The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum King of Kings

Anti-monarchical Puritans, “thinking to have ended the isolation from the Continental churches which the king had imposed on them, and expecting international endorsement of their cause, found themselves scorned by Europe’s Protestants for their political disloyalty and their religious radicalism.” Tellingly, Worden notes, a “frosty reception greeted Cromwell’s attempts of the 1650s to mobilise the evangelical cantons of Switzerland against the Popish threat.”
Differences among British Reformed Protestants—the Scots and the English approached political theology differently—and between Britons and their French, German, Hungarian, and Swiss Reformed brethren meant significantly different conceptions of the state marked international Calvinism. Those differences increased during the Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, and the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Dutch Reformed Protestants welcomed the institution of their firmly establishmentarian monarchy in 1813, fifteen years after Presbyterians in the United States concurred with Thomas Jefferson that the federal state could not be cognizant of religion, much less make choices about what was true religion.
Where I disagree with Baird is that I do not see a seamless unity in Reformed political theology–across a given chronology, or transmitted generationally from one era of Reformed thinkers to the next–that can be pressed on American clerics or laity, much less the American state. The rejoinder, I imagine, would be that this is not about the state perse, but the religious people of the American Union electing men who will favor Christianity within the United States’ constitutional framework. I’m sympathetic to that argument, but unconvinced. Politics is the art of the practical, and I don’t see how the federal government or one of the 50 constituent states as they are can uphold true religion, especially when conservative Protestants make common political cause with, to pick one example, Oneness Pentecostals in the Trumpist Coalition. If the state can excise Oneness Pentecostals from its dutiful upholding of true religion–I assume Mormons and other heterodox Revivalist groups don’t make the cut–then the state is thinking in a Trinitarian manner. Fair enough, but the Trinity is only authoritative because it is in a Creed–a creed Im thankful for and consider binding as an Anglican–but a Creed nonetheless that not even Southern Baptists find binding. What is the reason for including non-creedal Southern Baptists and not various forms of Pentecostals? The reason seems to be that, well, Southern Baptists have numbers, and are sort of Calvinists, and many conservative PCAers are ex-SBCers. All well and good, but Anglicans and Lutherans, unlike the Reformed, find Southern Baptists views on baptism revolting, if not worthy of anathematization. Anglicans feel similar about Reformed ecclesiology; Lutherans about Reformed sacramentology; the list goes on. If state personhood makes it capable of judging theology on a basic level, what keeps it from operating as a more sophisticated theological person? Calvin, Cranmer, and Luther certainly thought it could.
These questions aren’t meant to nitpick, but to ask questions about what the American state is, a question that still seems unanswered by Protestant thinkers interested in resourcement. Baird appeals to Protestant divines and their appeals are compelling. But the United States constitutionally does not make clerical admonitions politically binding. However the voice of the people of the United States, in congress assembled, is politically binding. I think Mr. Baird’s thesis would be strengthened if say Dwight Eisenhower or George W. Bush could be shown to make similar arguments as Hodge Murray about the state’s duties towards religion. - Miles Smith