69 Sermon Illustrations on Religious Freedom

My wife and I moved to New Hampshire in 1998 to start a new church. More than 10 years later the Lord called us to launch a new Christian college in New England. Each time we decided, in spite of contrary advice, to include “Baptist” in the name.

For us, Baptist is more than a traditional title, or something we are in name only. “Baptist” summarizes our beliefs and connects us to a long heritage of bold, New Testament believers.

There are seven distinctive reasons I am a Baptist and intend to remain one.

1. I am a Baptist because I believe in biblical authority.

From the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement centuries ago, through the English Separatists, to the Conservative Resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention, Baptists always turned to the Bible as the final authority in all matters of faith and practice. What the Magisterial Reformers (Luther, Calvin and those who followed) heralded -- Sola Scriptura -- Baptists acted on. Final authority does not rest in church tradition, a church council, a pope or a bishop. God’s Word alone is inerrant, infallible, final and forever. Baptists stand on biblical authority, so I am a Baptist.

2. I am a Baptist because I believe in believer’s baptism.

In October 2017, Protestants will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. It will be a worthy celebration. However, one area of distinction between the infant-baptizing Magisterial Reformers and the Radical Reformers is the New Testament pattern of first believing and then being baptized. The pattern was prescribed by Jesus, proclaimed by the apostles and practiced by the church. Baptists insist on believer’s baptism, so I am a Baptist.

3. I am a Baptist because I believe in a believer’s church.

Believer’s baptism is the necessary forerunner of a believer’s church. The Magisterial Reformers promoted a state church. They wanted the state to support their church instead of some other, but in so doing they equated citizenship with church membership. The Radical Reformers, in contrast, insisted on a believer’s church: Baptism and church membership are only for the regenerate, those born again through faith in Jesus Christ. Following the New Testament pattern, Baptists understand the church to be made up of baptized believers who intentionally unite together to form a local church. The church’s purpose is to notify sinners, edify saints and exalt the Savior. We understand, of course, that a regenerate church membership is not guaranteed; it is a goal we pursue. Even so, Baptists continue pursuing a believer’s church, so I am a Baptist.

4. I am a Baptist because I believe in congregational governance.

Believer’s baptism and a believer’s church are the necessary forerunners of congregational governance. If only the regenerate are baptized into church membership, all the church members are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and all can be led by the Holy Spirit as the church body unites to discover and do God’s will. Through the years, Baptists have organized local churches in various ways. Some make all decisions after extensive discussions at monthly business meetings. Other congregations make most decisions through the deacons and pastoral staff or through a fellowship of elders. A variety of congregational organizations are on the spectrum. Yet Baptists have always insisted on local congregational governance. How can churches in the same denomination function with a variety of organizational structures? Baptists believe each congregation has the authority under the lordship of Christ and His Word to determine its own structure. No outside organization dictates to a local Baptist church. Baptists believe in congregational governance, so I am a Baptist.

5. I am a Baptist because I believe in the priesthood of the believer.

Some have misused this Baptist distinctive. It does not mean every individual Christian has the right to believe anything they wish. For Baptists, all matters of faith are under biblical authority. Properly understood, the priesthood of believers means that each believer has direct access to the Father, through Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. No believer needs a priest or church hierarchy to gain access to God. Each believer is a priest; each has direct access to God through prayer and His Word. Baptists insist on the priesthood of believers, so I am a Baptist.

6. I am a Baptist because I believe in the security of believers.

Once a person is truly saved, he/she is eternally secure. Baptists believe that the Holy Spirit securely seals every justified believer until final glorification. A believer’s security is not based on his ability to endure faithfully but on the Savior’s enduring faithfulness. Baptists affirm the Biblical doctrine of the believer’s security, so I am a Baptist. [Holwick: not every Baptist is a Calvinist though it is probably the most widely-held position; those of Arminian persuasion believe salvation can be lost]

7. I am a Baptist because I believe in religious liberty.

While Baptists have been known for holding their doctrines firmly and passionately, they also insisted on the rights of others to do the same. The news of radio personality Hank Hanegraaff, the “Bible Answer Man,” recently converting to Eastern Orthodoxy may have surprised many evangelicals, but Baptists support his liberty to convert. It was Baptists who first insisted on religious liberty in Rhode Island. It was Virginia Baptists who wrote to Thomas Jefferson insisting that the Constitution of the United States provide religious liberty for all. Baptists stand for religious liberty, so I am a Baptist.

On January 5, 1527, Felix Manz was executed by drowning. His alleged crime was three-fold. First, following his conversion, he was re-baptized as an adult. Second, he re-baptized others whom he led to Christ. Third, he refused to have his infant children christened.

On the way to his death, Manz would not be silenced. He sang praises to God and preached to the bystanders. Upon arriving at the Limmat River, Manz was placed in a boat, immobilized and tipped into the icy water. Manz gave his life for the convictions for which he had lived.

Manz was one of our Anabaptist forefathers. He lived and died for the Baptist distinctives of biblical authority, believer’s baptism and a believer’s church. Manz was one link in our long heritage of bold, New Testament believers. Following our forefathers’ examples, let us never be ashamed to call ourselves Baptists.

