Liberty for All

Defending Everyone's Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age

Andrew T. Walker

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781587434495
• eBook ISBN: 9781493431151
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

2021 Book Award Winner, The Gospel Coalition (Public Theology & Current Events)

Southwestern Journal of Theology 2021 Book Award (Honorable Mention, Baptist Studies)

Christians are often thought of as defending only their own religious interests in the public square. They are viewed as worrying exclusively about the erosion of their freedom to assemble and to follow their convictions, while not seeming as concerned about publicly defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists to do the same.

Andrew T. Walker, an emerging Southern Baptist public theologian, argues for a robust Christian ethic of religious liberty that helps the church defend religious freedom for everyone in a pluralistic society. Whether explicitly religious or not, says Walker, every person is striving to make sense of his or her life. The Christian foundations of religious freedom provide a framework for how Christians can navigate deep religious difference in a secular age. As we practice religious liberty for our neighbors, we can find civility and commonality amid disagreement, further the church's engagement in the public square, and become the strongest defenders of religious liberty for all. Foreword by noted Princeton scholar Robert P. George.

1
Religious Liberty as a Christian Social Ethic

The Importance of Religious Liberty

“A belief in Christian ethics is a belief that certain ethical and moral judgments belong to the gospel itself; a belief, in other words, that the church can be committed to ethics without moderating the tone of its voice as a bearer of glad tidings.”1 So remarks Oliver O’Donovan, who notes in his seminal work on Christian ethics that the gospel of Christ must be tied to any study that purports to be Christian. It follows, then, that every task of Christian ethics should be done within the horizon of redemption and the unfolding of God’s kingdom.

Religious liberty is of supreme relevance to Christian social ethics and public theology, but as it is often framed in public discourse—even among professed Christians—it is not clearly tied to the gospel. The present fear is that religious liberty is merely an accident of history, a social construct, or a settlement born of pragmatic need. In a time when religious liberty has been sadly situated as a culture war issue, what religious liberty needs is an apologetic arising from Christian conviction.

How should we define religious liberty? I contend that religious liberty is the principle of social practice wherein every individual, regardless of their religious confession, is equally free to believe, or not to believe, and to live out their understanding of the conscience’s duty, individually and communally, that is owed to God in all areas of life without threat of government penalty or social harassment. It is nothing short of grasping truth and ordering one’s life in response to it. From this angle, religious liberty is an enterprise of both worship and ethics. As a person submits their whole life to God, religious liberty gives them agency to express their convictions about God through their actions and choices. Nothing less than personhood is at stake. Religious liberty is a juncture where one’s duty to God intersects with one’s obligation to live out duties and moral commitments for the sake of personal authenticity. It enables individuals, and individuals gathered in communities, to respond to their understanding of divine truth and to manifest the obligations of that divine truth in every dimension of life.

As a topic of immense value to Christians, especially Christian advocacy groups, religious liberty is taken for granted but insufficiently explained on biblical and theological grounds. More often than not, religious liberty is situated as an answer to political controversy.2 Or religious liberty takes its cues from politics, whether of liberal or conservative varieties. And if not seen as a matter of political philosophy, it is often situated as a sociological paradigm concerned about forging cultural détente.

One important goal of this book is to more clearly connect religious liberty to eschatology, anthropology, and missiology in contemporary Christian discourse. When one reviews Christian literature surrounding religious liberty, one finds few resources that provide systematic Christian accounts of religious liberty. Moreover, when surveying topics within Christian ethics, especially in textbooks, one finds that the literature is replete with books and chapters on abortion, capital punishment, homosexuality, marriage and family, euthanasia, and the like, but religious liberty does not receive proportional emphasis. If treated at all, it is tucked under an umbrella category, such as church-state relations. But religious liberty is much broader than just church-state relations. Religious liberty reveals how temporal authority understands its relationship and jurisdiction in relation to eternal authority. Religious liberty is thus revelatory and presuppositional in deciphering how religion and politics relate to one another in a given context. By my reading, not a single volume by a Christian scholar attempts to offer a systematic or comprehensive account of religious liberty’s theological origins and purpose within the biblical story line.3 This absence is a problem because religious liberty ought to function as a preeminent foundation for Christians’ understanding of their entry into the public square as religious individuals embedded within religious communities that exist in particular social contexts.

