Beyond Pragmatism
The Founding Fathers understood that a free people must be a moral people. They further understood that the only alternative to self-governance is strong outside control. If citizens lose the capacity for self-restraint, they lose the necessary means for social cohesion, and a strong civil authority is then necessary to preserve order. The Founders understood that for the American experiment in self-governance to survive, religious liberty would be essential for maintaining civil order, restraining authoritarians, and protecting against a European-style established church. Thus, religious liberty served the pragmatic needs of a religiously conscious people who still had memory of Europe’s religious wars.
However, pragmatism may sustain a nation during an age where the populace essentially shares the same values. But in an age where shared values are difficult to find, pragmatic benefits alone will not carry religious liberty through the next 250 years. If religious liberty is to endure, it must be grounded in something stronger than utility or rationalism. Religious liberty must be grounded in a theology of resurrection which tells us why the conscience requires protections.
The Conscience and Christ
First, Christ’s resurrection is the pivotal event in redemptive history. The resurrection not only vindicates Christ’s wrath-bearing death but also moves redemptive history toward the Spirit’s salvific ministry in the church age. The Spirit’s ministry gathers Christ’s church and leads believers into a life of faith. Thus, the resurrection and the subsequent giving of the Spirit establish the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of the believer.
The priesthood of the believer is built on the Scriptural understanding that individual believers do not need a priest to mediate communication between the resurrected Christ and his followers. The conscience is the internal faculty where the Holy Spirit does his sacred work, calling unbelievers to faith and guiding believers toward holiness. Yet even as believers learn to discern the Holy Spirit’s voice, it can conflict with their own internal voice (Rom. 12:2). Learning to listen to the Spirit’s voice takes time, effort, and renewal. When the State overreaches and attempts to direct the religious conscience, it disturbs the very voice the conscience is designed to hear. For instance, in contexts where a state church rules supreme, souls may confuse their status before God based on state orthodoxy or national heritage (Matt 3:9). A conscience trained to obey external compulsion rather than internal conviction loses the capacity to discern God’s call; thus, a conscience that cannot discern cannot freely respond.
One might ask, “How does this apply to those who believe a false religion? Should false religion be given permission to believe lies?” Yes, because beliefs by nature must be freely chosen to qualify as belief. St. Augustine’s famous words, “The heart is restless until it rests in thee,” recognized that even when one appears outwardly settled on a false belief, there is an internal restlessness within the conscience as Christ pursues the soul. Subsequently, the Spirit and the human conscience must have space to wrestle without interference from unqualified authorities such as the State.
The Image of God in All People
Second, the image of God in every person demands that religious liberty be extended to all people, not merely Christians. Evangelical theology rooted in scripture offers something that pragmatism cannot—a full-orbed concept of the human person. Baptist theologian John Leland argued in the eighteenth century that Christ’s willingness to assume human nature endowed all humans with the power of moral agency. To impede upon one’s religious freedom is therefore to strike against the image of Christ himself. Religious freedom is not a tribal argument for Christian dominance, or an argument for a theocracy, it is precisely the opposite. Evangelical anthropology demands that the conscience of all people including the skeptic and spiritually deceived be equally protected, because each bears the image of the God who pursues them.
This does not mean that false religions are given license to exercise practices that undermine the very foundation by which religious liberty exists. Religious liberty is an ordered liberty because it contains its own limiting principles. Religious liberty fixed in a theology of the Imago Dei has the constraining moral obligation not to coerce, abuse, or destroy the body or conscience of another image bearer. This is vital for us to understand as we celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, because religious liberty founded in pragmatism is vulnerable to weaponization.
The Church Must Recover Its Voice at 250
On this national birthday, we have a choice. We can continue to borrow secular arguments for religious liberty and hope the courts hold the line, or we can recover the theological convictions that built this freedom in the first place. Christ’s resurrection secures for us our personal assurance of freedom from sin, death, eternal life. And His resurrection tells us who we are as human persons and why the conscience is sacred. That is the argument America needs at 250 — only the church can make it. The next 250 years of religious liberty must be secured not only in the courthouse, but in the church.
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