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Mark H. Ballard is the founder and president of Northeastern Baptist College in Bennington, Vermont

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[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

One of the most contentious elections in American history took place in 1800. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the first to run with political parties behind them and the rhetoric became intense and personal.

The most ferocious attacks on Jefferson concerned his views on religion. Though he called himself a Christian, Jefferson held a skeptical view of the Bible and was widely reputed to be an atheist.

Jefferson had once offered a Franklinesque statement of his passionate commitment to religious toleration: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

All over the country, clergymen preached that such a view could lead to nothing but unchecked vice. From New York, one minister answered Jefferson, “Let my neighbor once perceive himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket and break not only my LEG but my NECK.”

Last Thursday President Bush did something few presidents in history have had the courage to do. However, you may not have heard about it, since much of the press downplayed it. But you shouldn't miss it, because the religious freedom of millions rests on people knowing about and getting behind the president's actions.

The president spoke to the American Jewish Committee in Washington Thursday on the subject of religious liberty. Bush spoke about how America, from its birth, has been committed to religious tolerance and religious freedom. We have always been a country that, he quoted George Washington, "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

Over two centuries, Bush noted, "Washington's rejection of religious bigotry has matured ... into a guiding doctrine of our foreign policy."

And then the president took direct aim at the countries that persecute people for their faith: He condemned Iraq, Iran, Burma, Cuba, and Afghanistan for their mistreatment of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities. He reserved special condemnation for China, which, he said, vandalizes churches and mosques, and puts religious leaders under arrest.

But the president's strongest words were aimed at the government of Sudan. Sudan, he said, "is a disaster area for human rights." The Muslim government is "waging war against ... Christians and other non-Muslims. Some 2 million Sudanese have lost their lives; 4 million more have lost their homes. Hospitals, schools, [and] churches ... have often been bombed by government warplanes; ... women and children have been abducted and sold into slavery."

"Aid agencies report," the president continued, "that food assistance is sometimes distributed only to those willing to undergo conversion to Islam."

The president backed up his remarks with some strong action, as well: He announced he had just appointed a special humanitarian coordinator, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, to ensure that U.S. food aid to Sudan goes to those who need it, no matter what their religion. And he promised that his administration "will continue to speak and act for as long as the persecution and atrocities in the Sudan last."

This is great news, and I know from personal experience that we can count on the president to keep his word. A few months ago, Bill Bennett, Rabbi Sapperstein, and I talked with special advisor to the president, Karl Rove. We pleaded for a special presidential envoy to deal with Sudan. Rove got back to me and said, "We will do it." And indeed the president is keeping his word.

The president's action has drawn fire in some quarters. Businesses that use Sudan's gum arabic for soft drinks and other products don't want Bush to take such a hard line against Sudan.

But you and I need to let President Bush know how much we appreciate his courageous stand on this issue -- an answer to prayer indeed, delivered on the National Day of Prayer. So, I hope you'll contact the White House and thank the president for standing up for the rights of persecuted citizens around the world, including many, many Christians.

I also urge you to visit BreakPoint Online for a copy of the president's magnificent speech. You probably won't find it in your local newspapers or on TV. But I want you to read it, because it's evidence that we now have a president, thank God, who is willing to set his jaw -- and do what is right.

For further reference:

Bush, George W. "The First Freedom of the Soul." Remarks by the President to the American Jewish Committee, 3 May 2001. Full text available on BreakPoint Online: http://www.breakpoint.org

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Copyright (c) 1999 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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In the past decade India has enjoyed an economic boom fueled, in large part, by trade in services with the United States. Sadly, many Indians, however, have not benefited from the boom, chief among them the Dalits, or, as they used to be called, the “untouchables.”

On October 2, Mohandas Gandhi’s birthday, 25,000 Dalits from across India set out on a Gandhi-style protest march to New Delhi. They protested their continuing marginalization within Indian society, which is especially intolerable in the midst of unprecedented economic growth.

It is difficult for any American to imagine how marginalized the Dalits are. They are considered to be less-than-human by much of Indian society. Because of this, they are relegated to “the most squalid jobs,” as Stephanie Giry put it in Foreign Affairs magazine — for example, cleaning human waste.

As one Dalit woman told the BBC, she cleaned toilets because that was the only way she could feed her children. The woman’s daughter said that she “tried looking for a job in a school or nursing home, but no one would take” her. “The first question they always ask is your caste-system.”

The Indian government has enacted anti-discrimination laws and created programs to compensate for this discrimination. Yet the Dalits’ place within the “Hindu religious and social hierarchy” limits the impact of these laws. More than 2,000 years of culture and religion often trump the law.

Little wonder that millions of Dalits have sought to escape that hierarchy by converting to Christianity. According to the Wall Street Journal, the “overwhelming majority” of India’s Christians are Dalits. [see #34858]

This, in turn, gives their Hindu neighbors and local government two reasons to discriminate against them: their caste and then their Christian faith.

In fact, if a Dalit converts to Christianity, he risks losing whatever little anti-discrimination protection and benefits are offered to Dalits — benefits that, however, can mean a decent chance at life.

