No Neutral Public Square
There is no human being who is not a worshiper, and there is no human being who does not become like what he worships. God made the world, and He made it a certain way with certain contours and grooves and patterns. That humans worship is an inescapable feature of the world God has made. And so is the reality that what we worship informs who we are becoming, what we love, how we think, and what we do.
Why should the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens;
He does all that he pleases.Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.Psalm 115:2-8
Put another way: There is no purely neutral human being who is simply observing the world objectively and making decisions without any reference to a god. This is not a neutral world, and we are not neutral people in it. Each of us serves and worships our god, and each of us brings that god into our marriages, our jobs, our voting booths, our budgets, and every square inch of this blood-bought, God-owned world we walk on.
One of the great fallacies of our day is the myth of a neutral public square. Throughout our Bibles we see men and women who knew that every nation, every family, every society had a god. The public arena of law and justice were not a place empty of allegiance. A god reigned over the kingdom, the army, the courts. It couldn't be otherwise, because no one has ever lived in a merely human world. No one has ever been a part of a merely human household or walked through a merely human marketplace or sat in a merely human school.
The fact that so many of us grew up assuming that the realm of judges and legislatures and public schoolhouses are indeed neutral places is merely a surprising consequence of Christendom itself. When a widespread acceptance of the idea that people deserve the right to freedom of conscience and private property and the lawful protection of their persons permeates your society, it becomes easy to assume that that is just the way it is. People just figure out a way to live together. People don’t wantonly slaughter their neighbors or steal young women out of their homes to rape and discard them because people are just reasonable, rational, neutral creatures by nature. “That’s just how it is.” But we’re wrong. Our Bibles and our history books tell us that’s not just how it is. Human beings are born sinful, and no creature born sinful and with his heart set after false gods is purely reasonable, rational, and neutral. Structures and assumptions informed by the God of Jesus Christ have kept the West from looking like much of the ancient pagan world. If those structures and assumptions begin to be reshaped in the image of another god, the West will begin to look very different. You cannot worship Baal without beginning to look like the Canaanites.
Because all people are worshipers and all people begin to resemble what they worship, all people carry the artifacts of their religion with them into the public square. Most of us grew up with the words “separation of church and state” coursing through our understanding of what made America America, but apart from the historical reality that those words appear nowhere in our founding documents, they’ve indoctrinated many of us with a falsehood. The truth is that there is no state that is separated from church. Every senator, every congressman, every governor and president and prime minister and federal judge and ambassador carries his church with him into his office. It sits right there at his desk with him as he signs orders or takes phone calls or writes emails. We take our worship with us wherever we go. We do not leave it on the coatrack over by the door.
The laws of a society assume a transcendent reality, something outside and above mere human opinion. Why does our society put people in jail for murdering a man but not for killing a wasp? Because our society assumes that human beings have a higher value or worth than insects do. Why? Says who? If Darwinian evolution is actually true as our society currently upholds, what makes a bipedal primate more valuable than a flying arthropod? The fact that we can feel things and speak about them and are self-ware? So what. Why is that good? Maybe the universe would be better with less self-aware creatures. Maybe pain for self-aware creatures is a good for the universe. As a matter of fact, why does the universe matter? There’s no standard, here, in the Darwinian, naturalistic, Big Bang worldview. You’re a talking sack of molecules. Separating some of those molecules with a shotgun is neither good nor bad. So why put me in jail for it?
In other words, why does our society assume truths that it can’t account for? It teaches that we are the result of time plus matter plus chance, but it treats us as though we are moral agents in a world where morality matters. The reason it does this is that we all know that this is a world governed by a moral lawgiver, and so we make laws in accordance with that deep knowledge. We know this is not a purely material world with only temporary strands of matter floating around it. We know what we do matters, that the world is not merely absurd and we are not merely walking, breathing meat sacks. We know there are transcendent realities. We all worship our gods. We find ourselves conforming to their transcendent standards. We are born craving a god, and until we are brought from death to life by Yahweh, we merely trade knowing the real one for knowing false ones.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Romans 1:18-23
The American state is not separated from church. It never can be. The issue is not whether American government will have a god that informs the transcendent standard its laws conform to but which god it will be. The false gods of our imaginations are fickle and unpredictable, and as we continue to make laws and regulations and policies and educational programs that are informed by the worship of human sentiment, status, money, entertainment, or power, you will see a society that increasingly reflects those flighty, volatile, capricious gods. Why we are we totally uncertain of what a woman is but totally certain of what a white man is? Why do we have an eschatology built around “the climate”? Why do we censor “misinformation” the way a church would weed out blasphemy? Because our gods shape us as we shape our society.
The One true God who actually made all of us, born in sin though we are, owns this world. It is His, and we dishonor Him when we act as though He still needs to prove that America should obey Him. America is under Jesus’ feet; governing and acting and educating as though she is not will not end well for her.
For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.
1 Corinthians 15:27-28
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20; emphasis mine
We were made to be worshipers because someone made us who deserves to be worshiped. The public square is already His. Let us not live as though His authority stops at the county courthouse steps. Let us be shaped by the God who is truly God, and let us work to see our nation shaped by worship of Him for His glory and her own good.