Clear and Present Danger: Religious Liberty Under Assault

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Dr. Todd Williams

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 2/17/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Good afternoon friends and welcome again to another Stand in the Gap today. I am your host, Jamie Mitchell, and I believe today’s topic is essential for every believer, especially as we live in these unique and potentially troubling days. Our topic is religious liberty. Now, before you think of switching off, let me ask you a question. Do you attend a church? Do you support a Christian school or maybe your grandkids attend one. Are you and your kids thinking about adopting or even being involved in foster care? How about attending a Christian college or you have attended a Christian college and you’re a supportive alumni? Are you concerned about how the government might attempt to pressure them into walking away from their historic theological and biblical values? And how about you who are Christian business owners? You have decided to run your company based on biblical principles and could face some legal challenges in the days of ahead.

Well, if you fall into any of those potential categories, then this program is for you. Do not turn the radio off. Core to the founding of our nation was the deeply held belief and principle that allowing people of faith to have inherent freedoms to exercise those beliefs are vital and essential for our republic to function. Yet in the days in these days, there is pressures coming and bearing upon people of faith to be silent or forcing us to stop applying our beliefs to our own entities. And one of our concerns is that the people of God do not fully understand this issue and therefore cannot adequately defend this most important pillar in our nation’s ethos and to help us navigate this topic today is a friend of our program and returning guest Dr. Todd Williams, the president of Cairn University. Beyond his university responsibilities, Todd is a sought after speaker, writes often for various publications, and now can claim that he’s testified before a government commission on this very subject. Todd, we are so glad to have you back with us again and especially about this important topic. Welcome.

Todd Williams:

Thanks Jamie. It’s good to be with you. It’s great to be back on Standing in the gap today.

Jamie Mitchell:

Todd, I want you to share about your experience testifying before the Religious Liberties Commission, but before that I want to take a 30,000 foot view on this subject of religious liberty. Where did it come from? Why is it important? What is the significant historical background and the history regarding America? Why does it seem that this is under assault right now? Give us a primer on the topic of religious liberty.

Todd Williams:

Yeah, I think that’s a great place to start and as I’ve been in a number of contexts being interviewed on this or talking about it, I think that that’s actually a very important piece of this. Right away we want to talk about, well, as Christians, are we facing discrimination? Are our lives being interrupted or interfered with in some way by social, cultural, or political agendas? And we start talking about religious liberty in a way that almost as though someone’s stepping on our feet and we should push them off of it and it becomes another one of these sort of shoving matches over what I have the right to do or don’t have the right to do. And I think we missed something really important about religious liberty when we allow that to be our posture. Religious liberty is a founding principle. It’s baked in the cake in terms of the American founding, it was there at the very beginning for many of the colonists who came from the old world to the New decades and decades before the American War for Independence.

Religious liberty was embedded in that. You have folks coming from England and other parts of Europe who were fleeing religious persecution. They came to a new world, some of them to get clear of religious persecution and live their lives the way they wanted to according to their own faith. Others like the Puritans came to the new world to actually set an example for England to return to a more virtuous approach to society that was rooted in their Christian faith. And so this idea of religious liberty is not a new one. It’s not a 20th century fundamentalist phenomenon to give evangelical Christians more political power. It’s actually baked in the cake and one of the founding principles of the American Republic that people would have the right. It is also important, I think, Jamie, if I may to clear this up too, we’re not actually asking for a right from the government regarding religious liberty.

As I teach the civics and government class here at the university, one of the aha moments for students is to recognize that the founders both in the Declaration of Independence and the framers in the Constitution assumed natural unalienable rights, and this is one of them. I think the First Amendment kind of speaks for itself. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion for prohibiting the free expression thereof. They’re not giving us the freedom of religion. They’re assuming a right to religious liberty and are basically saying the government cannot interfere with that, cannot infringe upon it, cannot impede it. It’s actually there in the very beginning that people ought to have a right to live their lives according to their religious beliefs. And the founders are a pretty diverse group. I mean you’ve got Thomas Jefferson who’s removing every supernatural occurrence from his Bible and John Witherspoon who’s a Presbyterian minister, and Robert Roger Sherman who from Connecticut who may be one of the most Christian men on the convention at the declaration, at the signing of the Declaration in Pen.

