Why Government Is Never Morally Neutral

By Jonathan Pierce

Every law begins with a moral sentence, even when nobody says it out loud.

Do not steal. Do not assault. Keep your contracts. Pay what you owe. Drive at a speed that does not recklessly endanger your neighbor. Do not discriminate in these specified ways. Protect this right. Restrain that conduct. Tax this activity. Subsidize that one. Permit this. Prohibit that.

Behind each command is a judgment about what people owe one another and what government is justified in rewarding, restraining, protecting, or punishing.

This does not mean every law is wise. It does mean every law is moral in the basic sense that it embodies a judgment about the good, the harmful, the just, the unjust, the permissible, or the forbidden.

Government might seek religious neutrality among citizens. It cannot be morally empty.

The Myth of the View from Nowhere

Modern public debate often treats explicitly religious reasoning as though it arrives carrying philosophical baggage, while secular reasoning floats into the room weightless and objective.

But there is no view from nowhere.

The secular citizen has first principles. The Christian has first principles. The progressive, libertarian, socialist, conservative, humanist, Muslim, atheist, and agnostic all reason from beliefs about human nature, freedom, obligation, authority, harm, dignity, and the purpose of social life.

Some of those beliefs invoke God. Some do not. All of them are beliefs.

The honest pluralistic society does not pretend that only religious people have a worldview. It asks people of different worldviews to make arguments in public, to listen, to persuade, to vote, to compromise where conscience allows, and to protect the basic civil liberties of those who lose the argument.

That is very different from saying religious conviction must be checked at the courthouse door.

Separation Is Not Exile

The First Amendment begins with two complementary restraints: government may not establish religion, and it may not prohibit its free exercise. Those principles protect the conscience of believers and nonbelievers alike.

The famous phrase “wall of separation between Church and State” is not found in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson used it in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists while describing the protection created by the First Amendment. Whatever later legal debates have made of the metaphor, Jefferson was writing to a religious minority concerned about government intrusion—not announcing that religious citizens should become mute when public policy is discussed.

Institutional separation between church and state is a safeguard. Ideological apartheid of religious citizens from public life is something else entirely—and a grave injustice.

A Baptist should not be able to use government to compel a Catholic to worship as a Baptist. A Catholic should not be able to compel a Jew. A Christian should not be able to compel an atheist to profess belief in God. The state is not the Church, and the Church should resist every temptation to make it so.

But none of that requires a Christian legislator to pretend that his belief in the image of God has no bearing on human dignity, or a Jewish citizen to conceal the moral convictions formed by Torah, or an atheist to disguise the philosophical foundations of his own argument.

Freedom of religion cannot sensibly mean freedom to have religious convictions only when they produce no public consequences. To tolerate convictions while suppressing expression of those convictions is political hypocrisy at best and arguably political tyranny. 

If Communist Premier of China Deng Xiao Ping can say, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thoughts contend,” who would be so bold as to suppress Christian thought in America—the land of the free.

Separation says, Do not dictate the religion of another.” Freedom of speech says, “Make your best case and persuade all who will to convert to your world view—and embrace your God.”

Law Is a Teacher

Law does more than punish. It teaches.

It teaches by naming conduct. It teaches by attaching honor or stigma. It teaches by defining rights and responsibilities. It teaches children what adults consider normal. It teaches institutions what they must accommodate and what they may refuse. It teaches a culture what behavior deserves protection and what behavior deserves restraint.

Sometimes law teaches well. Sometimes it teaches badly. But it always teaches something.

That is why the slogan “keep morality out of politics” collapses on contact with reality. Which morality? The morality that condemns bribery? The morality that protects the disabled from exploitation? The morality that says a powerful corporation should not dump poison into a river used by people downstream? The morality that condemns racial discrimination?

We do not actually object to morality in law. We argue about which moral judgments are true, which are within government’s proper authority, and which should be enforced by law rather than left to families, churches, markets, communities, or private conscience.

That last distinction matters. Christians should be among the first to acknowledge it.

Not Every Sin Should Be a Statute

The fact that something is sinful does not automatically mean it should be illegal. Pride is destructive, but no wise society creates a Department of Humility. Covetousness corrodes the soul, but police officers cannot inspect motives. Harsh words may be sinful without being crimes. Scripture gives the Church responsibilities that civil government neither can nor should assume.

This is where mature Christian citizenship differs from the fantasy of a baptized state.

Civil government has a limited vocation. It preserves public order, punishes certain wrongs, protects rights, adjudicates disputes, and creates a framework in which people with deep disagreements can live together. The Church has a different commission: proclaim the Gospel, make disciples, administer its own spiritual life, care for people, form consciences, and bear witness to the Kingdom of God.

Confusing those institutions harms both. When government tries to become a church, it becomes coercive. When the Church imagines political control can accomplish spiritual regeneration, it becomes worldly.

Yet distinction does not require silence. A Christian can defend limited government precisely because of Christian convictions about human fallenness. A Christian can defend freedom of conscience because coerced worship is not worship. A Christian can defend equal justice because the powerful and powerless bear the same image of God. Biblical convictions can lead not only to moral boundaries, but to political restraint.

The Better Public Question

So the serious question is not, “How do we remove morality from government?” We cannot.

The serious questions are these: What moral vision is being advanced? Is it true? Is it just? Does government have legitimate authority in this area? Does the proposed law respect conscience and equal citizenship? Does it protect the weak without pretending the state can perfect the human heart?

Those questions are demanding because they force everyone to show their work.

The Christian should welcome that burden. We should not ask for a privileged shortcut. We should bring arguments, evidence, history, constitutional reasoning, compassion, and moral clarity into the public conversation. We should be prepared to persuade neighbors who do not share our premises. We should be equally prepared to defend their right to speak when they oppose us.

That is not surrender. It is ordered liberty.

The state should not establish our faith. It should not silence it either.

Pastors who have engaged in changing the failed policies of the prevailing culture have often been intimidated, by this relentless expression of “friendly fire.”  

For over 50 years pastors have been carpet bombed by the disdain of purists who hold to the age old and fallacious criticism, “You can’t legislate morality.” 

If Christian morality is banned from the public square, someone else’s morality will take its place. Pastors need not be muzzled pastors but can resist being silenced.

Government will always make moral judgments. The work of citizenship is to make those judgments more truthful, more just, more humane—and more respectful of the conscience that government did not create and therefore must not pretend to own.