Скачать или смотреть We Want Religious Conviction

Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius, Christians started saying to the state, hey, you should punish those heretics out there, right? It's a natural inclination to use the power of the state to punish those who you believe are damaging to true Christianity.

So that's a natural temptation.

But by the time we get to the 17th century, we're seeing very solid Christians making a very different argument. People like Roger Williams, William Penn, Isaac Backus a bit later, who are saying, no, no, no. Christianity requires freedom. It's a matter of free choice. The state ought not to compel people in matters of religion. They made arguments based on the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. If you lived in France, would you want the state to compel you to be a Roman Catholic? Well, if you're a Protestant, you wouldn't. If there's a Roman Catholic in Massachusetts, should the state compel him to be a Protestant? They were recognizing that the biblical answer is no.

So, religious liberty in the American context is fundamentally a Christian idea. I'm not saying it's uniquely or only a Christian idea. You can make arguments for religious liberty on all sorts of other grounds. But in the American context, it arose because of Christianity and Christian convictions.

Now the second question, and it kind of goes along with the first, well, if Christians are in power, if congregationalists are in power, why shouldn't they use the power of the state to fund the congregationalist church? Maybe to enforce congregationalist morality. The same sort of logic applies. The idea is that no, Christianity is a religion of the heart. We ought not to be forcing Quakers and Baptists and Mennonites to be paying for a church that they don't believe in. And it really, of course, is a double burden on those folks because even if they're tolerated and they have their own meeting house, they have to pay their tax to support the congregationalist church and then turn around and pay money to build a meeting house and that sort of thing. So they get hit in a double whammy. And so people are making Christian arguments against religious establishments. And my favorite argument, and I think this is exactly right, when the government gets behind a particular religion or denomination that inevitably hurts that religion or denomination. Members of that denomination get fat and lazy because the state is paying their salary effectively, right?

So when you remove establishments, then you allow true Christianity to flourish. And this was the argument being made against religious establishments. That's not to say that faith shouldn't impact public policy. For instance, when Pennsylvania passed a law banning slavery in 1780, the legislators explicitly connected it to the Bible and their Christian morality. Slavery is wrong. Enslaved people have a right to enjoy the freedoms that the rest of us enjoy, the rest of us being white Pennsylvanians. And so therefore they put slavery on the path to extinction. And this is something we've recognized in our own day, right? When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. goes into the public square and fights against Jim Crow legislation on the basis of his biblical and theological convictions, we say right on, this is exactly right. So it's possible to say we want religious liberty. We don't want religious establishments, but we still want legislators to draw from the religious convictions when they pass law and public policy.