From the book God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics ©2000 by Stephen L. Carter. Reprinted with the permission of Basic Books, New York. All rights reserved.
The simple and dear message that the religious generally—and Christians particularly—must not allow the world to forget is this: God is present. God has not died or gone off on vacation or lost interest in his creation and the human beings he created. There is no direction in which we can turn, no philosophical shield behind which we can cower, no constitutional Judgment we can assert, to evade God's exacting gaze. There is no structure we can erect that God cannot topple, no physical law we can discover that God could not change, no ethical argument we can design that God could not refute. From God's eternal presence, we should learn humility.
The religious must not retreat before the evangelizing armies of the secular. We should neither settle for reducing our faith to the "God of the gaps" condemned by Bonhoeffer, nor accept the bizarre proposition that religion is wholly private, thus not entitled to a place at the democratic dinner table where we squabble over serious matters. We should resist the pressure to "translate" the teachings of our faith into a less powerful and untranscendent secular language that is designed to forestall the radicalism of the outsider's ideas. By insisting on God's presence, the religious can become conscientious objectors to the burgeoning effort to conscript the entire nation into the service of the bland yet dangerous ethic of self-fulfillment, an ethic that long ago claimed both major political parties. Consider: When was the last time the presidential nominee of a major party, instead of promising to give us what we want, at no charge, instead said to us something like: "We have important work to do together. It is hard work. It is going to cost us. It will demand sacrifices. But it is work that must be done." The answer is that no candidate would dare talk to us that way, not in this era that celebrates the fulfillment of the self above all.
