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“Deagon feels justified in speaking of a “Christian natural law,” which is rooted in Christian theological convictions and yet is also accessible to non-Christians since it is revealed in nature. Chapter 3 examines the work of several writers—both Christians and non-Christians—who present natural-law theories allegedly independent of whether God exists. Deagon argues that such attempts are ultimately impossible and that these writers have not avoided theology. Natural law theory, he claims, is intrinsically theological and thus never “theologically neutral” (62). In chapter 4, Deagon proposes that the foundational theological principles of love, the true, and the good form the content of Christian natural law….
Part 2 argues that Christian natural law is foundational for religious freedom, understood through these ideas of the good, truth, and love, respectively. In chapter 5, Deagon claims that religious freedom encourages people to pursue the good of religion, whose ultimate end is the beatific vision, that is, intimate eschatological communion with God. Religious freedom, Deagon says, also promotes the common good of our earthly societies by respecting and promoting inherent human dignity. Chapter 6 argues that religious freedom is good because its goal is pursuit of truth, and more specifically of true religion, which is knowledge of God and reconciliation with him. Finally, chapter 7 contends for religious freedom because love does not try to compel people to belief. “Coerced religion is not true or good religion”

Deagon is correct about a number of important big-picture issues, in my judgment. He is right to insist that natural-law theorists cannot avoid certain kinds of theological judgments, even if they avoid speaking about God. God is the creator and upholder of the natural order, after all, and the law it communicates is his. We can be grateful that the content of the natural law—such as the immorality of murder and theft—impresses itself upon non-Christians, and Christians do well to take advantage of that as they participate in moral conversations in public life. But no one can really understand any law without accounting for the authority behind it. One might consider how ridiculous it would be to develop a comprehensive account of American law while trying to remain neutral on whether the United States Congress and Supreme Court actually exist.

Deagon is also correct to note the many important continuities in the natural-law theologies of different Christian traditions. With respect to the medieval theological inheritance, the way early Protestant writers viewed natural law was more similar to how they viewed the doctrine of Christ’s two natures in one person than to how they viewed the doctrine of justification. That is, they thought natural law was a Christian idea they could largely embrace from the earlier tradition without need for major reform. Whether Deagon has too quickly elided Roman Catholic and Reformed versions of natural law, however, is a valid question.

Perhaps most important is that Deagon is correct to defend religious liberty and deserves commendation for taking up the cause.

Nevertheless, several drawbacks impede the book’s overall effectiveness…”

First, the authority problem. The fact that the Moral Law is universal does not mean every office has a universal commission to enforce it. Authority is always delegated authority, and delegated authority always comes with a specific scope. A father has genuine authority, but only over his own household… not his neighbor’s. A church session has genuine authority, but only over its own congregation. A magistrate has genuine authority, but the sword was given for civil justice between men, not for adjudicating the condition of a man’s heart before God. Nowhere in Scripture or in the Westminster Standards is the argument made that the magistrate holds a complete and unlimited commission to enforce everything the Moral Law demands of everyone. Baird’s syllogism assumes what it needs to prove.

Second, the pagan model itself is disqualifying. The Greeks and Romans didn’t enforce religious adherence because they cared about the heart. They enforced it to keep the gods from getting angry and destroying the crops. It was a purely transactional arrangement… public compliance in exchange for divine favor. There was no separation between first table issues and Caesar because there was no concept of the soul’s genuine relationship with God being distinct from civic duty. That is not natural law working correctly. That is paganism doing exactly what paganism does.

The Puritans understood this, and it’s part of why the 1788 revisers did what they did. True religion requires genuine faith. Genuine faith cannot be manufactured by the sword. If a magistrate coerces First Table adherence, he isn’t producing Christians… he’s producing hypocrites. He is actually violating the Moral Law by compelling men to perform false worship. The Reformed tradition has always insisted that this jurisdiction belongs to the church, not the state. The church holds the keys. The state holds the sword. Those are different instruments for different ends.

So when Baird points to the ancient world as evidence that magisterial promotion of religion is baked into natural law, he’s appealing to a model where to be one of Caesar’s subjects was to be under Caesar’s religious authority. The 1788 revision was written specifically to reject that fusion.

