New York Times Op-Ed: We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics, by David Brooks:

There’s been a lot of mingling of Christianity and politics since Charlie Kirk was murdered. … Erika Kirk used her time at her husband’s memorial service to forgive his murderer, which is one of the more radical things Christians are commanded to do. At the same service, JD Vance told the crowd that he has traditionally been uncomfortable talking about his faith in public but that “I have talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life.”

Some people are made nervous by this mingling of God talk with politics. They legitimately fear that religion is such a divisive and explosive force or that it’s being imposed on them, that it should be kept from the public square and practiced in the privacy of church and home. Keep God and politics separate.

I wonder how much such people know about American history. The founders believed that democracy could survive only if citizens could restrain their passions, be obedient to a shared moral order and point their lives toward virtue. They relied on religious institutions to do that moral formation. As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

[A] naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.

My friend Jonathan Rauch likes to remind people that he is a gay atheist Jew, but in his recent book “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy,” he argues that faith and politics do not exist independently of each other: “I came to realize that in American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.” A crisis within Christianity is a crisis for all Americans.

He goes on to argue that far from being separate, spirituality and liberal democracy need and rely on each other. Human life revolves around four big questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the ultimate source of right and wrong? How can we reduce the amount of suffering and injustice in the world? How can we understand the world without resorting to magic, using reason and evidence instead?

Rauch argues that spiritualism (religion plus the other moral philosophies) helps us answer the first two questions and that secularism helps us answer the last two. He writes, “My claim is not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world.”

You may be religious or not religious, but you have an interest in living in a society that produces people who are spiritually, morally and intellectually healthy. Thus, the crucial question is not how to separate spirituality (of religious and nonreligious varieties) and politics but how to put them in proper relation to each other.

Christians have been arguing about how to do this ever since Jesus did that bit about rendering certain things unto Caesar and other things unto God. The dominant view over the past few hundred years is that religion is prepolitical. It deals with deeper realities than the ones we argue over in politics. Religion is about ultimate concerns — about the moral formation of the person and the salvation of the soul. Politics is about how to settle disagreements, mostly about material things. Religious truth is universal and applicable in all times to all people. Political views depend on the circumstances, what is prudent at this or that time or place. The Bible doesn’t have a political program; it just tells you that the people on all sides of a political dispute are sinners in need of grace. Politics rests on spiritual and moral life but is fundamentally different.

I’ve always been partial to the Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper’s theory of the spheres. Society is made up of different spheres, he argued, like the family, the state, education, the church and business. God has ultimate authority over all of them, but each sphere has its own logic, its own way of doing things, its own sort of authority. Society works well when each sphere respects the dignity of others. I’ve always liked this theory because people think differently, depending on which sphere they are currently in. When I say I believe in God, I mean something very different from when I say I believe in conservatism or liberalism. We shouldn’t bring the cognitive and emotional style of one sphere into a different sphere.

My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy. …

The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.