Theocracy is not the goal

Evangelicals today are often accused of being theocrats whenever they advocate policies and laws deemed unpopular by the forces of extreme progressivism. The problem is that many Christians have a hard time explaining why they are not advocating theocracy when they support laws against abortion or the mutilation of confused teenagers in the name of gender ideology.

First, let’s be clear about what a theocracy is. Iran is a theocracy; the United States is a Christian country. To be a Christian country means that the country was founded by Christian people and the majority of the population continues to be Christian today. That describes the United States. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, is a country with many of the institutions of parliamentary democracy such as a president and legislature but also a supreme body made up of religious clerics that gives orders to the politicians about public policy. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the country has been a theocracy, which can be defined as a country that is ruled by religious officials. When the Ayatollah Khamenei decrees something, the president and elected legislators fall into line.

The United States is not and never has been a theocracy. And it is in no danger of becoming one.

But the United States has been influenced by Christian ideas, Christian morality, and Christian public figures since before the Revolutionary War. Thomas Kidd’s biography of George Whitefield refers to him as “America’s Spiritual Founding Father.” Historically, laws have reflected Christian ideals, and even where the nation has grievously erred, as in tolerance for slavery, it was Christians and their allies who led the charge to eradicate such evils.

But how can Christians convince non-Christians that accepting moral positions like the sanctity of human life is not creeping theocracy?

The problem is compounded by the recent rise of neo-Marxist postmodernism, which claims that all moral statements are merely disguised power grabs and that all social relations boil down to coercive power relations.

Christians need to do two things. First, we need to reject such a cynical view of reality, and second, we need to clearly articulate a different understanding of the world. We need to recover the idea of natural law, which is rooted in the classical philosophy that shaped the great Protestant confessions of faith in the post-Reformation era. There is a natural law that even non-Christians can discern by reason. In his book, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis called this the Tao, and he argued that it is found across numerous world cultures. Christians and non-Christians can recognize basic moral principles using reason.

Many contemporary evangelicals have been influenced by Cornelius Van Til and his theory of presuppositionalism. He developed this theory as the basis of his apologetics. Basically, his point was that neutrality with regard to God is impossible, and that every person is either in submission to God or in rebellion against God. He calls this the antithesis. Given this, Van Til denied that unbelievers can affirm natural law and natural theology. He went so far as to claim that unbelievers cannot know any true facts. Van Til also qualified this extreme position in other parts of his writings by admitting that unbelievers actually can know some things by common grace. The problem is that some evangelicals forget the qualification and stress the idea that non-Christians cannot know that, say, murder is wrong by reason and natural law.

This plays directly into the hands of the postmodern relativists who then insist that even the Christians agree with them that morality is just window dressing, and all politics is just a power struggle. From their perspective, only a coercive theocracy could impose Christian morality on society. Tragically, a shallow version of presuppositionalism leads many evangelicals to agree with them.

We need to follow C. S. Lewis on this point and not a modified version of Van Til. To ask the government to pass a law against murder or to adopt pro-life and pro-family policies is not the same as calling for conversion to personal Christian faith. When we ask everyone to admit that there are only two sexes, we are just asking people to use their reason to recognize reality. Of course, we want all people to come to faith. But we distinguish between acknowledging the common morality known from nature by reason and embracing the fullness of Christian faith.

If we want to be engaged in the public square without appearing to be a threat to religious freedom, we need a language to speak about public policy in a way other than quoting Bible verses and calling people to convert. Natural law provides a way of doing so.