Dr. Voddie Baucham and the Separation of Church and State

Dr. Voddie Baucham,  pastor of preaching at Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas, discusses the often misunderstood idea of the separation of church and state with our good friends at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).  

The concept of the “wall of separation between church and state” has been misrepresented by ALCU, and too many Americans believe that this metaphor is found in the U.S. Constitution. A quick read of the Constitution should dispel this myth, which has wreaked such havoc within American politics, and yet it persists.  

In the video below, Dr. Bauchman speaks to how the lies of our culture have infected pastors and churches today, and how we have failed in our Christian responsibility to engage and influence the culture.

From the video:

You talk to people about pastors addressing political issues and their immediate response is that “the Church doesn’t have any business in the political arena.” Now, that’s a very new idea. You know anything about the history of America, the history of the church, you know that that’s not been the case. We’ve always understood that as our culture faced these issues, that it’s the church that is uniquely equipped to address these issues. 

But there’s an irony there, I believe, in our context. And that irony is, pastors stand up now in their pulpits, in our culture, and spout psychology left and right and nobody ever says, “Hey, this is not the place for psychology.” Why do we believe it’s not the place for politics but that it’s okay for it to be the place for psychology? I’ll tell you why. Because the other side has been effective in causing us to believe in this mythological separation of church and state that somehow makes it inappropriate for the church to have any say in what it is that the State does or thinks. Or how the State acts.

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The Bible does speak to every issue in life, and our political issues are informed by our theology. There’s no such thing as a politician or a political issue that is not theological. You cannot do politics without theology! So we have to break this false dichotomy.

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“Let me put it this way. Nobody would have 50 or 100 years ago, shied away from dealing with homosexuality in those passages in the Bible that deal with homosexuality. Nobody would have shied away from dealing with marriage in those passages that deal with marriage. And nobody would have said that those passages were somehow political. Well now all of a sudden, the government comes in, walks onto our territory, and because the government has walked onto our territory, we now say that it belongs to them… They don’t get to do that! They cannot come into our territory and then say that we’re wrong for speaking about it. These issues are not just political issues, these issues are Biblical, theological issues, but beyond that, even issues that are political issues have biblical and theological underpinnings.”

To learn more about the history of this myth and its effects on American culture, read this article from The Heritage Foundation, titled The Mythical ‘Wall of Separation’: How a Misused Metaphor Changed Church-State Law, Policy, and Discourse.