Despite the risk, Dalits continue to convert — an estimated 25 million so far. Because of this double discrimination, they often have to practice their faith in secret. As one Dalit teacher told the Wall Street Journal, “If [officials] ever find out I’m a Christian, I will lose my position.” He and other Dalit Christians are forced to live a kind of double life: appearing to be a Hindu in public but limiting expressions of their faith to their homes and churches.

The situation in what’s called the “largest democracy in the world” reminds us that “democracy” and elections are not enough — there needs to be a commitment to the “first freedom”: freedom of religion. There needs to be a recognition that all freedoms grow out of what one of our founders James Madison called “the act of freedom by which each responds to the call of his Creator.” And it is time to start reminding India that business-as-usual with us does not include continuing to treat our brothers as “untouchable.”

So this Sunday, on the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, remember to pray for the Dalits and our persecuted brethren around the world. And this year, resolve with me to pray for the persecuted Church not just on this designated day, but year-round, “without ceasing.”

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The political atmosphere was charged with issues of religion and morality. Regardless of the Constitution’s prohibition of any religious test for office holding, candidates’ spiritual lives and professions of faith came in for extended discussion and scrutiny. The political parties sought to bring religious voters into their coalitions, especially the large number of Americans who identified themselves as evangelical Protestants. Ministers thundered from their pulpits, although sometimes inadvertently wounding their preferred candidates with their utterances. Some asserted that America was a “Christian nation,” while others clamored for religious freedom, and sparks flew from the friction between Protestants and Catholics. Hot-button moral issues polarized the electorate, and a war that some decried as unjustified and downright immoral exacerbated tensions.

Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation.

Sound familiar? At a forum of Democratic candidates in the summer of 2007, both Senator Hillary Clinton and former Senator John Edwards spoke of the importance of prayer, forgiveness, and how their Christian faith helped them through the most trying times of their lives. On the Republican side, the presence among the leading contenders of a Mormon (Mitt Romney) and a former Southern Baptist pastor (Mike Huckabee) elicited a further outpouring of discussion about the relevance of a candidates’ religion to his or her qualifications for the Oval Office. The two eventual nominees, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, have both written in some detail about their religious experiences. In Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote about how faith in God helped him survive imprisonment and torture during his Vietnam War captivity, and he movingly described a makeshift Christmas service he and his fellow P.O.W.’s put on in 1971. For his part, Obama took the title of his book, THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, from a remark by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. He devoted a thoughtful chapter to religion and politics, in which he discussed his identification with the black church and his decision to join Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

The McCain and Obama campaigns have also had to work to contain damage caused by their engagement with religious themes. McCain caught flak for the perceived anti-Catholic comments of Texas megachurch pastor and televangelist, the Reverend John Hagee, who had endorsed McCain, while Obama had to repudiate Reverend Wright for a bevy of incendiary remarks. The two candidates also made trouble for themselves. McCain had to backpedal and explain himself when he said that the United States is a “Christian nation,” and Obama drew a barrage of criticism when he opined that “bitter,” working-class Americans “cling to guns or religion” along with nativism and protectionism.

Of course there is nothing new about the politicization of religion (and vice versa) in the United States. In fact, contrary to popular myth, there is nothing at odds with the Constitution about all this. Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation. Perhaps no early American is more emblematic of this long-standing entanglement of religion and politics than the early nineteenth-century clergyman Lyman Beecher (1775-1863). Today, Beecher is probably best known for his remarkable brood of children, who included the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the celebrity preacher, writer, and lecturer Henry Ward Beecher. Yet in his generation, Lyman Beecher was one of America’s most prominent clergymen. He was a revivalist during the Second Great Awakening, one of the organizers of innovative missionary and reform organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Temperance Society, and a seminary president, to name just a few of his career highlights. In all of these very public roles, and many others, Beecher navigated the often perilous path between power and belief, religion and politics. A brief exploration of Beecher’s political experiences may thus allow us to see the present religion-politics matrix with a deeper and clearer perspective.

Lyman Beecher was born and raised in Connecticut and studied for the ministry at Yale. Religion and politics had historically been closely intertwined in that former Puritan colony, and taxpayer funds would subsidize the Congregational churches until 1818. Beecher assumed his first pastorate in 1799 over the Presbyterian Church at East Hampton, New York, just across Long Island Sound from Connecticut. At that time, many of his colleagues in the New England ministry bitterly opposed Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Republican candidate for the presidency. Jefferson, they believed, had demonstrated a disturbing sympathy for atheistic, anti-clerical views with his insistence on the separation of church and state — articulated in his famous “Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom” — and his association with the likes of Tom Paine and other known religious skeptics.

To counter these apparent “infidelities,” the New England clergy unsuccessfully agitated for what one historian has termed “a voter-imposed religious test” that would override the Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for government office. Political cartoons drew invidious comparisons between the piety and wisdom of George Washington and the irreligion of Jefferson. They pointed out, for example, that in his Farewell Address Washington had stated that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,” while Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, had written that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Within this contentious, partisan atmosphere, Beecher first made a name for himself by denouncing the practice of dueling, especially on the part of seekers of public office. Not long after Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton, Beecher preached a sermon asking how anyone could vote for a murderer. He delivered the sermon at a few Long Island churches during 1805 and at a presbytery meeting in April 1806, and then published it as The Remedy for Duelling. To counter these sorts of unchristian methods, Beecher advocated a ballot-box solution in which Christians would sanctify the electoral process “by withholding your suffrages from every man whose hands are stained with blood, and by intrusting to men of fair character and moral principle the making and execution of your laws.” Beecher lived in an era of partisan polarization, and yet he claimed that his strategy was above party. “It is in vain to cry out ‘priest-craft’ — or ‘political preaching,’” he said. “The crime we oppose is peculiar to no party.” Instead, displaying his talents as an activist and organizer, Beecher called upon “voluntary associations” to organize a “concert of action” to suppress the culture of dueling.

