It bears pointing out that homosexuality and gay marriage are two distinct, though commonly conflated, issues. First, evangelicals must determine whether homosexuality is a sin and, second, whether that means that the state should ban homosexual marriages. The second  position does not necessarily follow from the first. Few evangelicals, Christian Reconstructionists excepted, believe that the state should enforce all biblical standards of behavior. It is possible to believe that a behavior is wrong but not support its criminalization. It’s hard to imagine modern laws criminalizing blasphemy, adultery, or poor attendance at church (all of which were penalized in Puritan New England), but other state-enforced, evangelical-supported moral norms remain, like strict bans on prostitution, drugs, and, until 2003′s Lawrence v. Texas, homosexuality. Among evangelicals, there are two categories of immoral behaviors: those which are considered wrong and should be banned by the state and those which are wrong but not deserving of state condemnation.

Interestingly, homosexuality appears to be shifting from the first category to the second, but gay marriage is not. For example, John Piper, a popular conservative evangelical author and the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, recently wrote a post which criticized the idea of gay marriage. Piper offers a traditional theological critique of homosexuality, citing Romans 1:25-27 and I Corinthians 6:9. Yet, he’s not a theonomist; he acknowledges that not all sins should be legally prevented, including pornography and even homosexuality itself, but he argues that the legal significance of marriage (tied to inheritance, taxes, and the like) requires a clear statutory definition. If gay marriage is codified, society will have institutionalized and sanctioned homosexuality. He writes, “The issue is not whether we block a sinful behavior, but whether we imbed [sic] it in our laws.” Piper would have the state permit homosexuality but ban gay marriage. His views represent the majority opinion among American evangelicals.

However, that kind of compromise does not satisfy other evangelicals. If you remember the statistics I mentioned earlier, a significant minority of evangelicals believe homosexuality to be wrong and oppose gay marriage but support civil unions as an alternative. Some left-leaning evangelicals, like Sojourners and its prominent founder Jim Wallis, have supported homosexual civil unions for some time. This does not make Sojourners or Wallis unqualified supporters of homosexuality. Recently the organization has been criticized by LGBT activists for not accepting homosexuality in full and, like Piper, they believe that marriage is foundational to American society and thus oppose homosexual marriage. Yet they believe that excluding homosexual citizens from the various civil, legal, and financial benefits which are only given to married people is a violation of homosexuals’ equality under the law with heterosexuals. Their solution is civil unions, which offer the benefits attached to marriage without the name itself. Speaking broadly, left-leaning evangelicals have lined up behind Wallis while right-leaning evangelicals, like Piper, oppose both civil unions and gay marriage. Until recently, support for civil unions appeared to be just another political litmus test between the two factions, an intractable issue with clear lines of division.

Nevertheless, a new option for evangelicals has emerged. Just this month, Thomas Kidd, a religious historian at Baylor University and a Southern Baptist, wrote a post for Patheos entitled, “Why Churches Should Stop Performing Marriages.” Kidd argues that Americans should extend the separation of church and state to marriage. He writes:

State-defined but church-performed marriage is a relic of medieval Christendom, or the idea that the functions of the church and of the state closely overlap. Some Protestant reformers, including the early Puritan founders of New England, rejected this intermingling of church and state. They saw marriage as an exclusively civil rite, and they refused to perform church weddings at all.

Yet today, most evangelical ministers happily serve as civil functionaries when they recite the words, “By the power invested in me by the state of…”. Kidd believes that this intermingling encourages a “harmful confusion” and leads “many people who otherwise make no serious pretentions to faith [to] still think that their marriage should be consecrated in a church with pews and stained glass.” This incentivizes church marriages for nominally religious couples who want the legal and financial benefits of marriage without having to seriously commit to a church. Kidd believes that evangelicals should stop “fighting to make the government defend a biblical view of marriage.” It’s “a losing battle precisely because the government can’t play the role of the church.” Evangelical ministers should perform matrimonies and leave marriage to the civil authorities. Marriage has become a cheap imitation of the real thing, a mishmash of tax writeoffs and shallow religiosity.