Those individuals all regardless of the varying expressions of their religious liberty or their denominational commitments or their levels of conviction regarding the Christian faith and the gospel all believed in the role that religion serves and religious liberty serves in keeping society stable and functioning at an optimal level. The religious liberty issue is not something we defend those Christians. We have the right to do what we want. We actually defend it because the founders believed it was good for society. Religious liberty was necessary for a flourishing society. You needed to have the influence of moral conviction to have a society function in a virtuous way and to say, well, religious people have done bad things or religion has been led down a path that wasn’t helpful is not really a fair argument against religious liberty. It’s assumed that we have the right of freedom of religion and the government is obligated to protect that, right?

We’re not asking them to do something for us. We’re asking them to obey the laws of the country which are written to protect our religious liberty. But it’s a founding principle and it’s there for the good of society. It’s not just there for religious people to be protected. The founders believe this was necessary for flourishing society and I think one of the reasons that it’s under assault is because in the growing secularism of our day where we are so divided over a belief in a moral authority according to which we order our individual lives and order society, people are trying to eradicate faith and religion from influence in the culture in society. And so what’s the best way to deter religious or faith oriented influence in the culture in society is to exert political pressure on it, to move it to the margins or eradicate it altogether. I think that the assault on religious liberty is indirect relation to the rising secularism of subjectivism and relativism as a way of thinking morally, and I think that’s where this is coming from.

Jamie Mitchell:

As you can see, friends, without the freedom of religious expression, America would be a very different place. This is a founding principle. I like what Todd says. It’s baked in the cake and it’s not up for grabs. It’s not a new modern interpretation. When we return, I want Todd to share about his experience testifying in Washington and stating the case for religious liberty. Glad you’re with us today. Stand in the gap today. Well, welcome back. Our topic today is entitled A Clear and Present Danger, religious Liberty Under Assault, and our guest is the President of Cairn University, Dr. Todd Williams. Todd, this past year, president Trump established a commission on religious liberty to study the issue, the importance it is to our nation and even how it is being threatened. You had the unique opportunity to testify before that commission this fall, and I have a lot of questions about it, but first, how did that take place? How did you get invited and what was the nature of your testimony before the commission?

Todd Williams:

Yeah, it’s kind of very interesting how it all fell together because Cairn University here in southeastern Pennsylvania, we’ve come out of the Bible college movement. We’re a relatively small school in terms of footprint and I don’t think we’re on a lot of people’s minds in Washington dc. There are other schools that have much larger footprints and higher profiles, but we were reached out to by an individual who knew our provost to see if we would’ve any interest in participating in this opportunity to testify to the commission largely because we’ve been involved on a couple of fronts dealing with this issue of overreach by governmental departments and accrediting bodies. And so I think they knew particularly about our issue with the social work department some years ago and the closure of that program because of that accrediting bodies overreach into I think the indoctrination of a particular set of secular values.

And so I think that’s how I had written some pieces on that for the Martin Center on Academic renewal and some other things. So I think they knew we were out here and had dealt with this issue. The commission is actually under the Department of Justice, so it’s not with the Department of Education or anything, it’s under the Department of Justice, which is looking to see how religious liberty is being threatened and what are the practical ways that that can be addressed. So my segment, there were many people who testified, of course it was in the aftermath of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, and so one segment of the day was dedicated to that. There were some other things along the way, school choice and school vouchers. Our segment was dealing with the overreach of the government and accrediting bodies on the religious liberties, religious identity and religious expression in higher education.