Following a move in 1810 to the more lucrative pulpit of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher continued to push for action by voluntary societies, which he termed “a sort of disciplined moral militia.” He attacked Sabbath breaking and drunkenness in an 1812 sermon entitled, “A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable.” In his Autobiography, Beecher recalled that he had first become concerned about the problem of alcohol abuse during his time in East Hampton when he observed how unscrupulous merchants plied the Montauk Indians with liquor. He also noted that even when clergymen gathered for such an event as an ordination, they happily imbibed substantial quantities of booze. Now he took a place in the vanguard of the temperance movement, the campaign to get drinkers to swear off at least hard liquor, if not every type of alcoholic beverage. Beecher had a keen appreciation for the necessity of working to change public opinion in order to bring about lasting change. Indeed, over the quarter century between 1825 and 1850, the temperance movement succeeded in slashing the alcohol consumption of the average American adult from seven gallons per year to fewer than two.

This success should not, however, lull us into thinking that policy and belief achieved some sort of easy alliance in nineteenth-century America. Beecher and his clerical peers endured some very difficult days. In support of New England’s commercial economy, for example, they opposed the relatively popular War of 1812. And in their own vineyard, they faced growing competition from rival sects, particularly the Baptists, who called for the separation of church and state. The successful end of the war in 1815 brought disgrace to the anti-war Beecher and his peers in the Federalist Party, substantially weakening their sway in state politics. The result was a sea change in the religious politics of New England. Now the old “Standing Order” of Congregational clergy and New England’s political elite found itself in the minority, unable to stem the tide of disestablishment sentiment. By 1818, Connecticut had formally disestablished the Congregational Church. Beecher realized that the church-state arrangements of the Puritan forefathers were gone for good, and at first he hung his head in gloom. Yet he soon came around to the conclusion that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

In sermons delivered during the late 1810s and 1820s, Beecher rethought the proper connection between religion and politics in a democratic society. He tried to chart a course between the pitfalls of partisanship and the promise of moral influence. In an 1823 sermon, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints, he told his listeners to avoid “things merely secular” and to speak out only on “great questions of national morality.” He warned Christians not to get too attached to any political party but rather to cast their votes strictly on the basis of righteousness. As he phrased matters in an 1826 sermon to the Connecticut legislature, “Multitudes of Christians and patriots have long since abandoned party politics, and, not knowing what to do, have abandoned almost the exercise of suffrage. This is wrong. An enlightened and virtuous suffrage may, by system and concentration, become one of the most powerful means of promoting national purity and morality.” In other words, Beecher envisioned the evangelical community as an electoral arbiter that would stand between the political parties and base its judgments solely on moral principles.

Beecher applied these ideas during the Sabbatarian campaigns of the 1810s and 1820s. Sabbatarians wanted to stop the transportation of the mail on Sundays and close the post offices on that day. They believed that the republican experiment depended on Sabbath observation, because that was when the citizenry learned the moral virtue required of them in a free society. In 1814 Beecher became involved in a Presbyterian petition drive that beseeched Congress to halt postal transportation on the Sabbath day. Congress, however, judged the everyday movement of the mails too important to the communication of commercial and military information and so took no action. In 1828, Beecher, now pastor of Boston’s Hanover Street Church, was present at the inaugural meeting of the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath, an organization made up of people who promised to honor the Sabbath and boycott transport firms that violated it. He penned the organization’s initial statement, one hundred thousand copies of which were printed and distributed nationwide, followed by a second petition campaign.

The anti-Sabbatarian opposition that emerged showed that the introduction of supposedly nonpartisan moral issues into politics would prove deeply divisive. Individuals and denominations suspicious of an overly powerful clergy pushed back, especially those like the Baptists who feared that any mixing of church and state — such as that required by government action on behalf of the Sabbath — would favor their rivals, the Congregationalists. As early political cartoons made clear, these fears were quite widespread. The second petition drive was quashed in a Senate committee led by Richard Mentor Johnson, Democrat of Kentucky. The committee took a hands-off approach to the Sabbatarians’ petitions, saying that it was not for the committee to decide whether the Sabbath should be on Saturday or Sunday. The committee also made a slippery-slope argument, suggesting that if Congress interfered with the Sabbath, petitioners would soon be asking for taxpayer-funded ministers and houses of worship. Johnson’s two reports against the Sabbatarian campaign, which were in fact written by his friend, the Baptist minister Obadiah Brown, made him a champion of religious freedom in some circles.

