The Christian life is a lot like improv night at the local coffee shop. Let me explain.

When I was in seminary, there was this strange and wonderful little coffee shop near campus called City Coffee. In my first semester, I probably studied there every night. And every once in a while, the shop would host an improv night. Local “artists” would show up and do their thing. I’m actually not entirely sure I ever stayed around for it, though I do have a vague recollection of some very bad poetry. I certainly never participated. After all, I had homework to do — plus something called inhibition.

The Christian life is like improv night at City Coffee, only it’s improv night every day of the week.

Constant Word, Changing World

We might wish the Christian life were like karaoke night — in that case, you would at least have the words — but it’s not. It’s improv: the curtain opens, you’re on stage without a script, and somebody yells “Action!” after stuffing a prompt into your hand:

“What’s the Christian approach to TikTok?”
“Postmodernism”
“Post Malone” (Not to be confused with the “Mailman” Karl Malone, which would, of course, be a very different prompt.)

We know that we won’t find headings in our Bible like “Social Media” or “Paul & Public Schools” or “Jesus’s Sermon on MMA.” And we’ll search in vain for specific answers to questions like “Whom should I marry?” or “Where, how long, with whom, and in what specific ways should I engage in Jesus’s Great Commission?”

“God wants us to develop the skill needed to extend his never-changing word into our ever-changing world.”

Does the Bible have everything we need for life and godliness? Absolutely. But it doesn’t give us a line-by-line script. Instead, it asks us to improvise, to develop what theologian Kevin Vanhoozer calls “improvisatory reasoning” (The Drama of Doctrine, 336). That’s how God has designed the Christian life to work. He wants us to develop the skill needed to extend his never-changing word into our ever-changing world. He simply calls it wisdom, and, in one place — Proverbs 2 — he tells us not only where to get it but also why.

Let’s begin with why.

Learning the Good Life

Why learn to improvise? According to Proverbs 2:9, if you get wisdom — if you learn to reason improvisationally — “then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path.” Find wisdom, God says, and you’ll be able to identify and walk down “every good path.” It’s so important for us to hear this that God through Solomon says it again at the end of the chapter. Find wisdom, Solomon says, and “you will walk in the way of the good and keep to the paths of the righteous” (Proverbs 2:20). In short: find wisdom, find the good life.

Now, of course, good doesn’t guarantee you’ll be healthy or wealthy or even trouble-free — at least not yet. (Remember Jesus and the suffering faithful in Hebrews 11?) But there is a correspondence between your idea of good and the Bible’s, which is why I feel perfectly comfortable defining good as “satisfying” or “joyful” or “fulfilling.”

That’s why we should get wisdom; what about where?

God’s Words of Wisdom

Solomon writes, “The Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Proverbs 2:6). The wisdom we need — the wisdom we want — is something God gives.

Proverbs, in fact, says that God gives it to us “from his mouth.” Certainly this includes the wisdom God embedded in the world he created (and sustains) with his mouth: “In the beginning, God . . . said,” and the world was (Genesis 1; see Hebrews 1:2–3). Proverbs is full of just this sort of wisdom (see, for example, Proverbs 6:6–11). But this wisdom isn’t Solomon’s focus here. Creation isn’t the only thing breathed out by God; so too is every word of Holy Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16). And this wisdom is precisely what God has in mind here.

“The wisdom we need — the wisdom we want — is something God gives.”

Solomon makes this connection in verses 1 and 5. He says, “If you receive my words and treasure up my commandments within you . . . then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:1, 5). To receive Solomon’s words — to receive the Bible’s words — is, at the same time, to receive the understanding and knowledge — the wisdom — that comes from God.

Now, it’s one thing to know that Scripture teaches us wisdom; it’s still another to know where to look in the Bible to see it modeled. Here we move beyond Proverbs 2 and, as Vanhoozer reminds us, learn to “cultivate biblical wisdom by reading stories of how the prophets and apostles spoke and acted in concrete situations” (334). It’s from these stories, these canonical case studies, that we learn how to faithfully improvise.

Priceless Case Studies

Prompt: A church is struggling to believe the gospel. Presently, they’re being harassed by old friends questioning the Christian claim of a crucified messiah. (One report has it that these friends are calling that claim “foolish” and “scandalous” — another cynically wonders “how any moderately intelligent reader of the Scriptures could affirm something so implausible.”) And this is to say nothing of the bleak economic forecast facing the Christian community. Increased taxes, they suspect, might be only the front end of the bad news.

