The third and central act of active citizenship is persuasion, i.e., leading (inducing) our neighbors to agree with us about temporal life. Just as we organize for the well being of society, so also we seek, through convincing evidence, clear logic, and compelling illustration, to persuade our neighbors to see the temporal, secular sphere as we do. After prayer, persuasion is the most important service to which a Christian can commit himself when engaging the secular world. Persuading our neighbors, rather than compelling them by coercion, will require a re-orientation for many American Christians, who have not yet accepted the reality that Christendom (both the official and de facto alliance of church and state) is past. After Christendom, the struggle to accept this reality and the struggle to restore the privileged status of Christians in America is understandable. The change has come quickly and recently.

In order to understand the task before us in persuading Americans to embrace polices and politicians that align with nature, that tend toward justice, and that tend toward guaranteeing God-given liberties, we need to understand where we are in 2024.

Where We Are

Consider the status of Sundays in America. For most of American history Sundays were regarded by most Christians, even Roman Catholics, as the Christian Sabbath. When the U. S. Postal Service attempted to legalize limited Sunday postal service in 1810, American clergy and laity responded furiously. Livia Gershon writes,

In 1810, Congress passed a law requiring post offices to open to the public for at least one hour each Sunday. Furious church leaders sent hundreds of petitions to Congress and eventually initiated one of the nation’s first efforts to rally public opinion around a cause. Two decades later, a congressman declared that the American people had never before made a “stronger expression” of their views, whether considering the “numbers, the wealth, or the intelligence of the petitioners.”

In many communities in the early nineteenth century, local laws restricted most forms of commerce and activity on Sundays. Theaters often closed on Saturday nights, and Sundays were devoted to collective worship.

To some degree, this remained true well into the twentieth century. In the 1960s, on the American Plains, on Sundays, most stores, except grocery stores, were closed. In Lincoln, Nebraska people drove to the Adventist section of town to get what they needed on Sundays because the Adventists observed a Saturday Sabbath. When my wife and I moved to California the first time, in 1984, we were surprised to see liquor aisles in grocery stories but on Sundays those aisles were closed off with a velvet rope.

Today, all such regulations are long gone and that shift symbolizes the marginalizing of Christians and Christianity in late-modern America. We Christians have little actual influence in some important culture-forming spheres, e.g., public education (at any level) and entertainment. There are Christian sub-cultures in the entertainment business but Christianity is practically invisible in the film and television productions of the major companies. There are Christian public school teachers and administrators but the educational philosophy behind public education has been hostile to Christianity from the beginning. It has never seen the world as something God created, which we experience with our God-given senses, but rather as the product of the human intellect. You may be familiar with the idea that everything is a construct (i.e., artificial) and subject to deconstruction. This is not a new idea but it is newly popular in our time.

For more than a century, educators and administrators more or less ignored the educational philosophy behind public school but that began to shift in the post-World War II era. One of the influences was the formation of the federal Department of Education. Another was the professionalization of the education business and the political and cultural capture of educators by the cultural and political left. Today, however religious and culturally conservative the parents in a public school district might be, the administrators, educators, and even school boards likely hold a very different view of the children they educate and of the nature of education itself.

We could devote reams of copy to the decline of post-secondary education (undergraduate and graduate) but suffice it to say that what we are seeing in the K–12 system is even more true of the universities and colleges that produce not only our educators but our bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, judges, business and non-profit leaders.

Thus far, I have not mentioned an important sphere: politics but consider the symbolism of Bill Clinton carrying his Bible to church or that of Barack Obama telling Rick Warren that he opposed same-sex marriage (but not same-sex civil unions) because of his Christian convictions. George W. Bush was raised Methodist but his heart-religion, if you will, is not well known. Ronald Reagan had Presbyterian (PCUSA) connections but, like the Bushes, his religion was mostly private. His wife, however, was devoted to astrology. After her husband was almost assassinated she turned to Joan Quigley for comfort and counsel. Richard Nixon, a Quaker, famously consulted Billy Graham and even prayed with him but Obama’s theological advisors leaned strongly to the theological left as did John F. Kennedy’s (e.g., Paul Tillich). Donald Trump’s religious advisors (e.g., Paula White) seemed mostly to be props more than anything else. His religion is probably more influenced by Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993), author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), than anyone else. When Clinton carried a Bible to church it looked like something he had done before, even if his policies and behavior were at sharp variance with what Scripture actually says. When Trump held up the Bible it looked like he was holding an alien talisman.

We can probably summarize the relationship between orthodox Christians and the political class in America with one word: transactional. Since Roe v. Wade, the Democrats have allied themselves almost exclusively with the religious left and the Republicans with the religious right. In the post-Dobbs, era, however, even those alliances seem to be unsettled. Truly we have no lasting city here (Heb 13:14).

The State Of The Church

In the USA, the greater obstacle to persuading Americans to support polices and politicians that align with nature, i.e., the divinely-established order of things (e.g., natural marriage), which tend toward natural justice and the protection of natural, divinely-given liberties, is the state of Christianity in America.

In 2018, the Barna Group reported, “Based on Barna’s most recent data, almost four in 10 (38%) Americans are active churchgoers, slightly more (43%) are unchurched, and around one-third (34%) are dechurched.” According to Gallup, however, in March of this year, only 21% of Americans attend religious services weekly. That is down from 42% in 2000–03. 30% of Protestants (a very inclusive category) attend services weekly. LDS members are the most likely to attend a religious service weekly (54%). Only 23% of Roman Catholics attend church weekly.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people may be over-reporting their church attendance. Consider the mega-church phenomenon. Who knows who is and is not attending the local mega-church? Church membership numbers in the mainline have been declining for decades. Church membership has been declining nationally for 25 years. According to Gallup, in 2021, church membership dropped below 50% nationally for the first time in 80 years. By contrast, “U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.”

Within the institutional church, considered broadly, there is very little reason for confidence that American Christians know either basic Christian doctrine or fundamental Christian patterns of thought. E.g., in the 2022 Ligonier State of Theology report 54% of respondents agreed with the statement, “God learns and adapts to different circumstances.” 48% of evangelicals agreed with the statement, which is a denial of the omniscience, impassibility, and immutability of God and heresy against the ecumenical faith. 71% of respondents and 62% of evangelicals agreed with the statement “everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.” That doctrine belongs to Pelagius, whose doctrine was condemned as heretical by the Council of Ephesus in AD 431. Orthodox Protestant (e.g., Lutheran and Reformed) and Roman Catholic confessions agree on this point. One of the few encouraging aspects to emerge in this report is that though 36% of Americans believe that one ought to join a local church, 68% of evangelicals agreed with that statement.

What, however, are evangelicals, however one defines that adjective, being taught in their congregations? If the State of Theology Report is any indication, they are not being taught historic Christian orthodoxy, let alone Reformation theology. If they are not being taught basic, ecumenical Christianity how can we expect them to make distinctions essential to persuading other Americans to agree with them about public policy and public life?

Next time, we will consider three of those distinctions: 1) the distinction between nature and grace; and 2) the distinction between the temporal and the eternal; and the distinction between law and gospel and how these distinctions might help us to persuade our neighbors to agree with us on public policy and our public life together.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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