The political firestorm over the Sabbath was just a prelude to what would be an embattled few decades for Beecher. Through the 1820s and 1830s he found himself engaged in a bitter theological controversy, attacking Unitarian liberals for their rejection of Calvinism and defending himself against charges of doctrinal irregularities made by conservative, “Old School” Presbyterians. In 1832 he took his battle to what was then considered “the West” and assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. There he came face to face with what was his era’s most controversial issue: slavery. Until taking up his post at Lane, Beecher had been able to avoid the matter. But when the Lane trustees forbade discussion of slavery for fear of antagonizing the school’s Cincinnati neighbors, Beecher faced a serious crisis. Most of the more radical student body bolted to Oberlin College, which had been founded in 1833 and had become a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Beecher’s preference for a moderate, unified antislavery course foundered, as it would across the nation in the years leading to the Civil War.

By 1840 Beecher reentered the political fray. During the 1830s, Americans who found President Andrew Jackson and his policies disagreeable had formed the Whig Party. Beecher’s eldest daughter, the educator Catharine Beecher, had been a leading organizer of petitions against Jackson’s policy of Indian removal, the forced relocation of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States. In the presidential election of 1840, Lyman Beecher threw his support behind the Whig candidate, fellow Ohioan William Henry Harrison. Whigs played up the issue of Harrison’s piety, and Sabbatarians and temperance advocates flocked to his standard, regardless of his famous campaign image as a common man who inhabited a log cabin and drank hard cider. Unfortunately for the Whigs, Harrison’s sudden death a month after his inauguration dashed their hopes for an administration of godliness and morality.

In 1844 Beecher endorsed the Whig ticket of Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president. Frelinghuysen, former United States Senator from New Jersey and onetime president of the Sabbath Union, embodied Beecher’s ideal of “the Christian statesman,” but Beecher’s support soon became a liability for the Whigs. In a political move worthy of Karl Rove, the Democrats reprinted forty thousand copies of Beecher’s old anti-dueling sermon so as to embarrass Clay, who had been involved in a couple of duels in his younger days. The Whigs narrowly lost that election, in part because the growing Irish Catholic population in New York City, suspicious of the kind of Protestant moralizing represented by Beecher and Frelinghuysen, voted heavily Democratic.

What lessons can we take from this selective look at Lyman Beecher’s public career? For one thing, he was correct to conclude that the days of the New England founders, who had sought to make church and state mutually supporting, had passed. The United States Constitution is a secular document that prohibits religious tests for office and that outlaws direct state support of religious institutions. Beecher recognized that only to the extent that the United States was populated by those who adhered to traditional Christianity — what he termed “the faith once delivered to the saints” in his 1823 sermon, quoting Jude 3 — would it be a Christian nation.

At the same time, the “separation of church and state” does not mean that voters informed by religious values would remain silent. As Beecher’s generation spoke out against Sabbath breaking, intemperance, Indian removal, and slavery, so people of faith today will continue to champion so-called social issues in the political arena. But they should not expect to be popular as a result. Beecher’s experience exposed both the necessity of speaking out and the inevitability of the ensuing controversy. Moreover, professed Christians of different denominations may very well line up on opposite sides of issues. Congregationalists and Baptists, for example, tend to take different stands on numerous questions today no less than in Beecher’s time.

Beecher achieved his clearest successes when he operated independently of government. The evangelical organizations in which he played such a prominent role really did change the culture and help inaugurate the Victorian era. The same is true of the temperance movement. Yet Beecher also showed that the political parties are unavoidable. He desired Christians to remain above the partisan fray, but he also realized the necessity of eventually choosing to be involved with one or the other if one hoped to influence public policy. Then as now, elections have consequences. Harrison’s untimely death and the Whigs’ narrow defeat in 1844, for example, led to war with Mexico and the expansion of slavery. Beecher’s son, Henry Ward, would side with the new Republican Party in the 1850s as the only effective instrument for breaking the Slave Power’s grip over the United States.

Lyman Beecher’s efforts to scrutinize the morality of governmental policy and to mobilize voter support for his causes ultimately contributed to the robust, participatory democracy of antebellum America. He carried a Puritan tradition of prophetic preaching into the early republic and set ground rules for Christian involvement in politics that are still relevant. Contemporary American political culture, with its “values voters” and “faith forums,” is heir to his legacy.

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FURTHER READING:

An invaluable source for understanding Beecher is Barbara M. Cross, ed., THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LYMAN BEECHER, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). Originally published in 1864, it is a collection of his and his children’s reminiscences and letters that were compiled during his retirement years after 1850. It also includes extracts from many of his most noteworthy sermons.

The best general biography of Beecher is Vincent Harding, A CERTAIN MAGNIFICENCE: LYMAN BEECHER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM, 1775-1863 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991). There are perceptive chapters on Beecher’s evolving thinking about social reform in Robert H. Abzug, COSMOS CRUMBLING: AMERICAN REFORM AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION (New York, 1994) and John G. West Jr., THE POLITICS OF REVELATION AND REASON: RELIGION AND CIVIC LIFE IN THE NEW NATION (Lawrence, Kans., 1996). Two works that include Beecher as an important participant in debates over religion and politics are Richard J. Carwardine, EVANGELICALS AND POLITICS IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA (New Haven, Conn., 1993) and Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 10:4 (1990): 517-67. On the election of 1800 see Frank Lambert, “‘God — and a Religious President...[or] Jefferson and No God’: Campaigning for a Voter-Imposed Religious Test in 1800,” Journal of Church and State 39:4 (1997): 769-89. Daniel Walker Howe, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA, 1815-1848 (New York, 2007) provides a magisterial survey of Beecher’s age.

