Citizen Christians: Their Rights & Responsibilities

Christians are citizens of two realms

The Apostle Paul instructs us that as Christians we have the responsibility to be good citizens of the state "for conscience sake" because God has ordained government to punish and restrict evil-doers and to reward and protect moral behavior (Romans 13:1-7). Christians are to support the civil government unless the authorities require a believer to support or to do evil in direct contradiction to their ultimate allegiance to their Heavenly Father.

Christians are also commanded by Jesus to be the "salt" of the earth and the "light" of the world (Matthew 5:13-16).

This involves Citizen Christians in active engagement with the world, preserving as "salt" and illuminating as "light." Thus, the responsibilities of Citizen Christians include not just obedience to the state, but involvement in society.

Our Baptist Faith and Message confession of faith affirms this call to involvement with the world when it states that "every Christian is under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in his own life and in human society." The confession also says Christians not only "should oppose, in the spirit of Christ, every form of greed, selfishness and vice," but "should seek to bring industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth and brotherly love."

This statement clarifies our responsibilities as Christians, and our rights as citizens. When we bring our religious and moral convictions into the public marketplace of ideas and involve ourselves in the political arena, we are standing solidly within the best of our traditions as Americans and Baptists. Far too often in recent decades we have allowed ourselves to be driven from the arena of debate by false understandings and misleading applications of church-state separation and religious liberty.

President Kennedy once said, "The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." One such "persistent" myth that has afflicted us as a nation is the belief that you cannot, or at least should not, legislate morality.

Nothing could be more false. As a practical matter, all governments legislate morality. If we had not laws against murder, the death rate would explode. If we had not laws against theft, property losses would soar. Government must legislate morality in order to fulfill its God-ordained purpose. God requires that we, as Citizen Christians, hold government responsible to its purpose of punishing evil and protecting its citizens. And in so doing, we do not impose our morality on the murderer and the thief so much as we prevent them from imposing their immorality on their victims.

A total separation of morality and politics is as debilitating of moral values and public virtue as a complete dominance of a church by the state or the state by a church is of personal and religious freedom. Our forbearers intended