Rick Santorum speaking at a rally in Plano, Texas
Apparently, I’m unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting lately. For your information, I’ve been obsessing about the Republican presidential primaries, and Tweeting my support for Rick Santorum.
Over the past few years, I’ve been reading and thinking about competing approaches to the relationship between church and state, or more broadly, Christ and culture. Turning 18 during the 1988 presidential race, my political formation took place at the hands of what is now popularly looked down on as “The Religious Right.” Believing as I do that capitalism does more good for the most people (including those in poverty) than does redistribution of wealth and that abortion is nothing less than a twentieth-century “Massacre of the Innocents,” I have always found that the Republican party was more consistent with these views than the alternative, and I have voted accordingly.
Having more recently become a proponent of Reformed theology, I have been intrigued and challenged by Reformed and Presbyterian teachers discussing things like “Kuyperianism,” “Two-Kingdom theology” (2K) and “the Spirituality of the Church” and even things like “Theonomy” (or it’s more politically charged name “Dominionism“). While I find much to commend in the first three views, I have no use for the fourth. But unlike other Reformed bloggers, I have not become a strident advocate of either Abraham Kuyper’s view of sphere sovereignty, the modern Reformed appropriation of Luther’s modification of Augustine’s “Two Cities” (as expressed in City of God) view, or the Presbyterian view of the spirituality of the church. The committee is still out on which of these views will win the battle for my mind. All I can say is that I am still working on which I find to be most consistent with Scripture. In the meantime, I’m culling the candidates as I always have. This election season, my sympathies lie mostly with Rick Santorum as holding the best conservative candidate to run against our esteemed incumbent President Barack Obama.
Before I settled on which candidate was for me, I began to notice that many of the Reformed proponents of the Two Kingdom approach to Christ and culture seemed to favor the libertarian phenomenon, Ron Paul. Before this, I followed a certain prominent 2K blogger who is probably the chief scholar on the life, thought and ministry of J. Gresham Machen, the founder of both Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Yes, I mean Dr. Darryl G. Hart. I thoroughly enjoyed his series on the life of Machen provided by the Reformed Forum, and I listen to it again and again (You can listen to part 1 here). I did find Hart’s portrayal of Machen as a 1920′s libertarian charming, especially regarding his civil disobedience against the tyrannical anti-jaywalking laws of his day. How can you not grin at the notion of the author of Christianity and Liberalism defiantly charging across a busy street at will? But the more I listened to Hart expound on his 2K view, it began to sound more like a promotion of libertarianism in the name of 2K than it did a defense of the right of a believer before God to determine what he thinks is most in his nation’s best interests. Likewise, many others in the Reformed blogosphere who are big fans of Hart’s and strident 2K proponents themselves, seem to be following suit in promoting Ron Paul for president as enthusiastically as I am Rick Santorum. This is their right, of course, but I can’t help coming away with the feeling that to be 2K is to be self-consciously anti-1980′s Religious Right Republican and thus necessarily Libertarian. I’m sure they don’t see it this way, but this is the way it appears from my perspective.
So, staying true to my theological and political instincts, I remain very distracted from my blogging, and continue to daily follow the exploits of Rick Santorum’s “Game On!” surge to virtual, if not actual, front-runner status. My wife and I even attended his rally in Plano, Texas last week! (or was it the week before?) In my online searching about the former Senator from Pennsylvania, I came upon the text of a 2010 speech he delivered in Houston which analyzes and criticizes his Catholic president predecessor, John F. Kennedy’s historic 1960 Houston speech, in which he famously assuaged the fears of Protestant America that the Vatican would not exercise undue influence on his administration and declared “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Santorum says that the implications of Kennedy’s position has harmed the freedom of conscience and the freedom of religious expression, and has given us the modern Left-wing war on religion in America. You can begin reading it here:
“Three pictures hung in the home of my devoutly Catholic immigrant grandparents when I was a boy and I remember them well — Jesus, Pope Paul VI and John F. Kennedy. The president was a source of great pride and a symbol to Catholics that all barriers had finally been broken. What my family and maybe even candidate Kennedy at the time didn’t realize was that in a key moment in that election of 1960 right here in Houston, Kennedy began the construction of another, even more threatening wall for our society — one that sealed off informed moral wisdom into a realm of non-rational beliefs that have no legitimate role in political discourse.
“Fifty years ago this Sunday JFK delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to dispel suspicions about the role the papacy might play in the government of this country under his administration. Let’s make no mistake about it — Kennedy was addressing a real issue at the time. Prejudice against Catholics threatened to cost him the election. But on that day, Kennedy chose not just to dispel fear, he chose to expel faith. Let me quote from the beginning of Kennedy’s speech: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
“The idea of strict or absolute separation of church and state is not and never was the American model. It was a model used in countries like France and until recently Turkey, but it found little support in America until it was introduced into the public discourse by Justice Hugo Black in the case of Everson v. The Board of Education in 1947. (Black, by the way, was a Catholic-hating former member of the KKK who ironically enough advocated this strict separation doctrine to keep public funds from Catholic schools.)
“While the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, the concept of keeping the government apart from religion does. The first part of the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a state church, such as existed in England and in some of the states in 1791, and from discriminating for or against particular faiths. The founders were determined to ensure that the new national government had no jurisdiction over matters of religion, in large part to insure that each American would be free to pursue the religion of their choice without state interference. Far from reflecting hostility toward religion, our founders, rooted in their own faith convictions, knew that faith was not just an essential element, but the essence of civilization and the inspiration of culture.
“The second reference to religion in the First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion and in conjunction with the prohibition of established churches, these two concepts were to work together to ensure that religion and people of faith had powerful constitutional protections of their right to not only worship as their conscience dictated, but to be free to bring their religiously informed moral convictions into the public discourse.”
Keep reading… and feel free to sound off with your reactions to any of mine or Rick’s comments!
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