Watch the Garden

Freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, the protection of the right of property, these are fruits that grew in the garden of Christendom. We enjoy those fruits in this nation as an inheritance from Christianity-informed governmental structures, legal systems, culture, and institutions. By contrast, secularism, as a worldview that denies objective truth, objective morality, and holds that human beings are merely the product of Darwinian evolution, will neither produce nor nourish such fruits. It will starve them.

It’s a misguided assumption, philosophically and historically, that the public square will remain a neutral place, a place without any transcendent values. No public square will ever be a mere moral vacuum in which Christianity, secularism, Islam, and other competing worldviews and interests can negotiate claims. God has made the world in such a way that every public square, every family, every heart requires transcendent values to function at all. When you step into the public square, you are stepping into a place that already has moral values and beliefs as a feature of its very existence. It assumes things, including who has a right to speak, what truth is or is not, and what moral behaviors are always off the table. So the question is whether your public square will have transcendent values that are true and correct, (flowing from the character of the one true God) or false and incorrect (not aligning with His character).

What should the American public square assume? What transcendent values should be the floor of that square on which we all stand? Answer: The ones essential (or “mere”) Christianity confirms are true. Namely:

1) Human beings are made by God and have inherent worth as such.

Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27

2) Human beings have a right to life and freedom that cannot be justly forfeited except by just application of law.

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.’

Genesis 9:1-6

A Christian ethos, the assumptions and convictions that attend Christianity, these are what can shape and constrain the behaviors and institutions of a society towards the just treatment of human beings and the just administration of law. The reason why the United States is still a better and freer place to live than Iran or Saudi Arabia is that the treatment of human beings and their behaviors as shaped by Christianity is a better treatment than that incubated by Islam. And it is better than that incubated by atheistic Communism, which is why the United States is still a better and freer place to live than North Korea or China.

But the more we erode Christian transcendent values as the ground for our public square, the less our laws and discourse will reflect true justice and true liberty (which flow from the character of the true God who actually made this world). A secularist ground to the public square will see human beings as the mere product of Darwinian evolution; what transcendent value does any individual human being have in such a view? Neither will a secularist public square have a transcendently grounded impetus to protect the property and liberty of individuals. Why should a racist or a homophobe have his property protected? Why should we even let those rubes into this public square? A secular public square will not long hold the values of liberty and human dignity, because it will not long value humans, liberty, or their dignity.

God did truly make this world. It works healthily as behaviors, institutions, laws, and individuals are shepherded into alignment with His character. It brings about immorality, death, and destruction as all of these components of society become disjointed from His character.

A garden growing from Christian soil produces Christian fruit. A pagan garden will not yield the same goodness.