So there was a rabbi from Jewish institutions in New York City, a Catholic priest from Michigan with some concerns about what was going on with their schools in that state. There was an attorney who actually was working on that case, and then I was representing Evangelical Christian higher education, so pretty broad group on the panel. We were just one segment of the day and I was representing one portion of the population concerned with this religious liberty issue, which is not unique to evangelical Christians by any stretch. The Jewish community is dealing with this as is the Catholic community with regard to their education institutions. So that’s how it came to us. Then there’s a whole process of getting vetted and going through, providing written testimony, and then you show up in Washington and it was held at the Museum of the Bible, which was very good, and the commission is a very diverse group of Christian and leaders and people of faith, and so it was a good time. I think it was worthwhile, but that’s how we got to it. I think they knew that we had been on the forefront of this issue recently and I think they were eager to hear what we had to say.

Jamie Mitchell:

Todd, the nature of the questions that were asked, the interest of the panel and the commission, were you surprised by any of the questions they asked and what was the nature of their interest in the issues of overreach into the evangelical colleges and likewise?

Todd Williams:

Yeah, I think what was interesting was whoever put together the panel did a really good job of trying to get those of us who were actually dealing with this challenge in front of the commission to say, Hey, here’s something you may not be thinking about and maybe I can unpack it this way. Prior to us, there was a segment on a Christian football coach who was shut down from expressing his faith in his context at a public school there was a Catholic public school teacher who was forced to remove a cruise to fix from her desk drawer, those kinds of things where you have people of faith in public context and is it or isn’t an infringement upon their religious liberty. I think what the commission was really surprised about was that places that were very clear in their commitments to issues of faith and in our case a very clear commitment as an evangelical institution with a statement of faith documented positions on human sexuality, on issues of life, on biblical authority, very clear declaration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the exclusive claims of Christ, very clear on who can work here and who cannot work here in terms of their faith and their alignment with the university’s mission and positions that an evangelical institution.

With all of that in place serving evangelical populations, a population that is actually seeking to be in an evangelical college or university, that somehow secular entities, accrediting bodies, licensing bureaus, government agencies were able to reach into those organizations. I think that they were surprised that we were actually facing those kinds of challenges. I mean, they had some good questions about where do you think this attack on religious liberty is coming from? And the testimony is all there on YouTube for that day in November when the commission met. You can watch all the segments. My point was that we need to understand, and I think most of the people on the commission understood this, that the issue of religious liberty right now is not a political one. It really is a reaction to our belief in biblical authority and ultimately God’s authority that governs the affairs of humankind.

There is a moral standard according to which we order our lives and we believe society should be ordered accordingly. And I think that I was given the opportunity basically to underscore this, that religious liberty is the founding principle. We’re not asking for a 21st century adjustment or intervention. This was embedded in the constitution and enshrined there that there’s an assumed right of religious liberty and expression and that it shouldn’t be messed with. And so I had a chance to speak to that and then just speak to our specific example here where an accrediting body that I think is overreaching everywhere overreach to basically say we expect your students in this particular academic program to believe certain things and to think certain things, and I think that’s out of bounds.

So that was something that the commission allowed me to speak to and I actually recommended that they perhaps consider investigating accrediting bodies and agencies that are actually looking to insert themselves into private institutions with very clear statements of belief to do indoctrination or values reorientation. I think that that’s an overreach, and I think it’s beyond the scope of the accrediting body and government agencies, authorities to do so. So I encourage them to perhaps think about that investigating into which of these agencies is actually, if you have an agency that says, well, we hold you accountable for basic skill competencies in a profession, but the learning competency begins with this, students must believe that x, y, Z, that is not a competency, that’s not a professional competency. That’s a matter of conviction and belief and values and we’re private institutions of faith protected under the first amendment of the Constitution and no one should be doing that.

Jamie Mitchell:

Todd, I would understand that people who are not believers or not Christians would view your testimony even having this commission. They’re not happy about it. But I want you to speak to this issue if you can briefly, and that is how has the Christian community responded to both you going on this commission and what you’re hearing? Because I would beg to say that probably there’s some Christians who are saying, why are we involved ourselves in this kind of dialogue? Is that happening on your front?