Consider the manifold ways that religious liberty addresses key aspects of social ethics and public theology. First, religious liberty supplies the justification for religious persons to act freely at the behest of a religiously motivated ethic. Second, religious liberty implies delineating between the church and the world and how the church and the state ought to relate to one another. Third, religious liberty facilitates ethical duties that consciences owe a Creator and how those obligations are discharged. Consider also the implications of religious liberty for theology and ethics: exercising one’s conscience is related to moral agency, which demands that there be a horizon for this agency to occur. The conscience responds to truth that demands obedience. Among other ways it is important, religious liberty informs our understanding of the kingdom of God and how the kingdom’s mission advances in society: Does it advance through voluntary acts of faith, by proxy, or by coercion?

Religious liberty is thus a pillar of Christian social ethics; every other topic within the public square presumes it. For example, advocating for the unborn—whether praying in front of an abortion clinic or casting one’s vote in a referendum on the issue—assumes some framework that makes such activity possible. The collective action of a Christian advocacy organization working to dismantle sex trafficking networks relies on unstated assumptions about the freedom guaranteeing such activity and the public expression of its convictions. We might be tempted to see each of these as a mere right of basic political liberty, but more deeply, political liberty exists to allow the exercise of convictions born of religious foundation. (I would contend that the underdeveloped theological aspects of religious liberty in American Christian social ethics is the result of the fact that the American context focuses almost exclusively on matters related to religious exercise and religious establishment debates found in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. American Christians often find themselves held captive to a culture that engages in debates on religious liberty more out of pragmatic concerns to negotiate among competing claims of power than out of theological conviction.)

The freedoms Christians ought to enjoy in society and how the church relates to the state are paramount to any Christian public theology. As a result, religious liberty should be a doctrine, not just a constitutional device. Moreover, how Christians understand the reality of divergent religious systems occupying the same social space is critical to their mission. Dismissing or overlooking the centrality of religious liberty in Christian public theology demonstrates a failure to establish first principles that are necessary for the church’s mission.

Religious liberty helps Christians recognize the era in which the church’s mission exists—a time when Christ’s kingdom has been inaugurated but awaits consummation. In this intervening period, religious liberty reveals the nature of religious difference, what mission entails, and how people come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Religious liberty, then, is of deep eschatological concern, as it helps one understand the church’s mission and expectations in society. It is also central to a proper understanding of Jesus’s kingship over consciences that are to be held accountable to future judgment and the manner in which individuals come to apprehend the gospel (John 5:27; 2 Cor. 5:11; 2 Pet. 3:9–10).

Both religion and government are forced to reckon with the authority claims of the other. Religious liberty is a crucial cipher to unlocking the underlying statecraft of the political community. As one scholar has commented, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is in its posture toward religion that a nation most fully and clearly defines itself.”4 These words capture the gravity of religious liberty, and they are doubtlessly true. How a state understands the nature of its own power and how that power is distributed testify to whether that state is acting biblically (Rom. 13) or as an antichrist (Rev. 13). As Robert H. Mounce writes about the state’s self-aggregating power tendencies, “The worship of a Satanically inspired perversion of secular authority is the ultimate offense against the one true God.”5 And indeed, the greatest struggles of Western history take place against a backdrop of conflict over religion and political authority attempting to unite or compete.