How’s that for a real and specific prompt? What if somebody gave it to you? What would you say?

In time, the prompt makes its way to the church’s pastor, who, with God’s help, traces the problem all the way to its roots — or, to borrow from Vanhoozer one more time, “sees and tastes everything about [the] situation that is theologically relevant” (334). And he responds with a brilliant and original piece of Christological reasoning drawn from the Old Testament, carefully and winsomely arguing his case using premises he knows his doubting friends can still very much affirm.

If you’re wondering, I’ve just summarized Hebrews. And it’s just one of dozens of case studies in our Bibles teaching us how to apply God’s never-changing word to our ever-changing world. You may not have thought about the apostles (or the prophets) like this before, but they are master improvisers. And we can — we must — learn from their example. It’s one of the reasons they’re in our Bibles.

Improv Discipleship

How do we learn to improvise? We attend to God’s word, not least to the model improvisers God has so generously given us. Attend, though, is probably too weak or, at the very least, insufficient. After all, Solomon uses half a dozen or so verbs, pleading with his son and with us to get wisdom. If you want it, Solomon says, you’ve got to “receive” it (Proverbs 2:1), “treasure [it] up” (Proverbs 2:1), “mak[e] your ear attentive” and “inclin[e] your heart” (Proverbs 2:2) to it. You need to “call out” and “raise your voice” (Proverbs 2:3) for it. (Ask for it and really mean it; see James 1:5–7.). “Seek” and “search for it,” Solomon says, “as for hidden treasures” (Proverbs 2:4).

Don’t you want this priceless treasure God offers you for your good? Don’t you want to get better at applying God’s never-changing word to our ever-changing world? Friends, you have to improvise. That’s how God has designed the Christian life to work. So don’t you want to get better at it? I know I do. It’s not too late, and it’s not beyond your reach. You don’t have to be super smart, creative, or outgoing to excel at it. You simply have to know where to look and go after it with all your heart.

I wouldn’t delay; I think the curtain’s about to open.

ABSTRACT: The idea of a “Christian America” holds both myth and significant meaning. On the one hand, American history offers little evidence of a distinctly Christian founding; many of the Founders, in fact, actively opposed Christianity and sought its disenfranchisement in the new republic. On the other hand, the decades after the Founding saw a surge of Christian faith throughout the country. By the eve of Civil War, America could justifiably be called a “Christian nation,” but its Christianity was cultural, not political, the result of vigorous local and national enterprises rather than governmental action.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Allen Guelzo, Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, to examine the role Christianity played in America at the founding and in the decades that followed.

John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833) had no confidence that America was, or ever had been, a Christian republic.

Six months after the close of the War of 1812 — a war that he had violently opposed — Randolph wrote to Henry Middleton Rutledge that Virginia was “the most ungodly country on the face of the earth, where the Gospel has ever been preached.” And it was, as far as Randolph could see, as much “the case elsewhere in the U.S. . . .” The blame for this could be easily assigned: the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment “infidelity.” His generation had been “a generation of free thinkers, disciples of Hume & Voltaire & Bolingbroke, & there were very few persons, my dear Rutledge, of our years who have not received their first impressions from the same die.”1

Randolph’s unhappiness will come as a surprise to many Christians who have assumed that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” or that Judeo-Christian values played a prominent role in its early life, or that — explicitly or implicitly — Christianity deserves to be recognized as having a special status in the foundations of American life and law. The conviction that an American civil religion exists, and is founded on Christianity, has been fed by images of Washington kneeling in the snows at Valley Forge to pray, by the so-called “black-coat regiment” of chaplains exhorting Revolutionary soldiers to battle against the unholy armies of King George, and by the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to “Nature and Nature’s God” and the “Creator” who has fashioned everyone with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Rutledge was not merely playing the curmudgeon. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), who entered Yale College in the 1790s, found — in the heart of old Puritan Connecticut — that

the college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms; intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common. . . . Most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, etc., etc.2

Ashbel Green, who attended Princeton in the 1780s, also found that “open and avowed infidelity” was the order of the day, and “produced incalculable injury to religion and morals throughout our whole country; and its effect on the minds of young men who valued themselves on their genius, and were fond of novel speculations, was the greatest of all.”3