Todd Williams:

Yeah, I think it is. I mean received a lot of positive remarks from folks when we testified, even from people who may not agree with everything that I believe regarding politics and how that intersects with our faith and vice versa. But I think people saw that I was not really being political. I was speaking on the front that this is an assumed right protected under the law of the land and we should be permitted to exercise our freedoms in this way because the founders and framers believed it was good for society. I think that Christians react largely because we’re so divided over politics today that anything that is remotely seen as being positive about liberty, freedom, the constitution or the nation is necessarily that you’re throwing yourself behind the current administration or anything that you do that actually calls Christians to maintain the purity. Integrity of the gospel is an affront to this administration.

I think we’re so polarized over politics right now that we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees that we’re Christian people who have been sent to this city by God as his ambassadors, as exiled, and we should seek the welfare of the city to which God has sent us. That is we should be good stewards of our citizenship, our rights and responsibilities here to bring glory to God and to have a positive influence. And I think when Christians say we shouldn’t do things like testify before the President’s commission on religious liberty, I would want to know first, are these also Christians that think that we should be protesting a government action? Because you can’t really pick and choose and say you can’t be political this way, but you can be political that way, and I see a lot of that to be perfectly honest right now, we’re so divided, the emotions run so high, and my point on this was that we should not be arguing, and I don’t want to take us off track of this question, Jamie, but you and I have talked about this before. As a Christian, if they make the preaching of the gospel illegal or they make the assembling of ourselves together illegal, we’ll do what Christians have done down through the agency. We’ll break the law and go to prison and preach the gospel from there. That’s what the apostles did. This isn’t about us needing this in order to carry out our Christian call and we carry out our Christian calling from prison and from the fires of persecution and from authorization.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, Todd, hold that thought. When we get back, we’re going to talk about warning signs and even things that you’re talking about. Do not go anywhere with us. Stay with us here. Thanks again for giving us an hour of your day and trusting us to provide you with information, insight, and inspiration to live lives based on a biblical worldview and today’s program certainly fits that Bill. We’re looking at the topic of religious liberty, its history, importance, and how it’s being threatened today. Dr. Todd Williams is my guest. And Todd, as you were finishing up in that last segment, we were talking about how because of the political divide here in America, even Christians are being caught up in that and we’re losing sight. We’re losing the ability to discern really important issues such as the constitution and religious liberties and our rights as people of faith.

With that in mind, Todd, whether it’s the federal or state or local government or some agency, they’re not going to announce that they’re going to begin to stifle our religious liberties. It’s going to be subtle, it’s going to be covert, it’s going to be like a frog in a kettle. They’re going to turn up the heat slowly until we’re boiling in travail. Todd, there must be some signs or some things to watch for that could be helpful for our listener. I know you come from an academic issue, but can you weigh in generally speaking things that we should be looking for as potential threats to our religious liberty?

Todd Williams:

Yeah, I think again, because all these things, the cultural and social issues are all wrapped up around the political ones, and I really like what you said there about being discerning. If as Christians we’re supposed to be exacting with the scripture and rightly dividing the word of truth, then we should be no less discerning and careful with the issues of our day with the laws of the land. We should not be sloppy with our citizenship in this world, and we should be clear about what the gospel is and what the gospel is. And as I was saying, we should keep arguing that these things are good for society. We don’t do it so that our life will be easier. We do it because in a free society, this is essential. And so what you look for are those sort of infringements, and I’ll tell you a couple of the ones that start to pop up is when you start to see things in your churches, your Christian schools, your Christian ministries, your businesses where the government or licensing or accrediting agencies or I’m trying to think, even business associations or others where they’re trying to press us to change our language.

In other words, they’ll say, well, you can’t say that and you can’t say that, and they’ll actually zero in on certain words. Sometimes it is an issue of policy where they change something on a form or they change something like they’ll change.