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Jonathan D. Sassi is associate professor of history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of A REPUBLIC OF RIGHTEOUSNESS: THE PUBLIC CHRISTIANITY OF THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY NEW ENGLAND CLERGY (New York, 2001).

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is an unlikely scourge of European secularism: He is on his third marriage and has been called the “playboy president” by his critics.

But it is what Sarkozy has just said about the role of religion in French life that has really got his critics up-in-arms.

For more than a century, what the French call laïcité has been the defining characteristic of French politics and public life. The word, which has no English equivalent, goes beyond the separation of church and state. It is a kind of secularism that tends to see “any strong religious views as a direct threat to [France’s] freedom and way of life . . .”

Thus, discretion about one’s religious views, especially among leaders, is regarded as “a necessary part of being French.”

Sarkozy disagrees. In a book he wrote before becoming president, Sarkozy declared, “I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my religious practice is episodic.”

He continued this theme after becoming president. He has criticized removing references to “Europe’s Christian roots” from the European constitution. In a speech in Rome last December, he emphasized France’s Christian roots. He invoked France’s ancient title of the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

He proposed a new version of laïcité, one that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” That is because, according to Sarkozy, when it comes to teaching right and wrong, “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor.” Well said.

Sarkozy has also stood up for France’s often-beleaguered Jewish community. He recently announced that, starting next fall, French fifth-graders will have to learn the story of at least one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust.

He defended his plan by blaming the wars of the twentieth century on the “absence of God.” He further shocked French sensibilities by adding that Nazi racism was “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

This latter point is not hypothetical for the French president, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish.

Critics are appalled by Sarkozy’s invocations of religion. As one socialist leader put it, “a speech citing God not only on every page, but on every line, creates a fundamental problem for the republic.” Others chide him for disregarding the separation of church and state.

And, of course, they do not hesitate to point out the gap between his rhetoric and his lifestyle.

I wish that Sarkozy’s “religious practice” was less “episodic.” Nevertheless, I am gratified that he is taking on what has been called a “major taboo” in French public life. This may be the first time since the French revolution that a French leader has spoken seriously to the people about God.

A French-born writer, Hilaire Belloc, put it this way, “the faith is Europe.” Without Christianity, Europe would not exist. European secularism and the denial of its Christian roots have cut it off from its own heritage, leaving it vulnerable to the challenge of Islam.

After all, you can not fight something with nothing, which is what a “post-Christian” Europe is left with. That is why I welcome Sarkozy’s message — however unlikely the messenger.

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Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

At the first inauguration of George W. Bush as president, the Rev. Franklin Graham raised eyebrows by using an edgy word in his prayer.

“May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before You and acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer,” said Graham, the fiery son of evangelist Billy Graham. “We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Four years later, the word showed up again.

“Now, unto You, O God, the One who always has been and always will be, the one King of kings and the true power broker, we glorify and honor You,” said the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston. “Respecting persons of all faiths, I humbly submit this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Scholars who keep watch over the rites of American civil religion took note of the firestorms caused by these prayers. Clearly, it was becoming dangerous to use the J-word -- the name of Jesus -- in the public square.

But it’s old hat for Republicans to use explicit God-talk. This year, Sen. Barack Obama and his team went out of the way to invite progressive and even mainstream evangelicals to the Democratic National Convention -- including taking a turn at the podium. This was cutting-edge prayer in an age of theological tolerance.

One lesser-known voice backed out at the last moment -- Cameron Strang, the 32-year-old editor of Relevant Magazine and son of publishing magnate Steven Strang of Charisma magazine. Nevertheless, Strang the younger was willing to arrange for a rising star to take his place -- Donald Miller, author of the book “Blue Like Jazz.”

Miller ended his prayer with a call for unity within diversity, but also found a way to say “Jesus” without causing trouble.

“God we know that You are good. Thank You for blessing us in so many ways as Americans,” said Miller. “I make these requests in the name of your son, Jesus, who gave his own life against the forces of injustice.... Amen.”

The key was that Miller stressed the word “I,” making sure that his listeners knew he was claiming this was his own prayer -- not asking them to share his embrace of the second person of the Christian Trinity.

Still, when it comes to church-state strategy, the most groundbreaking prayer was offered by the Rev. Joel Hunter of the giant Northland Church near Orlando -- especially since his benediction ended the mile-high rally that included Obama’s acceptance speech.

A self-identified “pro-life Republican,” the preacher offered a conventional prayer that included appeals on behalf of infants, children, the poor, the persecuted and those who are enslaved, as well as for peace and for the environment. Then, at the end, Hunter paused to interject a unique “closing instruction.”

“I want to personalize this,” he said. “I want this to be a participatory prayer. And so therefore, because we are in a country that is still welcoming all faiths, I would like all of us to close this prayer in the way your faith tradition would close your prayer. So on the count of three, I want all of you to end this prayer, your prayer, the way you usually end prayer. You ready? One, two, three.”