But it was more than just the Enlightenment that dislocated American priorities at the birth of the republic. It was also the idea of a republic itself. To the extent that the Enlightenment banished all notions of hierarchy from the physical universe, it likewise banished all ideas of hierarchical government, and with it all the apparatus associated with such government, including religion. With no need for a monarchy, a republic based itself entirely upon human longings, human morals, and human consent — not divine ones. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts congressman, was disgusted by the secular optimism of republican ideas, since they encouraged “the dreams of all the philosophers who think the people angels, rulers devils,” and that “man is a perfectible animal, and all governments are obstacles to his apotheosis. This nonsense is inhaled with every breath.”4

Nor is there any reliable evidence that Washington knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray. To the contrary, Washington never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ once in all his voluminous correspondence, and referred to God as a more-or-less providential force who more-or-less made events happen from a distance.5 John Adams snarled at the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an affront to republican reason and caricatured the incarnation as the belief that “that great principle, which has produced this boundless Universe . . . came down to this little ball, to be spit-upon by Jews; and untill this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.”6 And even though Thomas Jefferson appealed to a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, the term Creator was as specific as Jefferson cared to get on the subject. More significantly, the federal Constitution banned the imposition of any “religious Test” for holding national office (article 6), and made no reference to a God or a Creator at all. “That very constitution which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish,” complained John Monck Mason, the Presbyterian pastor and provost of Columbia College, “does not so much as recognize his being! . . . Even the savages whom we despise” set “a better example.” When Alexander Hamilton was asked about this omission years later, his reply was the perfect echo of John Randolph’s estimate of Virginia: “I declare,” said Hamilton to Princeton’s Samuel Miller, “we forgot.” Or maybe worse. When the aged Benjamin Franklin exhorted the Constitutional Convention to open their sessions with prayer, his motion was met with a polite refusal, since the public might conclude that a call to prayer signaled that the Convention was in so much peril that it had no hope apart from divine intervention, and “the alarm” such a suggestion would arouse would “be as likely to do good as ill.”7

Unevangelical America

Perhaps our problem in Christianizing America’s origins lies in too strict a definition of Christianity. Even if the Founders gave no direct sanction to religious belief, surely the fact that so many of the original British colonies that became the United States originally had legal establishments of Christian churches, and that so many of them were designed by their founders as religious societies and refuges, means that there was a deep and latent Christianity of a general sort at the time of the Founding.

But a latent Christianity is not always a deep one, and it is not hard to find places in early America where Christianity was exceedingly thin on the ground. Charles Woodmason, a Church of England missionary in South Carolina, was appalled in the 1760s at the “open profanation of the Lords Day in this Province. . . . Among the low Class, it is abus’d by Hunting fishing fowling, and Racing — By the Women in froliking and Wantonness. By others in Drinking Bouts and Card Playing — Even in and about Charlestown, the Taverns have more visitants than the Churches.” Woodmason found that “there are no Clergy in North Carolina,” which (as he discovered) meant that “thro’ want of Ministers to marry and thro’ the licentiousness of the People, many hundreds live in Concubinage — swopping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians.”8 Even in the more demure atmosphere of Pennsylvania, the German Lutheran missionary Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was shocked at how quickly his fellow German emigrants lost any sense of Christian identity in the free air of the New World:

During this past fall [1749] many ships have again arrived with German people who spread out in crowds scattered throughout the country. It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary, and unprecedented wickedness and crimes.9

Much of this religious indifference was shaken by the outburst in the 1740s of what became known in America as the Great Awakening, a tremendous revival of religion centered mostly in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. But the Awakening was also comparatively limited in time and space: it lasted only from about 1740 till 1742, and passed almost completely over Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, Georgia, and even parts of New England. It might not, in fact, have created much of permanent effect had it not found an enormously talented and ingenious spokesman in the person of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Then, in 1775, came the American Revolution and another opportunity for Christianity to assert itself. Many of the Presbyterian and Congregational clergy who had supported the Awakening now swung enthusiastically behind the Revolutionaries. John Witherspoon, the Presbyterian president of Princeton College and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, announced that “the separation of this country from Britain has been of God” and called on “the Presbyterian body” to rally to “the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.”10 “Call this war . . . by whatever name you may,” added a Hessian captain in the British army in 1778, “but call it not an American Rebellion, it is nothing more or less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian rebellion.”11