I just heard one this year that was absolutely ridiculous. People taking the term mother off of a clinical health form, a prenatal clinical health form and putting the word birthing person in. When that’s happening, rest assured that is not being done for the purposes of expanding a social and cultural understanding of what a mother is. It’s done to actually go after our belief in biblical authority and the creators design that we were created male and female. And so what we look for is those kinds of overreaches or infringements upon our language. They actually want to start saying, well, you shouldn’t use this term. The word wife is an offensive term. Why do we have to make the distinction between men and women? Those are not just cultural issues trying to challenge cultural norms because those are rooted in a Judeo-Christian understanding. And for us as evangelicals in biblical teaching and authority, that’s the beginning of that.

You really can’t pray. One of the things going back to my testimony earlier, I was grabbed after my testimony by one of the commission members who was really surprised that an evangelical institution with very clear statements of what it believes would be pressured in this way. And I said, well, what’s interesting, I may have even said this in my testimony, I’m not advocating that Penn State teach an Old Testament class or a doctrine of sin class. I’m not advocating that a public university like Penn State or temple do what I do. What I am saying is you really shouldn’t tell us what we should believe in what we can and cannot teach to our own people. So I think anytime that Christians see that there is an infringement upon the right to their belief and the expression of that belief, that’s the warning sign and it is not wrong for us to take advantage of those rights.

The apostle Paul did it. He cited his rights as a Roman citizen. He continued to preach the gospel from jail, but he wanted to prolong his ministry and continue to have an impact for the cause of Christ. So he evoked and invoked his rights as a Roman citizen. So we have to watch out for this subtle pressure to begin to take the edge off of what we believe. And I think one of the first signs, Jamie, is they want us to take the edge off our language. And right now I think that’s around gender and sex, but I think it goes to other things, the belief in some sort of absolute morality. People always say this, they saying this fear, you can’t legislate morality. That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. We legislate morality all the time. It’s illegal to commit murder. That’s a moral legislation. What you can’t do is tell people what they should believe. So we’re not advocating for the government to force people to believe Jesus is the son of God. We just don’t want them telling us, we can’t say he’s the son of God because that’s an infringement on our religious liberty and our freedom of expression, both of which the founders assume to be natural human rights. So anytime we see someone sort of moving in that direction to curb our thinking, our beliefs or our expression, that’s the beginning of it.

Jamie Mitchell:

And Todd, part of that is the Christian understanding the danger of some simple compromises, and I want you to address this. Sometimes Christians don’t want to be seen as resistors or rebelling against authority, and some even would consider that what we’re going through with this infringement on our religious liberties is just a form of persecution and we just need to endure it. How should we approach this? Should we stand up when our constitutional rights are being threatened? Is it biblically right to defend religious liberties?

Todd Williams:

I actually think that you put your finger on what is maybe a source of the division that exists between Christians over this issue. Although as I was saying, I have people who say that we shouldn’t resist when our religious liberties are being infringed upon, but they want to resist when they disagree with say, the enforcement of immigration law or policies. So people are picking and choosing what they want to protest and what they want to resist. I think the question is, again, I think we’re on very good ground. If what we say is in order to be good citizens and neighbors, we have to defend the right to religious liberty because it is good for the world, it is good for society, then I think we’re on very, very good ground to say, look, this is for the children. This is for future generations and not just our own.

We actually believe there is a way in which the world should be ordered in what is right, that there is right and wrong, there is good and evil, and we should not allow ourselves to be silent when evil is called good and when wrong is called. Right. I don’t think the prophets of the Old Testament did that. I don’t think that the New Testament calls us to that kind of passivity, but again, we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for the other. And I think that if Christians are clear about that, that what we want is a civil society in which people’s freedoms are being maximized, where evil is being restrained, where good is being done, where people are permitted to flourish, and that doesn’t mean anything goes. It means that there’s a certain way to order our life in this world, and I think to say that we shouldn’t speak up is to not do what the apostle Paul did, which was speak up.