It’s plausible that Kidd’s opinion is informed by his expertise in the history of evangelicals during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Revolutionary America and during the Early Republic, many evangelicals, like Baptist minister John Leland, supported constitutional disestablishment at both the federal and state levels. Leland was not fond of the pre-Revolutionary system of established churches  in which a denomination (predominately the Congregationalists and Episcopalians) received a religious monopoly from the state while dissenting denominations (mostly evangelical groups like the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) were discouraged or even actively persecuted. Evangelicals allied themselves with humanist intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson and banned religious tests in the federal constitution and then defeated establishment state by state (Massachusetts was the last to topple in 1833).

Marriage, however, was not disestablished and, during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, the state attached a host of legal and financial privileges to the institution. Oddly enough, the collapse of the institution of marriage in the US came at the same time that marriage enjoyed its greatest level of formal government support. The state had instituted tax policies to try and encourage strong marriages but these incentives had little or even an adverse effect. State support may have vitiated rather than invigorated marriage.

Does that mean that removing state support for marriage might actually strengthen the institution of marriage? Although it may seem counterintuitive to modern day evangelicals,  removing state support for marriage might do just that. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, both prominent sociologists of religion, have argued extensively (see their brilliant book The Churching of America) that a religious free marketplace encourages vitality, innovation, and growth while state-protected religious monopolies cause stagnation, apathy, and decline. Indeed, contrary to the claims of Christian nationalists like David Barton, America has become steadily more rather than less religious over the past three hundred years. Finke and Stark argue that America’s exceptional religiosity among developed nations is a direct consequence of disestablishing religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By disestablishing marriage–severing the connection between state and church–might it also become a more meaningful and vital institution? Perhaps it’s still beyond the Pale of the evangelical imagination, but Kidd is just the latest in a long line of evangelicals to suggest an extension of the separation of church and state. The state can no more create healthy, biblical marriages than it can sustain healthy, biblical churches. Furthermore, if Finke and Stark’s “religious economies model” is any indication, disestablishing marriage may have a beneficial effect on the institution itself. People would no longer seek nominal marriages in order to gain legal and financial benefits. Matrimony would become a more exclusively religious institution and marriage a civil one.

Even more pragmatically, embracing the disestablishment of church and state in marriage could prevent a harmful anti-evangelical backlash in the future. If polling data is any indication, support for gay marriage has been steadily increasing and skews young and educated. If evangelicals continue to be the strongest opponents of gay marriage, they could one day find themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in Canada, where preachers are barred from speaking critically of homosexuality or gay marriage because ministers are representatives of both state and church.

John Leland’s 1776 warning of the consequences of a state-supported clergy remains timely:

“No man or set of Men are entitled to exclusive or separate Emoluments or Privileges from the Community but in consideration of Public Services.  If, therefore, the State provides a Support for Preachers of the Gospel, and they receive it in Consideration of their Services, they must certainly when they preach, act as Officers of the State and ought to be accountable thereto for their Conduct. . . . the Consequence of this is, that those whom the state employs in its Service, it has a right to regulate and dictate to; it may judge and determine who shall preach; when and where they shall preach.  The mutual obligations between Preachers and Societies they belong to . . . must evidently be weakened — Yea, farewell to the last Article of the Bill of Rights! [The fourth article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted in 1776].  Farewel (sic) to “the free exercise of Religion!”

Dr. Kidd, thanks for taking the time to introduce us to your latest book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. What is the basic premise of God of Liberty?

There is no historical topic more debated in America today than the role of faith in the American Founding. In God of Liberty, I show that religion was everywhere in the era of the Revolution, from days of prayer and fasting called by the Continental Congress, to the chaplains who served in Washington’s army, to the political principles of religious liberty and equality by God’s common creation of humankind. Unlike in today’s political arena, public principles of faith tended to unite Americans of very different personal beliefs.

Your book The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America was released in 2007. Did your decision to write about the role of religion in the American Revolution flow from your research on the Great Awakening? Was there a connection between the First Great Awakening and the Revolutionary War?