But the war took a more severe toll on church life than anyone expected, and what made the cost of the war harder to bear was the meager recognition the new republic gave to the parsons and the churches that had supported it. The political leadership of the Revolution — Washington, Jefferson, Adams — marched to the rhythm of the Enlightenment, leaving its Christian advocates somewhere far behind. “The late contest with Great Britain, glorious as it hath been for their country, hath been peculiarly unfortunate for the clergy,” wrote Peter Thacher, a Massachusetts parson, in 1783. “Perhaps no set of men, whose hearts were so thoroughly engaged in it, or who contributed in so great a degree to its success, have suffered more by it.”12 Everywhere, old forms of traditional Christianity seemed to be on the defensive. New Jersey eliminated all state funding for churches in 1776, and New York followed suit in 1777; in Massachusetts, the new republican constitution of 1780 maintained public taxation for church purposes, but it now allowed taxpayers to choose which church they wished to support.13

Building a Wall

It was Virginia that became the test case for how much — or how little — public recognition Christianity was going to be left with in the new republic, and it was mostly going to be little. At the urging of the great Revolutionary orator Patrick Henry, Virginia led the fight to strip the Church of England of its legal status as the state church of the colony, but it still provided afterward for the levying of church taxes and the distribution of them among the various churches in Virginia.14 This half measure did not satisfy Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Both of them were relentless in their determination to force Christianity off the public square of Virginia republicanism: in 1779, as governor of revolutionary Virginia, Jefferson withdrew state funding for the two professorships in divinity at the College of William & Mary, and in 1785, Madison persuaded the Virginia legislature to drop all public funding for religion.15

That, in turn, set the stage for Jefferson’s and Madison’s attitudes toward public religion on the federal level. Madison, representing Virginia in the first federal Congress in 1789, was responsible for composing the provision in the first amendment that committed Congress to making “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And while this seems on the surface to describe no more than a hands-off attitude toward public religion, one member of the House of Representatives feared that it cloaked “a tendency to abolish religion altogether.”16 And Madison’s subsequent use of the amendment makes it clear that he intended it as a significant disfranchisement of Christianity in the American republic. In 1790, Madison opposed counting ministers as ministers on the federal census, and he opposed the hiring of chaplains for Congress and for the American military as “some sort of alliance or coalition between Government & Religion.”17

Jefferson, acting on the same principles, believed that instead “of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children,” it would be better for Virginia educators to teach so that children’s “memories may be here stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history,” and he was trying as late as 1818 to prevent the new University of Virginia from even allowing a classroom to be used for Sunday worship.18 Jefferson summed up his attitude toward public religion very succinctly in 1802, replying to a letter from the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ . . . thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”19 The image of a “wall of separation” was not intended as a compliment: it was meant to convey the shutting-out of religion from public discourse.

Deists, Unitarians, and Masons

If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism — the simplistic belief of a clockmaker God who wound up the universe and then let it tick away on its own, without any personal intervention. The Revolutionary veteran and Vermont republican Ethan Allen pushed Deism into public debate by publishing a crude but highly effective tract, Reason the Only Oracle of Mankind (1785), in which he freely attacked reliance on the Bible and the “superstitions” of prayer and miracles. Allen was followed by an even better-known veteran of the Revolution, Thomas Paine, who had made himself into a republican hero in 1776 with his famous anti-monarchy pamphlet, Common Sense. Paine was in an incessant ferment of revolution, and joined ranks with Deism by publishing The Age of Reason in 1794 (a second part followed in 1796). Paine was even cruder than Allen, and even more effective: “What is it that we have learned from this pretended thing called revealed religion? Nothing that is useful to man and everything that is dishonourable to his Maker,” Paine yelled. “What is it that the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder.”20

“If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism.”

A more complacent and elitist version of Deism was Unitarianism. Like Deism, Unitarianism was an English development, but it caught on in a big way in America after the Great Awakening as an alternative religion for New Englanders who could not stomach Jonathan Edwards and the Awakeners. William Ellery Channing declared in his famous 1819 Baltimore sermon, “Unitarian Christianity,” that “we believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God.” Hence, Jesus Christ was not God, and did not share any divine attributes with God. Channing immediately hedged by adding that Unitarians continued to believe that Jesus was nevertheless “the Son of God . . . the brightness of the divine mercy,” whose death provides atonement and salvation. But Channing firmly rejected that idea that Jesus was also divine. God was a “Unity,” and shared nothing of his attributes with Jesus (thus the term Unitarian).21

