July/August 2004

William Wilberforce's legacy was possible for two reasons. First, he was a committed Christian. Second, he was also a member of the British Parliament. Because of the first, he had a burning passion against the institution of slavery. Because of the second, he was perfectly placed to do something about it. For seventeen straight years he introduced a measure to abolish slavery and failed every time. On his eighteenth attempt, the measure passed. Wilberforce lived to see the slave trade abolished in the entire British Empire a month before his death.

A conversation between Senate Chaplain Barry Black and Liberty editor Lincoln Steed.

Close to 200 people attended the annual Religious Liberty Awards Banquet sponsored by Liberty magazine and the International Religious Liberty Association (IRLA), in cooperation with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

leaders have been pressing public claims that the United States has been a Christian nation since its beginning. Their argument is that the Founders of the nation were Christians, and that they wrote their Christianity into the Constitution and intended for this to be a Christian nation.

In the days of the early church they looked at the government—they looked at the dominant societal system, the dominant political economic system, and had a name for it. They called it Babylon. You say, “Are you suggesting that the United States is Babylon?”

In the summer of 1954 Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had a problem: what to do about powerful anti-Communist organizations that threatened his Senate reelection. The answer proved amazingly simple.

During Jefferson’s eight-year term in office, and in the ensuing eight-year tenure of James Madison, religion and the churches managed not only to survive but even to multiply on a grand scale. Neither president worried about the growth of religion, but only about maintaining its freedom.

Separation of church and state means a lot of things. But it does not mean that the faithful have no voice in the public square. It certainly does not relieve believers from urging government to act with wisdom, justice, and righteousness. And it clearly should not bar personal involvement in matters of law and public policy.