Bob Lepine

While speaking to students at DTS on apologetics, Voddie Baucham warns of the dangers of sentimentalism, emotionalism, and anti- intellectualism within the church.

Last week, a student asked me whether it was appropriate for Vice President Vance to recite the Nicene Creed while hosting the Charlie Kirk Show. It’s a great question—especially in light of all the public Christianity on display at Kirk’s memorial service yesterday. So, should Baptists be uneasy about this, given our convictions about the separation of church and state? Here’s what I told my student: 1. Public officials may bring their faith into public life. It is entirely appropriate for leaders to express religious convictions in their political messaging. Baptists are not Rawlsian liberals who imagine that one’s deepest “comprehensive doctrines” can or should be bracketed out of public life. Our faith shapes our moral reasoning, and that inevitably bears on public life. This is why, even when liberal Catholics appeal to their faith to justify a political stance, I may disagree with them, but I do not object to the act of bringing faith into the conversation. Faith is architectonic—it gives foundational posture to all arenas of a person's life. 2. Religious liberty applies to politicians, too. Public officials retain the same religious freedom as every other citizen. There is no formal—or even informal—requirement that they sanitize their language of religious references or motivations. To demand otherwise is to impose a secular test for office (that our Constitution prohibits). 3. We distinguish between the person and the office. Baptists are clear: if the “Office” of the Vice President began legislating with regard to religion—convening synods, dictating doctrine, or enacting laws that establish a church—that would be a violation of Baptist convictions around church and state. But what we saw yesterday was not an abuse of office. They were citizens who happened to hold office, exercising their faith in public. 4. Civic religion has a legitimate place. What we witnessed from numerous public officials was not a de jure attempt to legislate Christianity but rather the best of American civic religion: a recognition that public order rests on transcendent authority. Such expressions remind us that moral reasoning, political traditions, and civic virtue are not sustained by government alone (or secularism, for that matter) but by an appeal to God as the ultimate source of order. What occurred yesterday was a demonstration of the complementarity of civic order and religious foundation. Baptists should celebrate it.