The purposes that Unitarianism served in New England were just as often served elsewhere in the new republic by Free Masonry. Free Masonry had its origins in the peculiar hunger of the Enlightenment for a religious ritualism that could be squared with the glorification of reason. Although Free Masonry developed out of the fraternities, guilds, and lodges of Scottish and English stonemasons in the 1600s, by the eighteenth century it had become a secretive order for wealthy and aristocratic English-speaking male elites, and it developed rituals and a quasi-theology that allowed it to offer upper-class Anglo-Americans a fashionable and restrictive version of republican religion. The secrecy that shrouded the American Masonic lodges makes it nearly impossible to estimate the number of American Masons; but that secrecy also gave it an alluring sense of esoteric and mysterious ritual and republican brotherhood, and prominent Americans from Washington and Franklin to Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson found themselves drawn to the Masons.

All of them together — Masons, Deists, Unitarians — thought they were the wave of the future. Thomas Jefferson, surveying the scene in 1822, rejoiced “that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered [its] creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests . . . there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”22 What is amazing about that prophecy is how clearly Jefferson should have seen, even in 1822, that such a likelihood had already disappeared. The United States may not have been a Christian republic at its start, but it soon became one.

Revival and Republican Virtue

Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism between 1780 and 1860. Instead of traditional Christian denominations fading into a Unitarian future, they embarked on a voyage of aggression, expansion, and empire-building that easily outstripped the overall growth of the entire American population. The Congregationalists jumped off from 750 congregations in New England in 1780 to spread across upstate New York, northern Ohio, and into lower Michigan, and by 1860 had grown to 2,200 congregations; the Presbyterians, who counted about 500 congregations in 1780, counted 6,400 in 1860; the Methodists, who had hardly existed as a denomination in the 1780s, included nearly 20,000 congregations in 1860, while the Baptists, who had only 400 congregations in the United States in 1780, included 12,150 in 1860. Even Roman Catholics, who had organized only about 50 congregations and missions by 1780, had grown to 2,500 congregations in 1860. Between 1780 and 1820, American religious denominations built 10,000 new churches, and by 1860, they had quadrupled that number.23 How, in the name of Thomas Jefferson, had this unlooked-for result occurred?

“Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism.”

Two major reasons explain the sudden explosion of Christian influence in American life. The first is the resiliency of revivals. The writings of Jonathan Edwards on the Awakening of the 1740s were developed by his pupils into a full-blown blueprint for fresh waves of revival. Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), upon taking over the presidency of Yale College in 1795, aggressively beat down the “infidelity of the Tom Paine school” that Lyman Beecher had found there as a student. Beecher recalled that the students challenged Dwight by handing him

a list of subjects for class disputation . . . [and] to their surprise he selected this: “Is the Bible the word of God?” and told them to do their best. He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly [in the college chapel] for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head.24

This “Second Great Awakening,” which is variously dated between 1800 and 1825, could not be contained to New England. Edwardsean preachers and converts followed the out-migration of New Englanders to New York and Ohio, and there, influential outposts of Edwardsean revivalism sprang up, to the point where western New York was home to so many revivals that it was referred to as “the burned-over district.” Of course, the revivals spun off a number of unlooked-for variations — Mormonism, the Shakers, the Millerites, Matthias the Prophet — but their energy was palpable, and even the variations were testimony to revivalism’s pervasiveness.

The second force that moved Christianity to the front of American culture’s attention was the need of republics for virtue. Every good republican knew that republics were politically fragile: lacking the old monarchical cement of patronage or hierarchy, republics depended for their existence solely on the virtue — the disinterested benevolence and self-sacrifice — of their people. But where was virtue to come from? The French Revolution had demonstrated that the ethics of the Enlightenment were no protection from the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. What then could guarantee the virtue of republican nations? The answer to that question was promptly offered by John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith, as the two successive Presbyterian presidents of Princeton College before and after the Revolution: only religion can guarantee virtue, and therefore the promotion of Christianity is a prerequisite to keeping the American republic virtuous and prosperous. “To promote true religion,” argued Witherspoon, “is the best and most effectual way of making a virtuous and regular people”; by contrast, added Smith, let “infidelity” and atheism prevail, and virtue would “cease to exist, and the bonds of society, which are effectually maintained only by the public morals, would hasten to be dissolved.” The proper conclusion, then, would be that even in a republic, the government should offer sponsorship to Christianity, and “the magistrate . . . enact laws for the punishment of profanity and impiety.”25