Yes, there is a connection between my research on the Revolution and on the Great Awakening. One of the last chapters in The Great Awakening deals with evangelicals’ reactions to the American Revolution, which served as a springboard to my new research on the Revolution. The connection between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution is much debated, and I deal with it head-on in the first chapter of God of Liberty. The Great Awakening did not cause the Revolution, but it certainly shaped the culture that produced the Revolution. Among other things, the Awakening put a powerful new emphasis on the dignity and rights of the individual before God. It represented the first major uprising in America against political authority, especially against the state-sponsored churches of the colonies, which many revivalists criticized as cold and lifeless. It gave many Americans a stronger sense that there were fundamental rights—especially religious liberty–on which the government should never intrude. And, as Harry Stout of Yale University argued more than thirty years ago, the revivals inaugurated a revolutionary form of popular rhetoric in America, where speakers addressed common people directly in biblical language they easily understood. That rhetorical style was adopted by leading Patriot orators such as Patrick Henry, who was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening in Virginia.

Do you see this book has having an audience both among the general public and among academics? What does the book have to say to each audience?

I would certainly hope that more than just academics would read God of Liberty, especially since I wrote it for Basic Books, which in my opinion is one of the best “trade” presses at producing engaging but intellectually robust books. For academics, especially those who study American religious history or the history of the American Revolution, I would hope that the book becomes a standard resource and course text for understanding the role that faith played in the Revolutionary era. For more general readers and students, I hope that God of Liberty will offer an entertaining and historically responsible answer to the question of faith and the American Founding. This debate has been filled with much sound and fury (on both sides) but has often missed the vibrancy and diversity of American belief in the Founding period.

For all the attention given to the American Revolution and especially the Founders, your book is one of the few general treatments of religion in the Revolution. What work still remains to be done on this topic?

I am sure that I have left many things undone in the book. Some topics I would like to know more about are the religious lives of Continental soldiers, and the religious dimensions of the Federalist/Antifederalist split.

Your book is rich in stories about people and in analysis of primary texts. Was there a story or a text that you found particularly useful or surprising in your research?

One of my favorite stories from the book is when the Baptist evangelist John Leland brought President Jefferson a 1200-pound block of cheese—the “mammoth cheese”—as an expression of appreciation from New England’s Baptists in 1802. Leland was thoroughly evangelical, yet he loved Jefferson, the Deist, because of his advocacy of religious liberty. Conversely, Jefferson believed in a “wall of separation,” yet he was comfortable with a strong public role for religion, as exemplified by Jefferson’s attendance at a church service, with Leland preaching, in the House of Representatives chambers the same weekend that the pastor delivered the cheese.

What were the implications for the Revolution and the new United States that the country was home to pluralism within Christianity, as well as a small but significant minority of Jews?

The Revolutionary era featured both religious diversity and religious strength, and those were the conditions that the Founders sought to protect and preserve in their church-state arrangements. Sometimes I think that the advocates of America as a “Christian nation” forget just how varied Americans’ faiths were at the time of the Founding, while modern secularists underestimate the pervasiveness of belief, as varied as it was.

In your conclusion you take a moderate position between people who mistake the Revolution as being completely secular and those who read too much orthodox Christianity into the Revolution. I was not surprised to learn that you’ve received commendations from reviewers like George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Harry Stout. I was surprised that Peter Lillback has recommended God of Liberty. How does your book speak into the current debate over the role of Christianity among the Founding Fathers?

I hope that my book will demonstrate that the extremes of the debate over religion and the Founding both overreach, in certain ways. There is no point in acting like all the major Founders—especially Franklin and Jefferson—were traditional Christians, but it is equally as silly to argue that the Founding was fundamentally “secular.” Even the most skeptical of the Founders, including Jefferson and Franklin,  believed that religion and morality were critically important for the preservation of “virtue” in the life of the republic, and would never have endorsed what we call a “strict separationist” position.

You also find revolutionary principles that are of use in politics today. How would you sum up the political point you’re making in this book?

On one hand, I am trying to show that the Founders would never have endorsed the notion of an entirely secular political sphere. On the other, I hope that traditional Christians will see that religious liberty and religious diversity did not negate religious vitality in the Founding period.

God of Liberty is available new at Amazon for just $17.79. If you’re interested in hearing Dr. Kidd speak on the role of religion in the Revolutionary War, his lecture at Indiana Wesleyan University can be viewed online.