Christians live in a twofold regime. They support the visible church with tithes and offerings and they respect God’s servant Caesar (Rom 13) by paying taxes but in a Republic Christians have a right and even a duty to organize in private societies and to seek to influence civil polity and policy for the common good. It is not in the interests of a liberal education for idealogical zealots to ban genuine ideological diversity from campus. Who is seeking to ban the Marxists from campus? No one. Why should religious groups, who still believe their historic faiths, be singled out?

In (1559) Institutes 3.19.15 Calvin wrote that God has instituted a “twofold government in man” (duplex esse in homine regimen). This truth means that we have a legitimate interest in both sacred and secular spheres. By distinguishing between a sacred and secularspheres I do not intend to imply in any way that Christ is Lord over one but not over the other or that the Christian is obligated to God in one but not in the other. Rather, I intend to say that God rules over both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical spheres, in which Christians live under God’s authority, in distinct ways.

It might help if we distinguish between secular and secularist. The latter seeks to deny, obliterate, or suppress the ecclesiastical and the spiritual. Though it is frequently derided, the distinction between the secular (that which is common, on a practical level, between believers and non-believers) and the sacred (that which is unique to Christians and particularly to the Christian church) has solid roots in the Reformed tradition. E.g., Westminster Confession 1.6 speaks of those things that “common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence…” as distinct from “sacred functions” (WCF 23.3).

The Second Helvetic Confession makes this very distinction in chapter 19: “…that is, to take it from the common and ordinary use, and to appoint it to a holy use.” This use of the distinction between the “secular” (common) and “sacred” (set apart) occurs frequently in the Reformed explanations of the sacraments in theologies and in the confessional documents. This distinction is hard to avoid. After all, if everything is sacred, then nothing is sacred and clearly there are sacred matters.

As citizens with obligations before God to both spheres Christians ought to take seriously their duties to the civil magistrate. In the American, constitutional Republic, citizens vote, they serve in office, and they advise their legislators and other officers. On a practical level, these acts are common to Christians and to non-Christians even if with epistemology (how we know what we know) and theology in view we might explain those acts very differently.

One area that ought to be a matter of growing concern for Christians (and other religious folk) is the attempt by some in our society to use administrative and bureaucratic positions to silence views with which they disagree. Such impulses are fundamentally un-American and unjust. One egregious example of this drive to silence dissent is the recent decision by the Cal State University system to “derecognize” Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF).

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