Now, it’s true that Jesus didn’t raise an army to confront the Romans, but he actually didn’t speak to that at all during his earthly ministry. It is true though that the Apostle Paul took advantage of his rights as a Roman citizen for the proclamation of the gospel. So I don’t think it is inconsistent with biblical Christianity to stand up for rights where they’re being threatened and it isn’t just this right of religious liberty. We should speak up on any rights that are being threatened because, and maybe this is a good thing to bold in the mix and maybe a future conversation. Jamie, we know you and I have talked about all of this stuff for years. We know that the gospel is the picture of ultimate freedom. Christ purchased us for us through his shed, blood freedom from sin and death, freedom from the grave that the gospel is the picture of perfect freedom and evil hates any expression of freedom, political, social or otherwise. And so we have to be clear as Christians that we’re for freedom because Christ has set us free from sin and death, and I think it’s important for us to be willing to speak up on that.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, Todd, the Christian community does not understand the word liberty. We try to make it equal to freedom. It’s not liberty is throwing off the evil that tries to oppress us, and then it leads to our freedom. That’s why religious liberty is pushing off the bounds, pushing off the bondage and allowing us to do. One of the things that I’ve learned is that you even have to educate the secular minds on this issue. I remember years ago, our church, church buildings don’t have taxes usually on the property, but the city we were living on made a big deal that they were going to go after the churches and religious institutions. And I wrote an editorial stating why historically churches were not taxed. And I basically said, if you tax our church, here are the programs and the things we’re going to have to stop doing that benefits our community.

And quickly, the mayor and the other people began to back off because they saw that it was a good thing to give freedom to churches and ministries to do what they’re doing. This has been a great conversation. When we wrap up, I want Todd to give us some steps as believers, as Christian leaders on how to keep protecting our liberty and to do it in a godly way. Don’t go anywhere. As we finish up today standing the gap, this has been another fantastic hour, but all good things come to an end. Dr. Todd Williams, president of Cairn University has been our guest and we’ve been discussing religious liberty and the assault on it. Todd, I want you to discuss some practical ways that we can protect our liberties and be intentional about making sure that we have some safeguards in place. But I want to take a moment if you wouldn’t mind, and weigh in on last month’s invasion of a church’s worship service by anti-ice protestors. Here we see a clear violation of the law. My guess is that you would say that those protestors needed to be prosecuted for no other reason, but to affirm our first amendment rights and to let it be known that religious liberty is not up for grabs. Am I right on that? And what perspective do you have on that event that took place?

Todd Williams:

Yeah. I would say that if you believe in the rule of law and you believe that society must be one that is ordered and functions according to the law, that this needs to be prosecuted, it doesn’t need to be cross prosecuted because they were mean to us as Christians, it needed to be prosecuted because it’s a clear violation of our first amendment rights, the law of the land and other laws as well. Now, that is to say, I think that they can be forgiven. The Christians who are in that room and all of us should forgive those that know not what they do, that kick against the goads that seek to harm the church without knowing that they’re blind spiritually and haven’t been drawn to God by his grace. And so forgiving them is one thing, but I do think prosecution is a legal and civil matter that needs to actually be done in order to keep things moving in the right direction with regard to the rule of law and order and freedom and rights and that right prosecuting these individuals under that approach secures the rights of those we don’t agree with as evangelical Christians.

And I think that is critically important. Look, this isn’t just a religious liberty issue. The Faith Act of 1994 under the Clinton administration, freedom of access to clinical entrances was designed to actually keep people safe in these kinds of settings. And it wasn’t just limited to prenatal clinics or hospitals or medical clinics. It was actually extended to religious institutions and houses of worship. And so when you actually think about this, this is a clear invasion of private space for political reasons, and I cannot imagine a single situation under which a group of evangelical Christians would go into a gay rights support group or even on a religious institution’s campus that is maybe more liberal on that particular issue, that had a group that was affirming L-G-B-T-Q individuals than L-G-B-T-Q rights that Christians would walk in and accuse them of being fake Christians and interrupt the meeting that they wouldn’t face prosecution.