A Biblical-Theological Basis for Religious Liberty

How can religious liberty become an issue of Christian preeminence and focus when the phrase “religious liberty” is nowhere in the Bible? As Baptist missionary and scholar John David Hughey notes, “Religious liberty is implicit in Christian theology, and theologians, eager to lay solid foundations for freedom already achieved or still to be won, are giving serious attention to it. Several major Christian doctrines have implications for religious liberty.”6 Hughey’s observation begs that an explicit connection be made between religious liberty and basic Christian theology. A. F. Carrillo de Albornoz similarly observes that religious liberty “is not in single passages in the Bible; it is God’s whole way of approaching mankind that gives us our lead.”7 Carrillo de Albornoz goes on to state that “our prime question is, therefore, to investigate this ‘nexus’ or to see exactly how religious liberty is implied in the Christian revelation.”8

Recent Christian scholarship, in both quantity and quality, has failed to provide a robust account that makes religious liberty intelligibly Christian.9 Indeed, there is no Christian consensus for developing a framework or conceptual paradigm around religious liberty that incorporates essential elements of Christian theology. Religious liberty is mostly seen as a concern about preserving religious identity and religious exercise in pluralistic societies. Biblical arguments (e.g., the rich young ruler was given a choice to follow Christ) are crafted piecemeal or merely implied. Indeed, in contemporary Christian scholarship, religious liberty is discussed in the context of debates about pluralism and negotiations concerning cultural conflicts rather than being shown to connect to biblical reflection. With religious liberty left almost exclusively to the province of legal theory and political philosophy, Christians lack a key component of Christian social ethics.

A consensus regarding religious liberty is foundational for Christian social ethics because “authentic Christian faith necessarily means, for the Church as well as the individual Christian, involvement within an historical context.”10 The more that Christian leaders develop a concept of religious liberty, the better they will grasp the church’s identity and mission at a time when history is replete with competing claims of authority and allegiance. Religious liberty is a form of self-conscious reflection by individuals and organizations to decipher their engagement in society. As long as the church lacks a Christian framework for religious liberty, it will fumble about in its interactions with the world, unable to ground essential truths necessary to its social witness that are integral to its theology and mission.

The remedy to an anemic or underdeveloped biblical-theological basis for religious liberty is to anchor religious liberty to biblical motifs. Indeed, by not doing so, Christians leave a vacuum to be filled by constitutionalism, humanism, or secularism. Carl Emanuel Carlson comments:

Now if humanism is the fundamental basis of our movement, then we are involved on the horns of a quite different dilemma. . . . The concern for liberty might be disassociated from the redemptive work of Christ. It may have nothing to do with Christology or eschatology or with much more that is traditional Christian theology. . . . If the authority of the lordship of Christ in the church and in the experience of the person contravenes our understanding of the nature of man as expressed in the doctrines of religious liberty, the future of liberty is not bright at the present time.11

The quest to connect religious liberty to biblical theology is the central and driving concern of this book, and tethering religious liberty to areas such as eschatology, anthropology, and missiology forms central planks in its overall argument.

To be clear, several academics have shown the connection between Christian ethics and religious liberty, but their approaches are piecemeal and do not consider, generally speaking, key themes in biblical theology. Christian reflection concerning religious liberty is informed more by vague theisms and the United States Constitution than by explicit theology. By contrast, an approach to religious liberty should be centrally concerned with recognizing Jesus’s kingship over the conscience and his absolute and exclusive right to execute judgment over it. Religious liberty is best understood when built on the foundational biblical motifs of the kingdom of God, the image of God, and the mission of God. The reality of Christ’s already/not-yet kingship is the ground on which religious liberty ought to be intelligible for Christians.

Think of a three-legged stool. We might think of religious liberty resting on the three legs of the kingdom of God (eschatology), the image of God (anthropology), and the mission of God (missiology). Each leg supports the overarching and uniting reality of Jesus’s kingship. This threefold strategy is deliberate and based on a schematic framework seen in J. Budziszewski’s Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action.12 Budziszewski says that any “adequate political theory” has at least three elements: (1) an orienti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Religious Liberty as a Christian Social Ethic
• Part 1: Eschatology
• Part 2: Anthropology
• Part 3: Missiology
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Back Cover