Hart is right that the 1788 revision deliberately narrowed the magistrate’s authority. The changes to WCF 23:3 removed the explicit duty to suppress “blasphemies and heresies,” and the deletion from WLC 109 of “tolerating a false religion” as a forbidden sin was not an accident. These were conscious editorial decisions by men who had watched state-church entanglement produce oppression and wanted to correct it.

But Hart defended that position poorly, and it cost him.

Rather than simply walking through what the American revisers actually changed and why, Hart kept retreating to historical pluralism and prudential arguments… “look how well religious liberty worked for Jewish Americans,” “it’s just not realistic,” and so on. Those aren’t bad observations, but they’re not confessional arguments. And when he took an exception to WLC 108 rather than arguing that the duty to “remove monuments of idolatry” belongs to individuals and the church acting through spiritual means rather than to the civil sword, he practically handed Baird the moral high ground. He made it look like he’s the one departing from the Standards, when the better argument is that the Standards themselves, properly read together, already limit the magistrate’s scope.

Then there’s the moment around the 58-minute mark that really stood out to me. George asks Hart why America is losing the social fabric the founders built. Hart’s answer is basically “world wars, the Cold War, the New Deal, government got too big.” And then he explicitly says he doesn’t blame it on religion or a lack of religion.

That’s a missed opportunity, and I think there’s a more precise answer hiding right inside Hart’s own framework.

The reason the system isn’t working isn’t simply that government got big. It’s that government got big in a specific direction… it started subsidizing lifestyles and behaviors that natural law and God’s created order would otherwise have filtered out on their own. America was built on something close to meritocracy, and meritocracy works because God designed the created order to generally favor virtue. Unvirtuous behavior carries real consequences. Drug addiction, sexual chaos, fatherlessness, and financial irresponsibility are genuinely costly ways to live. Societies that normalize them tend to shrink… and we mean that literally. Birth rates collapse. The people most committed to the unvirtuous lifestyle are also the least likely to replace themselves. People watching the wreckage tend to course-correct.

That self-correcting mechanism only works if the consequences are real.

When you take the wealth generated by virtuous, productive people and use it to insulate unvirtuous lifestyles from their natural consequences, you break the feedback loop. Trans ideology would not survive without massive institutional subsidy from a society built by heterosexual families and procreation. No-fault divorce and single motherhood at scale would not be sustainable without the wealth transfer mechanisms of the welfare state propping them up. The drug addict survives because a virtuous society keeps him alive long enough to recruit others.

The founders didn’t build a system that required the magistrate to act as an arbiter of First Table laws. They built a system where natural law, properly allowed to function, did a lot of that work organically. What we have now isn’t the failure of that system. It’s the deliberate suppression of it. The magistrate’s job isn’t to coerce piety from the top down… it’s to stop using the Second Table as a funding mechanism for the enemies of the First….



Keys and Swords

The place to settle this debate isn’t in the practice of the early American Republic. Baird is right that Sabbath laws persisted well after 1788, and he’ll use that practice to argue that the revisers never intended what Hart and others claim they intended. That’s a fair point as far as it goes.

But practice doesn’t rewrite text. And the text is clear.

The American revisers didn’t just quietly let the old language sit. They went into WCF 23:3 and cut the explicit duty to suppress “blasphemies and heresies.” They went into WLC 109 and cut “tolerating a false religion” from the list of sins forbidden by the Second Commandment. Those are not accidents or oversights. Those are editorial decisions made by men who knew exactly what they were removing and why. If they intended to preserve the magistrate’s coercive authority over First Table issues, the single easiest thing in the world was to leave that language alone. They didn’t.

Baird’s move is to say WLC 108 preserves the duty because it was left untouched… that “removing monuments of idolatry according to each one’s place and calling” still applies to the magistrate. But that argument only works if “place and calling” for the magistrate still includes First Table coercion. The revisers defined that calling in WCF 23, and what they wrote there doesn’t include it. You can’t use 108 to smuggle back in what 23 and 109 explicitly took out.

The magistrate’s job is to execute justice between men, protect the innocent, punish the wicked, and keep the civil peace so the gospel can go out freely. That is a genuinely noble calling. But the First Table of the law was never his to enforce.. The church has keys. The state has a sword. Those are different tools for different jurisdictions, and the revisers knew the difference.

That’s not R2K liberalism. It isn’t Marcionism. It’s just reading what was actually deleted… and asking why.