WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Do Christians Hurt Their Witness by Defending Religious Liberty?
That question in the headline above might well strike some as odd, but historically there are actually two groups that think Christians should stay out of the public square and keep their faith to themselves.
The first group came from the Christian community itself and is all but extinct today. It was not uncommon after the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 to hear fundamentalist Christians declare that participation in the political process was wrong because it required becoming part of the sinful world system of Babylon. Doing that allegedly compromised a Christian’s witness.
Religious freedom comes from God, not church councils, benevolent kings or elected presidents (Screenshot from YouTube).
The second group is much more contemporary and consists of secularists mostly on the political Left, who insist on a mistaken reading of the First Amendment’s bar on an established religion and Thomas Jefferson’s famous dictum about a “wall of separation.”
The founders, including Jefferson, sought to keep government out of the church, not to bar the faithful from the pubic square. The secularists have this exactly backwards.
The Colson Center’s Brook McIntire offers three additional reasons why Christians participating in the public square not only does not compromise their witness for the faith, but contributes greatly to the common good, thus benefitting everybody, including adherents of other faiths and of no faith: