse and we must live with great discernment. We must deal shrewdly with the world around us, especially with the state, the media, and the large corporations. But apart from this, what do we need?

The Solution

What we need is a return to Christ, a third Great Awakening. Such a return would move us back into a proper understanding of the separation of church and state. The church, as guided by the Scriptures, once again must be allowed to speak into the state's affairs in order to restrain the state, calling it continually to subject itself to Christ the King. There is only One to whom “all authority has been given in heaven and on the earth” (Mt. 28:28), and His name is not Caesar. Only when we return to Christ will we as a nation be able to regain the “form and freedom” that provide the proper bounds for human life to flourish. We must also be mindful, lest we think that Christ’s authority is purely “spiritual,” that Christ is the One of whom Isaiah prophesied, “The government shall be upon his shoulder” and “of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (Is. 9:6-7). If Christ is King, then we must let him be King and worship him as such. If Christ is King, we must also call Caesar, our presidents, and all the other governing authorities, to assume their place below Christ, to be his servants. The Scriptures are clear: “The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 34:1) It is only when we learn to render to God what is God's–namely, everything, including what is delegated to Caesar–that the fabric of civilization holds. And so here is the call to you, American: Repent and worship Jesus, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Repent and turn back to the law of God.