Despite Jefferson’s and Madison’s best republican efforts to close the door on Christianity, their efforts were frequently undone by the courts, who had more than a little concern about virtue. The great Supreme Court justice Joseph Story declared that Christianity was in fact a necessary component of the English common-law tradition, and offered the “only solid basis of civil society.”26 And in 1844, writing as an associate justice of the Court, Story upheld the decision of the lower federal courts in the case of Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, which permitted the breaking of the will left by the notorious Philadelphia banker and atheist, Stephen Girard, in order to permit religious teachers onto the grounds of a school that Girard had founded in Philadelphia and into which he had declared, by the terms of in his will, a clergyman should never be permitted to enter. Story declared that this was “derogatory and hostile to the Christian religion, and so is void, as being against the common law and public policy of Pennsylvania.”27 By defining virtue as Christianity, Christianity could be treated as a necessary part of the republic’s life, and allowed the public role that Jefferson and Madison had struggled to prevent.

Cultural, Not Political, Christianity

The results of the Second Great Awakening, and the co-optation of virtue, paved the way, in 1835, for Alexis de Tocqueville to remark, “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” And it was, continued Tocqueville, “a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.”28 Charles Grandison Finney, the most famous revival preacher in America since Edwards, rushed to claim that his own Presbyterianism was but “Church Republicanism,” and even Episcopalians like Calvin Colton declared that “the genius of the American Episcopal Church is republican.”29

But this was not a political achievement. In 1864, proponents of a “Bible amendment,” which would have inserted an explicit recognition of Christianity into the Constitution’s preamble, came close to getting Abraham Lincoln’s presidential endorsement.30 But only close. Christian America would, instead, be culturally Christianized. Still, for those who believe that politics lies downstream of culture, this was no small accomplishment, and all the more significant for the fact that the Constitution provided a comparatively spare and noncommittal framework for governing the republic, thus allowing for a Christian culture to enjoy vast sway in the nineteenth century.

Nor was the achievement of a Christian America the gift of the American Founders, or a part of the design of the American republic. That Christianity in America arrived at a place of commanding influence in American life in the years before the Civil War was the product of ceaseless cultural energy by Christians themselves in the decades after 1800. Never again, wrote the literary critic Alfred Kazin, “would there be so much honest, deeply felt invocation of God’s purpose.”31 If that influence has seemed to wane, then perhaps the solution will lie in the renewal of that energy, that invocation, that culture, rather than in a myth.

He does not want to go home after daycare. During those hours, he experiences the nurturing care of women — that mothering touch that makes a little boy’s world go round. He cries when it’s time to leave. He stammers to leave the maternal — a second language in which he was born fluent — when he has to go back into the home of two men. The “married” men are openly promiscuous with other men. One pretends to be more effeminate than the other, but effeminacy (the boy knows by experience) is a gross and cruel substitute for the gloriously feminine.

He is trapped with men who “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27). Men who did not keep that penalty to themselves. They took the little boy directly from the hospital room to live in the lust-filled, wrath-stamped house of two men despising God and his design.

The little boy clings to his Christian auntie whenever she comes, she tells us, and cries when it’s time for her to leave his house, a house full of testosterone, aberrant desire, and a cheap mimicry of both fatherhood and motherhood. The boy, despite his catechizers, knows the real thing from the fake. He knows what it is to be held by the real, soothed by it, cuddled and made to feel secure in the safety of its arms.

The men who took him are “expecting” their second any day now.

What’s Wrong with the World?

A true story like this should anger us, fracture our hearts, and bend our knees to pray. What is wrong with the world?

What is wrong with the world? Paul gives us an answer in Romans 1:18–32: Mankind is at war with its Creator. Each generation has its own way of saying to the Father and his Son: “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us” (Psalm 2:3). Or with Pharaoh, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice?” (Exodus 5:2). Romans 1 takes us behind the scenes for some context to desperate times.

Here we learn that fallen man, timid little creature that he is, dares not make eye contact with the Almighty, so he suppresses the truth about God to continue, all too happily, in his filth (Romans 1:18). A popular form of suppression today is atheism. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” — and he does so because “they are corrupt” and “do abominable deeds” (Psalm 14:1). And those deeds do not wear masks and quarantine. Man denies God to practice and continue practicing homosexuality, as one of many rebellious ways, and then adopts children into his perversity.

