Episode Details

Most of us were raised to think of the public square as religiously neutral territory. School is just school. Law is just law. Science reports the facts and leaves the value judgments to us. Joe, Michael, and Nate spend this episode arguing that none of that holds up, and that Christians have paid a heavy price for believing it.

 

They start with what a worldview actually is and why nobody gets to opt out of having one. Underneath any reading of the world sit answers to a few unavoidable questions: who God is, what a human being is, where morality comes from, what history is for. Those answers don't vanish when a culture stops going to church. They get relocated. Secularism has its own answers, and it enforces them.

 

A good stretch of the conversation goes to where this shows up in practice: curriculum, legislation, news coverage, research funding, family life, politics, the arts. Along the way they draw a distinction that's easy to miss. Christians can and should use tools that unbelievers built. The trouble starts when they take on the foundations along with the tools.

 

The objections get their turn too. Can't we just meet on common ground? Isn't this too black and white? Does it mean Christians can't cooperate with anyone? And the one that comes up most often: isn't secular government neutral by definition? The answer to that last one is that every legal order enforces some moral vision. The only question is whose.