I mean, we have to actually recognize that this is an invasion of private space. It wasn’t just a protest. If they wanted to protest, they could have stayed outside. And it’s tricky because churches are open doors and you want people to come in, but this was clearly a hostile act. They were not coming in for the purposes of inquiry or interaction. They came in to actually interrupt and to protest and to create a violent atmosphere because they were emotionally charged up about something they disagreed with, and they targeted Christians, and we can forgive them and we can endure that. But we should be clear that wanting this to be prosecuted is for the good of society and good of the social order, not just good for us as Christians. It’s good for everyone, and we should be clear about that,

Jamie Mitchell:

Todd, when that happened, immediately, I said to my wife, I said, every imam, every priest, every rabbi should rise up because if they can do it to us, then they are open game. It’s something you said earlier about this principle of religious liberty. It’s to provide a mutual respect for people of faith because our nation believed we’re a better society when there’s mutuality of respect in our faith expressions and that when that happens, it’s good for society. Now we have just a few minutes left. Todd. What kinds of things can God’s people do to consistently defend and uphold our nation’s founding principle of religious liberties? And I especially want you to speak to our leaders, our pastors, our school administrators, ministry leaders. What practical things can we do to uphold religious liberties?

Todd Williams:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question, and I think one of the first things that we need to actually spend some time doing is to get ourselves educated, to get of foundational knowledge of civics and government, to know the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, to understand, to read on American history and American founding, to get a sense of who we are, where we came from, and what our founding principles are. I think to simply wade into a political disagreement without that foundational understanding about the land in which we live is actually to weaken your argument because it looks like you’re simply defending yourself because you want the world to operate according to your understanding and not according to someone. So I think the more we know about what America is, the form of government, why things are done this way, the balance of powers, the laws that are there, the fact that the Bill of Rights are all worded in the negative, they’re not giving us our rights.

They assume these rights are natural rights, and the government is charged with the responsibility of protecting them. You’re arguing from a different platform, and I think that it’s more effective, so we have to become knowledgeable of that. Second, I think we have to tighten up our own theology and understanding of what the gospel is and isn’t what the church is and isn’t. We have to be careful not to become politicized, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about politics. That’s the thing that always gets me about this is we somehow think that in our attempts to be Christians in this world and not become politicized, that somehow we don’t have to care about, we shouldn’t care about politics. There’s a way of understanding. I think that goes back to reading what the church has done historically on these issues. One of the first big Christian works was two cities, two loves on the Christian’s relationship to the world.

We should be clear in our understanding theologically and biblically about how to exercise this dual citizenship. So those two things are absolutely critical. And then I think for leaders especially, there’s a difference between conviction and rage. There’s even a difference between outrage and rage. I think we have to check our emotions that we are not simply angry because we don’t like what happened. That’s actually what the other side does all the time. We get angry because something happened we disagreed with, or something happened that we didn’t think was fair or we didn’t like or made us uncomfortable or scared us. We have to be careful. Our outrage should be based on what is right and what is just and what is true. And so if we’re thoughtful, then we can act with conviction and even emotion, but not to the point where we’re acting out of rage because something happened that we don’t like or scared us.

And so that fight or flight kicks in. We’re actually acting with the force of our convictions because we’ve thought about it. And I think that’s really important when we speak on these issues that we’re not simply, it’s not simply a flare up. I was telling my students the other day that the founding is not an angry mob that all of a sudden erupts on the streets. It is a decades long process that leads from the stamp act to the first shots fired, which includes the Boston massacre and the bombardment of coastal cities. The founders were not people who just got mad because someone kicked them in the shins. They were actually acting with the weight of their convictions. And we should do that as Christians, but we should be careful not to fight angry. We should be measured, we should be thoughtful. We should have our emotions in check and be self-controlled, and we should speak, we should definitely speak when we see wrongs being done. We should speak up on these issues when the government or the nation or the culture is behaving in a way that isn’t according to what is just and true and right.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Todd, bless you. Thank you for leading on this issue for evangelicals and for Christian academic institutions. Hey, I want to encourage you, I’m a proud alumni of Cairn University, and if your kid goes that school, they will have Dr. Williams on a class of citizenship and understand the constitution. Encourage you to check out Cairn University these days. We need courage, friends, but courage must be used and act upon.