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4. The Church and Liberal Democracy:
The Moral Limits of a Secular Polity
1. Christian Social Ethics in a Secular Polity
It has become commonplace that we live in a secular world and society.
But attempts to describe and assess the significance of being “ secular” are
notoriously controversial.1 I have no intention of adding further fuel to that
particular debate. Rather I want to concentrate on a more limited, but I think
no less important, set of challenges a secular polity, such as liberal democ
racy, presents for Christian social ethics.2
By calling attention to the secular nature of our polity I am not trying to
provide or defend a theory about what it means to live in the ‘‘modem world ’’
or to be a “modem woman or man. ” All I mean by secular is that our polity
and politics gives no special status to any recognizable religious group.3
Correlatively such a policy requires that public policies be justified on
grounds that are not explicitly religious.
American religious groups have been particularly supportive of this
understanding of the secular nature of our polity, in that it seems to allow for
the free expression of religious convictions without limiting any one group.
Of course particular religious groups have in fact been discriminated against
socially and politically, but such discrimination, we feel, is not endemic to
how our polity should work. Moreover some interpret the secular nature of
our polity, that is, our government’s acknowledgment of its noncompetency
in religion, as a profound confession of the limits of the state appropriate to a
recognition of God’s sovereignty or as a realistic understanding of human
sinfulness.4
This positive evaluation presents a decisive challenge to Christian social
ethics that we have seldom understood. Even as Christians recover the pro
found social significance of the Gospel, they find that the terms of expression
and justification of those convictions must be secular. Many Christians as-
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