Hunter, on his own behalf, spoke into the microphone: “In Jesus’ name, Amen.” Meanwhile, 80,000 or so other people were free to name their own God or gods.

After fielding questions about his actions, the pastor stressed that it would be “taking the Lord’s name in vain” if he created confusion in such a setting. The goal was ensure that participants did not believe they were being asked to accept a prayer that forced them to “compromise their core beliefs.”

Thus, “I did not ask people to pray to another god; I asked them to finish a prayer according to their faith tradition,” argued Hunter, on his church’s website. “This may be a small point linguistically, but it is a huge point theologically. ...

“As you may imagine, I prayed long and hard before feeling like God had given me the precise words for this prayer. I believe that He in His sovereign way will use it to bring people to Himself.”

If you have heard me on BreakPoint before, you know that I am not an alarmist. While I am concerned about the culture and the Church’s place within it, I don’t sound the alarm after every setback.

Still, I am concerned about the increasingly small space to which our culture is seeking to confine the practice of our faith. We are heading in the direction of making faith a purely private matter, one that is not allowed to intrude in any public square or discussion. Recent cases making their way through the courts illustrate this direction.

The first story originates in San Francisco. On December 7, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the Christian Legal Society and the University of California-Hastings Law School. The local chapter’s recognition and funding were revoked after the CLS added a provision to its statement of faith which voting members must affirm. That provision stated that “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle is inconsistent with” affirmation of the statement of faith.

Although the language includes all sex outside of marriage, school officials decided that the provision discriminated against gay students and, thus, violated the school’s non-discrimination policies. It didn’t matter that all Hastings students were welcome to attend and participate in the organization’s meetings.

The CLS sued the school, and in March the Ninth Circuit ruled that Hastings could require student groups to “accept all comers as members, even if those individuals disagree with the mission of the group.”

The precedent for this ruling was a 2008 opinion by the same Ninth Circuit, Truth V. Kent School District, involving a Bible club in Kent Washington. There, the application for official recognition was rejected because voting membership was limited to those who affirmed biblical inerrancy and pledged to live in accordance with Christian teachings.

In ruling in favor of the school district, the Ninth Circuit essentially said that if you want to be officially recognized, you must undermine your religious mission.

You don’t have to be an alarmist to wonder if such a requirement would be imposed on any other kind of group.

It’s difficult to reconcile these rulings with the Supreme Court’s decision in Rosenberg V. Rector. There, the court ruled that the University of Virginia could not deny funding to a Christian publication while providing it to other student publications. This denial was a form of “viewpoint discrimination” that violated freedom of speech.

The Los Angeles Times editorialized that something similar is at work here. The CLS is concerned with a person’s beliefs and whether they live by them, not who they are. Yet 14 years after Rosenberg, people are still singling out Christian groups for exclusion.

Well, we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say because they’re up next.

In the end, groups like the Christian Legal Society aren’t seeking to change school policies — they simply want to identify themselves publicly as Christians in the same way that members of other groups can publicly identify themselves.

This apparently is too much for a culture that, having freed one group from a closet, now seeks to stuff Christians into it.

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Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times asked “What’s God got to do with it?” The “it” being referred to was the security and freedom that Americans enjoy and often take for granted.

The answer to the question is “quite a bit,” and arguing otherwise requires taking something else for granted: our way of life’s debt to Christianity.

The man asking and answering the question was Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine. Shermer took exception to the words of a recent House resolution to keep “In God We Trust” as the national motto. The resolution read: “Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured.”

Shermer was troubled by the “belief that religion has a monopoly on morality,” especially, he says, “in this age of science and technology, computers and cyberspace, and liberal democracies securing rights and freedoms for oppressed peoples all over the globe.”

According to Shermer what really makes people “feel free and secure” are things like “the rule of law,” “education for the masses,” the establishment of “fair and just laws,” and the “equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

What Shermer doesn’t tell us is that things like the rule of law, mass education, and the other things he credits with making our freedom and security possible, didn’t spring fully-formed out of nowhere. They are part of Christianity’s legacy to the West.

Take the rule of law. It was Christianity that taught the West that rulers are not free to do as they pleased and that they are not above the law. According to John Calvin, resisting tyranny was the duty of those “who desire that every individual should preserve his rights, and that all men may live free from injury.”

The same can be said about mass education and even the science that Shermer puts so much stock in. They are the result of what Christianity taught: that God created the world, and we were called to explore every aspect of it.

Most of all, our ideas about what constitutes a free and secure society are derived from Christianity. Political scientist Glenn Tinder has written about how much of what we celebrate in our society, like the “respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings,” has “strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity.”

It was Christianity, you see, that taught the West that all human beings are created in the image of God. Without that understanding, the very words of the Declaration of Independence, “that all Men are created equal, that they endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” could never have been written.

Without this Christian vision we wouldn’t have the freedom and security that Shermer ascribes to science, technology, and politics. And I give a very concrete and current example of this on today’s “Two-Minute Warning,” which I urge you to go see at ColsonCenter.org.

The issue isn’t what’s inscribed on our money but whether Americans understand what makes our way of life possible. Sadly, I’m afraid the answer to that right now is “no, they don’t.” So it’s up to us, the Church, to explain just how vital the Christian faith has been — and still is — to our rights and freedoms.

