Craig Carter: Reasoning for moral laws

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 21st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. When evangelicals advocate for policies deemed unpopular today, a common critique is that they are being oppressive theocrats. The problem is many Christians have a hard time refuting that. WORLD Opinions contributor Craig Carter has some helpful advice.

CRAIG CARTER: First, let’s be clear about what a theocracy is. A theocracy is a country that is ruled by religious officials. Iran is a theocracy— and has been—since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The Islamic Republic of Iran 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. 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. Meaning it has been influenced by Christian ideas, Christian morality, and Christian public figures since before the Revolutionary War. Historically, its 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.

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 qualified this extreme position in other parts of his writings by admitting that unbelievers can know some things by common grace. The problem is that some evangelicals miss 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.

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.

I’m Craig Carter.

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