J.D. Vance, told the Christian Post that the separation of church and state is Satanic. He’s full of it.
First off, I don’t believe a word Vance says, ever. He’s a soulless ladder-climber who’s made deliberate choices who to sell out to on every rung. To the extent he has sincere beliefs about the United States, they’re repellent. And this is no exception. According to the Christian Post article, “Vance called for ‘a more fully Christian politics,’ one that refuses to treat ‘economic growth’ as an idol, or to dismiss Catholic social teaching as merely ‘spiritual stuff’ with no input on how a nation should be run.”
“Christian politics” is as much gibberish as Mike Johnson declaring all you need to know is that he has a “Biblical worldview.” There is no one Christian politics or worldview. As Mark Noll has written, the Civil War, some Christians believed slavery was a compact with Hell; other Christians believed American chattel slavery was divinely ordained. Many civil rights marchers believed ending Jim Crow was God’s will; many segregationists believed Jim Crow was the will of god. Evangelical Christians in the 1970s were pro-choice; then in the 1980s they swung to “abortion is murder.”
I don’t think there’s any question that slavery and racism are evil; as Huck Finn said, if God wants black America in chains, our duty is to liberate the slaves and go to hell. And I think simple human decency is all that takes to figure that out. As a Christian I don’t dismiss the Bible as a guide; however if Protestants pre-Civil War could not reach a common agreement on what the Bible says about slavery, it’s not a clear, unambiguous guide. We can’t just look up answers like it was a search engine for heaven. And we are, after all, fallible mortals, as are our spiritual leaders. Even if the Bible is inerrant (I do not believe it is), we can’t assume our interpretation of it is.
All that said, I don’t believe for a minute that Vance wants “Christian politics” in the sense that all Christians should have the same right to influence the government. He wants a Christianity that supports his politics, which at the moment are authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and misogynist (I’m quite sure that if it was in his self-interest, he’d switch gears). Lots of Christians, including the Pope, are pro-immigrant; Vance is so anti-immigrant he bore false witness against legal Haitian immigrants, lying they were stealing and eating cats and dogs. There are Christians who are pro-gay and feminist; Vance is neither.
Our religion can support or influence our political positions. If, however, the only argument for our position is “God wants it,” that’s when church-state separation kicks in. Because some other Christian believes God wants the exact opposite, guaranteed.