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Copyright (c) 2011 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

March 4, 2013, is the 224th anniversary of the United States operating under its Constitution. Created in 1787, the document endured without legal standing for a year and a half as the different states sought to ratify it. The republic started functioning on the basis of the document on March 4, 1789. On that date the first Congress convened. Two years later, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution were added in 1791. These additions gave the new republic a strong Bill of Rights that protected the liberties of individual citizens.

While the Constitution rarely mentions faith or faith issues, the Christian community in the United States has received many benefits from it -- a fact that is often overlooked due to the scarcity of direct references. For instance, the document only acknowledges the Deity once -- in Article VII, when the original Constitutional Convention gave the unanimous consent of the states present on the date “the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”

Two other direct faith allusions also are contained in the original document of 1787 and the subsequent Bill of Rights of 1791. In Article VI the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” In the First Amendment contained in the Bill of Rights, the document reads, “Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” No Bible verses and/or expressions from historic Christian works are contained in the document.

In fact, the major influences on the men who drafted both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights originated from the writings of the enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries who, for the most part, believed that faith could be expressed purely by use of reason and intellect, and that God’s intervention in the process was not a necessary element -- hardly a Christian concept.

For instance, Englishman Thomas Hobbes argued that government should be a contract between those that govern and the people. John Locke, taking up Hobbes’ theme in his work, “Two Treatises of Government,” felt that government should look out for the well-being of its citizens and respect their individual rights. He especially promoted the rights of “life, liberty, and estate” (or property) for all citizens. Interestingly enough, when Thomas Jefferson drafted most of Locke’s theme into the Declaration of Independence, he slightly revised Locke and instead wrote that the people had a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Perhaps Jefferson thought that future American governments should not guarantee that all citizens possess a property entitlement. Locke’s phrase, however, does show up in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. In that amendment the document states that citizens cannot “be deprived of ‘life, liberty, or property’ without due process.” When the 14th Amendment applied federal guarantees to the individual states, the phrase and its context was repeated.

Other enlightenment philosophers also directly impacted the Constitution. Baron Montesquieu in his work, “The Spirit of the Laws,” proposed that government should be divided into branches. Each branch would then maintain “checks and balances” on the others -- thereby limiting the power of each branch. Cesare Beccaria, along with Voltaire, expressed concerns about how citizens were punished. Beccaria’s concerns, published in his work, “On Crimes and Punishments,” advanced the principle that punishments should not be “cruel or unusual.” He obviously influenced the Eighth Amendment that bans such punishments.

Enlightenment philosophers, like Voltaire (in the “Treatise on Tolerance”) and others, ironically agreed with the Baptists and other communities of dissenting 18th century Christians and argued against the tyranny of state-supported churches. Voltaire, along with other like-minded philosophers, instead advocated that all faiths should be allowed to worship without state interference. This influence is most evident when the Founding Fathers abolished the religious tests for federal office seekers and created the First Amendment guarantee for religious liberty. While the constitutional convention operated in a society heavily influenced by a Christian worldview, the U.S. Constitution itself was a product of enlightenment thinking, and the United States became the first modern nation to base itself on enlightenment principles.

Nevertheless, the Christian community in the United States gained important benefits from the document. Many of these benefits should be noted. First and foremost, Christians in the United States are not forced to belong to state-mandated religious bodies, and in fact, such bodies are forbidden by the First Amendment. Furthermore, the same amendment allows Christians to worship free from state interference.

Many other benefits also are enshrined as constitutional rights. The abolition of religious tests in Article VI means that Christians do not have to meet criteria from another faith to be an office-holder. As noted in the First Amendment, Christians, like all Americans, also can exercise their free speech, assemble to worship, write and publish works about their faith without government interference, and also petition the government to redress grievances. In legal matters, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments give Christians and Americans in general due process in legal proceedings, a fair trial, the right to be heard by a jury, and the right against self-incrimination. American citizens of all faiths also are protected against “cruel and unusual punishments” by the Eighth Amendment. These are just the more notable examples of how the American Constitution positively impacts the Christian community.

While we American Christians enjoy these benefits, many Christians in other parts of the world do not possess these guarantees. As I write this article, Christians endure nearly unspeakable persecution in many parts of the world. They have no legal protection, are not allowed to assemble, and many are tortured and killed. I have watched in dismay as thousands of Middle Eastern Christians pour out of the historic heartland of the Christian faith to come to our shores. Here they can worship. In their home countries of Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and the Holy Land, these historic Christian communities face discrimination, persecution and steep numerical decline. Today in the land where Jesus walked, only two percent profess Christianity, according to the CIA World Factbook: Israel.

As we acknowledge the difficulties that Christians face in many parts of the world, we also can thank the Almighty that we have the blessing and protection of the United States Constitution. These guarantees of religious liberty for the Christian community should never be taken lightly. Christians should involve themselves in the public affairs of the nation and conversely maintain exemplary citizenship. The Almighty does expect us to “give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17).

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Stephen Douglas Wilson is dean emeritus and chair of the history department of Mid-Continent University in Mayfield, Ky., and a member of the SBC Executive Committee.