In 1976, theologian Carl F.H. Henry wrote an essay on the relationship between religion and government in the United States. It appeared on the occasion of the nation’s bicentennial in “Christianity Today” magazine, of which Henry had been the first editor when it began in 1956.
His take 50 years ago on “the controversy over civil religion in recent decades” was reprinted in the July/August 2026 issue of the same magazine. As the separation-of-church-and-state debate is even more heated on our country’s 250th birthday, “CT” devoted many of its 128 pages to thoughtful opinions on it by Henry, Justin Giboney, George Marsden, Russell Moore, Jen Pollock Michel and Brad East.
The wisdom of Henry, not only a graduate of Wheaton College and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary but a Ph.D recipient from Boston University, is worth looking at again. He came at it from an evangelical, biblical perspective but also an intellectual one and certainly not as a fundamentalist. He had written a book rejecting Christian liberalism on one extreme and the inflexibility of fundamentalism on the other (“The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism,” 1947).
Henry said “national religion in the political arena” leading up to 1976 had been “more an innocuous Judeo-Christian idealism than an explicitly evangelical faith.” In the 50 years since, more directly evangelical views have been more common in public discourse, beginning with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. But polls showing the rise of “nones” – people who profess no religion – indicate that the nation is drifting away from traditional Christianity.
Even in 1976, Henry pointed out that U.S. politicians’ mentions of spirituality didn’t result from “authentic Christian theism or Judeo-Christian theism” but were “a dilution of elements borrowed from the biblical past and blended with modern sociopolitical philosophy.”
He said spiritual references in political talk were vague except for occasional use of the word “God,” “who emerges somewhat as a benevolent force that undergirds human dignity and human rights.” The original “Star Wars” movie wasn’t released until 1977, but its “Force” was consistent with Henry’s comment.
Today, an active, biblical God pops up more often in conservative political commentary that seems to upset those who believe the church should be east from the state’s west. But Henry recalled that the nation’s founders opposed a state church as was the history in Europe, not a complete divorcing of religion from public life.
As in our time, Henry wrote that many historians “routinely ignore the emphasis on divine providence in national origins and on inalienable human rights grounded in divine creation…
“For all their insistence on non-establishment, the founding fathers viewed religion and education as indispensable twin supports of democracy.”
Henry listed three rebuttals to the cries for banning religion from the public square:
(1) People are inherently religious, “even if some members of the human species devote themselves religiously to irreligion. No society can long retain cohesion without a shared faith commitment in the form of common convictions and agreed values.”
(2) Education has adopted a foundation of secular naturalism, which Henry described as “a nonstop merry-go-round” where “all is temporal and changing.” He wrote that it results in self-interest and “’doing one’s own thing’ to the neglect of those social and humanitarian concerns” that non-religious citizens support.
(3) In 1976, Henry believed that committed Christians would not allow a 100 percent split between government and religion to happen. They “refuse to dethrone the risen Lord in any of life’s relationships and duties, even as Orthodox Jews refuse to relate Yahweh only to private concerns….
“The Christian holds that the concern for personal righteousness, social justice and political integrity that the nation desperately needs at the threshold of its third century will be found only through a recovery of Christ’s lordship and kingdom, and he is not about to exchange that faith for any quasi-official alternative.”
Henry died 27 years after he wrote those words, and now it’s been 23 more in which American society has drifted even further from Christianity. Maybe “drifted” isn’t accurate, because many in education and politics have actively promoted secularism and relativism.
More than ever, we need logical, persuasive voices to advance the clear message that the U.S. founders intended to avoid a national, government-sponsored church such as had caused so much strife in Europe and wanted to protect churches’ freedom from the government – not to erase religion from civic life.
Mike Haynes taught journalism at Amarillo College from 1991 to 2016 and has written for the Faith section since 1997. He can be reached at haynescolumn@gmail.com. Go to www.haynescolumn.blogspot.com or his Facebook page for more of his columns.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Haynes writes how Henry’s wisdom is worth looking at again
Reporting by By Mike Haynes, Special to the Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
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By Mike Haynes, Special to the Amarillo Globe-News | USA TODAY Network
