Why that’s great news for liberal Christianity

Church and State: A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury (VT) on July 13, 2025

Texts: 1 Samuel 8:4–22a; Romans 13:1–7

Friends, I would like to think with you this morning about two things that the aphorism tells us we should never discuss in polite company, certainly not together: religion and politics. You may have seen that the IRS released a policy change this past week on churches and other tax-exempt charitable organizations engaging in partisan politics. For decades, churches have been barred from endorsing particular candidates for public office, at risk of losing their tax-exempt status. This is a result of the so-called Johnson Amendment of 1954, and it has been the policy of the IRS ever since: churches cannot endorse specific partisan candidates for public office. But that prohibition has been skirted and violated by churches without much repercussion, sometimes creatively and more recently rather boldly. Conservative evangelical organizations have sued to change the policy, and this week, the IRS said OK. Churches can engage in partisan politics with no penalty.

It will surely come as a surprise to some of you that I think this is a remarkably good development. I will make the argument this morning for why I think it is a good development—more precisely, I will make four arguments: a theological argument, a historical argument, a practical argument, and, finally, a moral argument.

First, the theological argument. It is often said among Christians that faith has nothing to do with politics, but I would submit to you today that this cordoning off of faith from politics is nothing short of heresy, to use an outdated but evocative term. To say that faith has nothing to do with politics is to subscribe to a particularly American interpretation of religion, one that has sat too long in the over-traveled verses of that classic hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Amazing Grace faith is an individual thing; our relationship with God is personal, it governs our private spiritual life, but it should not venture beyond that. My faith is my faith, and yours is yours, and never the twain should meet, certainly not in a public setting.

Jesus imagined a new politics of dignity, justice, compassion, and kinship. He called it the Kingdom of God.

But in the longer arc of Christianity, following Jesus has always been a private commitment with public and political implications. Jesus himself defined faith in public terms. Following him meant not just a warm conversion of heart but different standards for living in the world. Following him meant opposition to the powers of tyranny. Following him meant solidarity with those the regime rejects or threatens. Jesus repeated the Hebrew prophets’ denunciation of corrupt politics and inhuman wealth distribution. Jesus imagined a new politics of dignity, justice, compassion, and kinship. He called it the Kingdom of God, and he called each of his followers to be part of its realization on earth. The religion of Jesus has always been political.

And the Bible repeatedly subjects the politics of this world to righteous scrutiny. Much of Jesus’ teaching was commentary on the ways his society failed the expectation of God for human community. The Hebrew prophets regularly indicted their own community for its failure to treat one another as God wished for people to be treated. Our readings this morning provide two examples of the Bible offering a religious review of politics and government. The story from the First Book of Samuel tells us of the Hebrew people’s transition from a tribal community ruled by judges to a nation ruled by a king. This story tells us that the people clamored for a king. They wanted to be like the other nations around them. They wanted that kind of power. They wanted a leader who would lead them into battle and fight for them. Again and again, God—through the prophet Samuel—resisted their request. I am your king, said God. I will lead you through the prophets and the judges I have commissioned for you. No, the people said, we want a king, a messiah.

So God relented, but not before warning them about what comes with what they’re asking for. You think you need a muscular leader to make you great. Here is what your king will do. He will use you for his own ends. He will enrich himself at your expense. He will make you poorer and his cronies wealthier, and one day you will cry out, because you will realize that the king you chose for yourself, the king you anointed against my wishes, has made you worse off, not better. Here the Bible offers a critical look at political power that may seem as relevant to many of us today as it was to the ancient Israelites.

But not all of the Bible is critical of politics. In our second reading today, the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in ancient Rome. In the second part of this letter, he discusses what impact belief in Christ ought to have on the lives of those who follow him. And one of the recommendations he makes is here in this thirteenth chapter: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” There is a practical aspect to this advice, for the Roman authorities would not hesitate to dispense with civilly disobedient Christians just as they thought they had the leader of this movement. But besides the practical, there is a theological claim in Paul’s words: civil authority is part of God’s order. Civil government is a basic good of human society, for the establishment of peace and order and the restraint of evil. And fulfilling our civic duty can be seen as an expression of faithfulness.

Two very different portraits of civil politics and political leaders, but they aren’t as incompatible as they might seem. Paul suggests that civic order and the benefits of government are among the gifts that God has given human society for their well-being and flourishing, while First Samuel reminds us that those gifts, like everything else in the fallible existence of human beings, can be corrupted and used to transgress God’s intentions and harm people. And the tandem of these two perspectives has been important to Christianity ever since. Civil society is a good. Government is a gift from God. Civil obligation can be seen as a religious duty. But the goods of government can be corrupted, and when they are misused, it is a matter of faithfulness for us to call out their sins and work to realign them to the values of God as we understand them.

All of this is to say that politics is very much a concern of Christian faith and always has been. Christians should see their faith and its values as relevant to their public lives as much as their private lives. Our religious commitments to compassion, justice, and dignity should call us to celebrate human society when it furthers the common good and critique it when it fails the common good. And our faith ought to shape who we regard as good civic leaders and who we discern as bad for a moral society.

So that’s the theological argument for why a policy that makes it easier for Christian communities to publicly engage with politics is a good thing. Politics is partly what we do when we commit to following the values of Jesus. But maybe your discomfort with religious involvement in partisan politics is not primarily theological but historical and political. Don’t churches involved in partisan politics violate the constitutional separation of church and state?

