After seeing the role that civil religion Christianity played in Wednesday’s events, I am all the more convinced that religious liberty is absolutely urgent for us as Baptist and evangelicals to prioritize. Why?

Religious liberty is much broader than just about the freedom to believe or act. It is about the relationship between eternal authority and temporal authority. Thus, in discussing religious liberty, we have to get to questions of jurisdiction. Jurisdictions assign roles.

The role of government is not to act as an instrument of salvation. At best, it indirectly serves the mission of the church. The state is a temporal, prudential, and pluralistic arrangement that restrains human ferocity for obtaining whatever common good can be negotiated.

Religious liberty is thus foundational to public theology because it helps clarify the jurisdiction and role of eternal and temporal authority. This is why in every class I teach, I make religious liberty an essential component to our engagement. It’s our Baptist heritage.

If we get religious liberty right, we actually get the proper distinctions between church and state and church and world right—which counteracts the confused outworkings of civil religion vis-a-vis Christian Nationalism.