Evangelicals and Catholics Together

Twenty-eight years ago, Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson gathered a group of Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars to form Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT). Their founding statement, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium,” was adopted on March 29, 1994. Analysis of the statement persists even to this day, as people of faith continue to grapple with the centrality of truth, desire for unity, and demands of faith.

Since 1994, Evangelical and Catholic scholars have produced ten more statements, a booklength retrospective titled Evangelicals and Catholics Together at Twenty: Vital Statements on Contested Topics (2015), and shorter statements on critical cultural issues, including “A Statement on Public Officials and Public Office” (2020) and “Statement on the New York State Abortion Law of 2019.”

In 2021, FIRST THINGS and the Colson Center reconvened ECT to deliberate about the responsibility of Christian citizenship in the twentyfirst century. After a series of discussions, the group began to draft a public statement, “Fear God, Honor the Emperor,” to be published this spring. We are pleased to share an excerpt below.

From time immemorial, the laws of men have sought to recognize and promote the pre-existing moral order, which is encoded into creation, as well as to honor that order’s eternal Source. Today, our political institutions usurp the role of the divine Author, asserting their authority over the most fundamental human realities, redefining and reordering them. Secularism encourages this idolatry. It removes religious authority from public life and, in so doing, claims to secure neutrality in civic affairs. We are told that this newly won neutrality brings religious freedom and allows for a social contract based on needs and interests shared by everyone, without regard to theological convictions. Yet, secularism’s promise has shown itself to be hollow. It is a metaphysical project with political consequences. Secularism claims that all goods worth pursuing are found in this life, and thus it sponsors a regime that requires us to conform to its purely immanent and this-worldly projects and ambitions. . . .

Our political inheritance is noble. The best of our constitutional and civic traditions draw upon Christian sources. But secularism has spent down the Christian inheritance of the West. It is urgent, therefore, to recover a biblical understanding of God’s authority in its two manifestations in the time between Christ’s ascension and his return in glory. The Christian tradition refers to “two swords,” two sources for the right ordering of the affairs of men. The temporal sword is used to ensure peace and tranquility in the civic realm, and the spiritual sword guides and governs souls toward the end of their salvation in Christ. The two swords are distinct, but both are required.