Earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service agreed not to enforce the “Johnson Amendment” against two churches, the National Religious Broadcasters, and Intercessors for America. That Amendment was an IRS regulation that sought to prohibit such organizations from “participating or intervening in campaigns for public office as a condition for their non-profit, tax-exempt status.” The result is good. But two critical issues remain that churches and ministers must resolve to make that result most beneficial.
I will just speak about churches; the word “minister” refers to the person or persons who would evaluate political candidates for endorsement. Ballot issues are often viewed differently, and the Johnson Amendment never prohibited a minister from discussing a candidate’s worldview.
To make an endorsement, a minister needs certain competencies. After 12 years as a state Senator and 18 as the head of a Christian policy organization, I readily agree with the assessment of Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer in his work Unbelief and Revolution:
The Christian would be wrong to imagine that, having the guidance of Scripture, he could do without learning. . . . [T]he Christian too needs to have precise knowledge of whatever belongs to his particular field. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but the beginning is not the whole of it. . . .
With respect to the particular field of politics, he added: “[T]he all sufficiency of God’s Word is no excuse for lethargy. Nor is some sort of Christian instinct enough to keep from erring in questions of political thought as they relate to every day.” (emphasis supplied)
Van Prinsterer’s political successor, Abraham Kuyper, put it this way in Guidance for Christian Engagement in Government. He said there would be no difficulty in politics:
“If Holy scripture were composed like a law code, so that one could look up the various titles and articles and find there the rules that are to govern the relationship between government and subjects and the mutual relations among subjects. But this is not what Scripture is. . . Scripture contains God’s ordinances—i.e., his eternal and unchangeable principles—but mostly in mixed form, like nuggets in a gold mine.”
This mining requires the knowledge of scripture. But it must be applied in relation to God’s providential developments in the sphere of law and governance. This knowledge won’t come from today’s seminaries.
First, as to minimum competencies in the field of politics, I think a minister should know:
This may sound too exacting. But absent these competencies, the minister cannot see the myriad ways in which Republican office holders are allowing a denial of Christian values in law and politics to go unchallenged.
Put another way, without these competencies, ministers can wrongly think candidates are doing all they can to uphold Christian values. Having these competencies will minimize the likelihood of ministers finding out later they were endorsing problem-enablers, not the kind of competent reformers we needed.
Second, the minister must understand our times. This provides perspective to evaluate what legislative efforts are most needed to advance the Kingdom of God (and who is ducking what is needed). It will also allow the minister to know whether a candidate's proposed remedy conforms to the thinking of our times or to Scripture. For example, I have explained elsewhere how and why most Christian legal and policy advocates who seek to prohibit medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria conform their thinking to our times.
Our times are an age in which all metaphysical considerations have disappeared from our thinking about law. This statement may not make sense, or it may seem abstract or irrelevant to law and politics. If so, that is demonstrative of the problem.
That’s understandable. It would have made little sense to me maybe five years ago. Thankfully, Abraham Kuyper and his theological successor Herman Bavinck helped me understand the problem created by its disappearance. I think they can help ministers.
In 1898, Kuyper told the seminarians at Princeton University that metaphysics is “increasingly tabooed.” It “is avoided as drowning us in a swamp.” “Thus, the religious organ [is] confined to our feelings and our will.” That meant “religion is excluded from science (meaning knowledge) and its authority from the domain of public life.” Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism.
The reason is that Immanuel Kant’s view of the cosmos limited objective and true knowledge to an empirical world of phenomena. As a result, Kuyper rightly said, adoption of Kant’s philosophy “limited the sphere of religion to the ethical life.” In other words, questions about what kind of creatures we are and what kind of thing the cosmos is were eliminated. Bavinck agreed. “Disregarding all so-called metaphysical questions, people rushed on to the will of God in order to know and to do it.” (Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2)
In other words, living an “ethical life” was all that remained of religion (Christianity), that is, conduct. But its ethics were based on what the larger society said no longer constituted true and objective knowledge, namely, God. Therefore, the Christian's ethics could no longer be considered real objective knowledge either. It is just our truth. The world says, “Be a Jesus follower if that helps you cope.”
This leads us to a consideration of something more fundamental than developing the preceding competencies: Certain limiting language in the agreement with the IRS.
For the sake of the gospel I think ministers should consider this language in the agreement (paragraph no. 10):
“[T]he Johnson Amendment does not reach speech by a house of worship to its congregation, in connection with religious services through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith.” (emphasis supplied)
That is certainly true. But society’s acceptance of the Kantian division of knowledge says “Christian speech” is fit only for a “congregation, in connection with religious services.” That is so because Christians view politics “through the lens of religious faith.” But, again, society says “faith knowledge” is not real knowledge.
Ministers and the Body of Christ must never concede to such a limitation. The gospel is not separate from anything; it reaches everything. The gospel is Jesus Christ. And He is the king appointed by God the Father with authority over all things in heaven and on earth.
So, notwithstanding the language in the agreement, I believe the Church must return to a gospel that believes and says to everyone, including a candidate for office, that God in Jesus Christ “now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30, KJV). He is not softly and tenderly calling people to choose whether they want to worship the God revealed in Christ Jesus who sustains their every breath.
Worship and obedience is everyone’s “reasonable service” because of who He is, and metaphysically speaking, because that is the kind of creatures were were originally created by God to be. See Romans 12:1
Now for some thoughts on how to make this IRS agreement most beneficial.
First, those of us in the pews must encourage our ministers to develop the foregoing competencies, or at least urge them to rely on someone who does or designate a person for their congregation who will develop them.
Second, ministers should not endorse anyone until they possess competencies in the sphere of law and civil government or have the counsel of someone who does. My Substack page is dedicated to that along with my podcast, “God, Law, and Liberty.” A good start for ministers wanting to evaluate the work of Christians in this sphere would be my article, Are Christian Lawyers/Legislators Making “Process”?
Third, ministers must break through and help their parishioners break through the unspoken and unseen metaphysical barriers in law, policy, and public discourse that say “religious speech” is not objective knowledge about the world. Learning how to challenge an unbeliever’s metaphysic as Paul did on Mars Hill is a good start. See Acts 17:22-31.
Fourth, and related to the third, ministers need to reclaim the public nature of their office. It disappeared as a result of an unwitting acquiescence to our times. They need to speak to public officials from a Christian view of law. That’s the focus of a series of weekly essays/podcasts I started, beginning with “What Is a Christian View of Law.”
These steps will be needed because, from now on, ministers can no longer rely on the Johnson Amendment to justify not endorsing candidates.