But the grandeur of this world leaves ruined man without excuse (Romans 1:19–20). He, even he, lives within a masterpiece — God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). The great artist signs his name everywhere to be seen. Man quivers within heights and depths he cannot explore, in a cosmos more expansive than his imagination. Man’s brain (which is hostile to God apart from grace, Romans 8:7–8) surpasses a computer. His cells contain baffling intricacy. And yet his love for sin makes modern man shrug and call himself an atheist. His religion says that all came from original nothingness, from the great I Am Not. Claiming to be wise, he has become a fool.

The old watchmaker analogy highlights the absurdity of explaining nature by mere nature. If that atheist man finds an iPhone in the woods, he will always conclude someone must have left it there. That it was made. Chance did not design it. The passage of time cannot take credit. Though an Apple, it did not fall from a tree. Yet he lives and moves and has his being in the wide world of complexity that towers the iPhone as the heavens above earth and yet he says it all came from impersonal, unintelligent forces. They are without excuse.

Fattened by Sin for Slaughter

Unregenerate men of all sexual professions do not see God because they do not want God. They would pin him up and nail him to a tree again if they could. “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). As criminals want no All-Seeing Judge, so natural man chafes at the God who reminds him that man is no god and is not good. How dare God tell us what to do with our bodies? How dare he tell us what to do with our babies? How dare he tell us what marriage is? How dare he!

So sons of Adam reject God. They do not render him the honor due his name, or thank him for his goodness and mercy (Romans 1:21). Instead, they offer the Almighty insults and spit upon the hand of their Benefactor. As a madman who pulls out his teeth to throw them at the sky because he hates the moon, men harm themselves in their rebellion. They become useless in their thinking, and their foolish hearts are darkened (Romans 1:21). Deny God, and you deny reason, deny sanity, deny goodness, deny beauty, deny life. One becomes a spiritual Nebuchadnezzar — nails grow as talons, he stoops to eat grass like an ox — though he may live in a lake house, drive a fancy car, and be thought charming by this God-hating world.

He is at war with God, and God is at war with him. He is under the wrath of God, a wrath that is just now preheating (Romans 1:18). He has exchanged God for images, and now God gives him over to suicidal sinfulness: to the lusts of his heart, to impurity, to the dishonoring of his own body (Romans 1:24). He bowed before idols and prostituted God’s truth, so God brings him to grassy plains where he will grow fat for the day of slaughter.

Bloodshed of Toddlers

God has given these two men up to dishonorable passions, to commit “shameless acts with men” (Romans 1:27). And then they conspire to adopt what God has forbidden them by nature. And then the delirious powers that be place kids in their “home” to be hit by the shrapnel of this skirmish with God.

And this is what God’s judgment does: Like striking a wasp’s nest, it incites man’s stinging left and right.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:28–31)

Who do these “haters of God” envy? Deceive? Slander? Murder? Themselves, others, and sometimes, children.

Rebellion against God becomes a wildfire. Wickedness is never satisfied to keep to itself; it mutinies. It enlists bedfellows. It stirs up and demands compliance. It slithers and has scales, takes over school systems and adopts children. And it co-opts those who know better: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). These know such sins beg for God’s capital punishment, but instead of imploring them to repent — as love would dictate — they instead applaud them for their courage and “authenticity.”

Flee the Wrath to Come

God’s reality is inflexible. His law is perfect; his rules are true and righteous altogether. The Judge of the earth shall do right, and this is a terror for all here who despised his mercy, despised his designs for love, sex, and marriage, despised his day of salvation, and despised his crucified Son.

Today, dear reader, is the day of salvation — seek King Jesus. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. He has made a way, with his own blood, for you to be received. Are you a vast sinner? Have you murdered, taught false doctrine, adopted children into an abominable union before the Lord? Your wicked life is a wide opportunity for God to display the fathomless depths of his compassion and the eternal power of Christ’s sacrifice to forgive you. The terrorist of the church, the blasphemer of God, and murderer of Christians wrote,

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15–16)

Look to this great example of mercy to give confidence to receive your own. Abundant pardon for abundant crimes. There is enough mercy for all who come.

Seek the Lord while he may be found;     call upon him while he is near;let the wicked forsake his way,     and the unrighteous man his thoughts;let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,     and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55:6–7)

Jesus Christ has a throne of grace for the repentant, and a seat of terror for the impenitent. What is wrong with the world? Man’s sin. What alone is right with the world? Jesus Christ — his person, his redeeming work, and his church of redeemed sinners. He shines in the darkness, and still the darkness has not overcome him.