To address this concern, let me first do some credentialing. You all know me primarily as a preacher and theologian, but in my day job I am a historian of religion in American life, and in that capacity I regularly teach a course called “Church and State,” in which we study the Founders on this question, read over a century of Supreme Court decisions on First Amendment interpretation, and think about the application of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to issues like prayer in public schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, and whether professional cake bakers have to bake cakes for everybody.

On this question—whether church involvement in partisan politics violates the constitutional separation of church and state—we can say a few things:

First, we must immediately emphasize that the “wall of separation” idea is not in the Constitution. The First Amendment simply says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It says nothing about a wall of separation. That idea came from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a bunch of Baptists, and it was as much about him trying to convince everybody that there should be such a wall, because that was generally his preference. Jefferson thought religion was a private matter and should play no part in politics. But the majority of Americans in the early days of our Republic disagreed with him.

Most Americans at that time agreed that the institutions of church and government should be separate, that there should not be a state religion, and there should be no religious test for citizenship or office. (Today’s Christian Nationalists, please take note!) But they also assumed that the moral teachings of religion were appropriate to bring into political debate and decision-making, even if they seldom agreed on how to do that. Christian preachers were among the most influential apologists for the American Revolution, as they made the case for the “rights of man” from their pulpits. Christian abolitionists called on their country to end the barbarism of slavery as a matter of religious duty (although Christian defenders of slavery also made their case in religious terms). Christian reformers were active in later fights for women’s suffrage and economic justice. All of this is to say that the “wall of separation” makes for a good bumper sticker, but it has never been an accurate summary of the relationship of religion and politics in the United States.

In brief, that’s the historical argument. Now the practical one. The Johnson Amendment is routinely stretched and violated today. If their preachers don’t anoint Donald Trump as God’s messiah, evangelical churches heavily imply that Republican politics are righteous, all the time. To be honest, prominent Black Churches have a history of hosting Democratic politicians in a way that sure feels like a partisan endorsement. So the implication of churches in partisan politics already happens all the time. The Johnson Amendment is rarely enforced. So why should some churches be handcuffed by a policy that others thwart with abandon? To my mind, this is one of several reasons liberal Christianity has had a hard time matching the public influence that evangelical Christianity has in this country: evangelicals don’t hamstring themselves by following a policy no one is enforcing. If those of us who identify as liberal Christians want to have the public influence we think we ought to have, then we need to start playing by the same rules of the game. The new IRS policy was not intended to help Christians like me … but it does. 😊

If we live in a politics that runs far afield of how our Christian faith describes the Kingdom of God, we should have the civic freedom to say so.

And that gets me to the moral argument. A certain segment of Protestants in this country has been very successful convincing America that to be Christian one must politically be for reproductive restrictions on women, for unfettered capitalism, for limited government, for unquestioning support of the government of Israel, against marriage equality, against the lazy poor, suspicious of the political loyalties of Muslims, and unbothered by the moral abomination personified in certain politicians. We Christians of a different stripe have a moral obligation to counter that association. If our Christian convictions are troubled by health policies that severely threaten women and immigration policies that terrorize our neighbors, if our Christian convictions are offended by the dehumanization of gay friends and Black friends, Jewish and Muslim neighbors, and people down on their luck, if we live in a politics that runs far afield of how our Christian faith describes the Kingdom of God, we should have the civic freedom to say so, because we have a righteous duty to say so. If we look out on the political landscape, and we see candidates who pledge themselves to convictions similar to ours, we ought to be able to celebrate them collectively. And if we look out on that same political plane and see politicians who stand for everything we stand against, who literally represent the anti-Christ to us, we ought to be free to call that out too, without worrying about whether we have transgressed some artificial and porous policy line that only some of us are paying attention to anyway.

So that’s my argument for why I think we should embrace this week’s IRS ruling. Historically, religion has never been truly separate from political debate and decision-making, and as Christians we cannot help but think about politics from the perspective of our Christian values. In fact, we have a religious duty to insist on values in our politics and in our politicians.

Now this doesn’t mean that I think the idea of churches endorsing candidates is completely unproblematic. In a moment in which money already controls too much of our politics, I worry about the impact of money on churches who involve themselves in partisan campaigning. I also think that endorsing a candidate from the pulpit can easily cause conflict within a church when not everyone in that church shares the same political perspective. I don’t think we need the state to be worrying about that, but in the spirit of the capacious Christianity I talked about the last time I was here, I think churches like ours would want to be very cautious. A partisan endorsement by the pastor or by Church Council could shut down conversation and alienate people within the congregation. But as adherents to a religion that says how we treat each other matters to our relationship with God, I think we do our Christian duty a disservice when we place artificial limits on our ability to speak truth to the world when truth needs to be spoken.

My problem with some conservative evangelical leaders talking politics in the name of Christianity isn’t that they are bringing their religious values into the public sphere. My problem is that they are representing the wrong values as Christian—all the more reason why I want as much freedom as those churches have to influence our public life. In a moment when government programs are being slashed to the detriment of millions of people in need of food and health care, Christians should insist on Paul’s teaching that government is a gift of God for the common good, and we should have the freedom to align with leaders who share that conviction. And when government leaders resemble God’s warning about the corrupt and self-serving kings of ancient Israel, Christians need to point out those resemblances too, by name, if it’s not already obvious. Amen.