A Deal With the Devil
R.C. Sproul on Christians and Politics, Part Two
“In a sense, we have made a deal with the Devil. We have agreed to practice our faith, as it were, on a reservation: that is, removed from the public square. We are told that as long as we keep our faith private and personal and do not intrude into the public arena, we will be able to exercise our First Amendment rights in the exercise of religion. If we agree to keep our religion private, then all the financial support we give to the church will remain tax deductible. We are forbidden by law to support in the church any political candidate, based on the axiom of the separation of church and state. Yet there is not a single word about such separation in the Constitution of the United States or on the Declaration of Independence. That phrase found its origin in a private comment by Thomas Jefferson, who meant that no one denomination or religion should be established as the state church. In our day, separation of church and state has come to mean the separation of the state from God. God is to have nothing to do with secular affairs of government. Nothing could be further from the purposes upon which this country was founded. We can argue indefinitely as to whether our founding fathers were Christians or Deists, but one thing is certain - they embraced theism. They believed that the government is to be under God.”
R.C. Sproul, Acts: An Expositional Commentary (Sanford: Ligonier Ministries, 2019), 222-223.
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