waltondammerung

The problem is that you are still not asking the right questions. Let me try to explain why.

If the organizing principle of the state is religious freedom, then the state exists largely to coordinate the organization of society through the voluntary actions of the people themselves, according to their religious beliefs. Indeed, that was American society from 1776 to 1932.

However, even in pre-1932 America, there were many activities that the state pre-empted, since it was necessary to define some activities as common to society as a whole. For example, the crime of murder was defined by the state. Murder was not a matter of private, voluntary definition. But although the state established a common definition of murder, that definition still reflected the underlying American religious consensus as to what murder was and how it should be punished.

In other words, even when the state establishes rules for society as a whole, those rules are as religious as any other rules. They may be religiously broader rules, since they have to take into account a wider constituency, but they are no less religious. Only the venue is changed and not the inevitably religious character of public policy.

With this in mind, let us turn to one of your sets of questions. Here is what you write: "If you think laws should reflect Christian principles, but that social programs are the responsibility of the church, how do you reconcile those ideas? And the opposite question-if you think the government should follow Christian principles of charity, but that it shouldn't legislate morality, how do you reconcile those ideas?"

These questions rest on a false disjunction. First, the two questions are not comparable at all, but are apples and oranges. The first question, which is obviously addressed to conservatives, is actually a question about the proper political venue for social programs, which is either the voluntary social order or the state. The second question, which is addressed to liberals, puts forward the logical proposition that it is possible to have legislation that is religiously or morally neutral. The premise itself is nonsense. Here is the question that you should be asking: what principles should we use to determine what things should be organized by the state and what things should be organized by the voluntary social order?

Take the problem of assistance to the poor. In pre-1932 America, such assistance was mainly a matter for voluntary associations, organized according to the beliefs of those involved. In post-1932 America, assistance to the poor is mostly undertaken by the state. However, the theories that underlie modern state assistance are no less religious than the theories that govern the policies of private religious organizations. Indeed, the ideology that guides the modern public welfare system is best described as pagan in its morality and purposes. Religious liberals support the government system, of course, but they do so precisely because their liberal theology is indistinguishable from political liberalism. They have repudiated orthodox Christianity. In short, the question of how the poor are to be assisted is always a religious question, whether the assistance is undertaken by the government or by the voluntary social order.

This brings us to what modern politics is all about. When liberals say that government should be non-religious, what they mean is that it should be non-Christian. But they are perfectly happy to enforce their own religion through the state, and they do so by the simple expedient of declaring that their understanding of reality is "non-religious." It is a measure of how far most American Christians are now divorced from reality that they have bought into this paradigm. At the same time, liberals have been working for almost eighty years to move as much of the American social order as possible away from voluntary social control, and to place it under the control of their "religiously neutral" state.

Do you see what's going on here? It's called a revolution, and this revolution is as much spiritual as it is political. In essence, the pagan Left is in the process of ending religious freedom. It is accomplishing this by placing more and more of our social decisions under the control of the state. In the liberal view, Christianity is to become a purely private, and subjective, belief that is to have no social consequence. And in their hilariously cynical way, liberals routinely describe anyone who opposes this process as the enemy of religious freedom. This is the history of America since 1932.

It is also the history of the abolition of American Christianity.

I have been contemplating my responses to your questions, and having difficulty getting them to gel. Then, today, I ran across this article at First Things
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0607/articles/douthat.html
and realized that Douthat addresses many of the underlying questions far more thoroughly than I could hope to.

It is a lengthy article, though, so for those of you who don't care to dig through it, here is his summary statement:

"Garry Wills is half-right: There is no single Christian politics, and no movement can claim to have arrived at the perfect marriage of religious faith and political action. Christianity is too otherworldly for that, and the world too fallen. But this doesn’t free believers from the obligation to strive in political affairs, as they strive in all things, to do what God would have them do. And the moments when God’s will is inscrutable, or glimpsed only through a glass, darkly, are the moments when good-faith arguments between believers ought to bear the greatest fruit.

In today’s America, these arguments are constantly taking place—over issues ranging from abortion to foreign policy; over the potential, and potential limits, of interfaith cooperation; over the past and future of the Religious Right. But they are increasingly drowned out by cries of “theocracy, theocracy, theocracy” and by a zeal, among ostensibly religious intellectuals, to read their fellow believers out of public life and sell their birthright for the blessing of the New York Times."