An excerpt from an address given by Tribune Founder Noel Smith at a meeting of the Fundamental Baptist Congress of North America and subsequently published in The Biblical Faith of Baptists: Book IV, Regular Baptist Press, 1971.
As a Christian citizen of the United States I not only have privileges, I have obligations. I have the obligation to take as active and intelligent and practical a part in government as any other citizen. I have the obligation, constitutional and moral, to get “mixed up” in politics. I have the obligation to get out where there is cursing and drinking and gambling and do my duty as a citizen. Seventy-five percent of the corruption in this country today is due to the practical indifference of lazy, cowardly, flabby, “built-up” saints who don’t want to risk soiling their soft white hands by getting into politics and taking a practical stand for what is decent and right. Half of them don’t even vote. They say they are waiting for the Lord to come and “clean up the mess.” They conveniently forget that the Lord taught that they should be busy while He was away, and when He came. And if we shouldn’t be busy about our citizenship, upon which depends the very foundation of civilization and the future of our children and grandchildren, what should we be busy about?
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Christian citizenship is involved in the basic national issue confronting us today. … That issue is this: Can there be any happiness without liberty, any liberty without self-government, any self-government without constitutionalism, any constitutionalism without morality, and any of these without stability and order?
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This issue must be faced, debated, and resolved by men and women of good will, intelligence, reason, intellectual capacity and integrity, a genuine love for their country, and a deep concern for the kind of America their children and grandchildren are to grow up in.
And on this basic and decisive issue, if Christian citizens do not exercise in every practical way their privileges and obligations of citizenship, then they should be decent enough to keep their mouths shut about the religious, moral, and political depravity and degeneracy that surrounds them.
Christian citizens should be both thinkers and dowers. This country was founded and constitutionally established by men who were both thinkers and doers. To think without doing is worthless, and to act without first thinking is to make the condition worse.
Christians have a habit of going from one extreme to another in exercising their privileges and obligations of citizenship. Either they want the country reformed from top to bottom in a week, or they want to leave the whole mess for the Lord “to clean up when He comes.”
Civil government is not that simple. In the first place, civil government was not established by God for Christians exclusively. God loves men and women who are not Christians. God loves heathens. He loves pagans. God established civil government in the interest of the human race.
Therefore Christians should not take the position that we should have none but a Christian government. I wouldn’t want to live under a government by preachers. In the first place, half of them would hang the other half before sundown — for the glory of God. And I suspect I would be on the hanging end. The best Christian on earth may know nothing about the philosophy of civil government. In government Christians have failed about as often as non-Christians.
Benjamin Franklin wasn’t a Christian. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a Christian. Willam Howard Taft was a Unitarian. Mr. Taft wasn’t one of our great Presidents. William Jennings Bryan said that he went into office by a majority and went out with universal consent. But Mr. Taft was an able Secretary of War, a wise administrator, and he was one of the great Chief Justices.
William Howard Taft was an American. He believed in and loved his country. He was a man of principle. He believed that the alternative to constitutionalism was exactly what we have today — anarchy.
I will vote for such men of character and patriotism, whether they are Christians or not.
And why? Because many professing Christians are not good Americans. And a good American is not necessarily a Christian — as I wish he were. You can be a devout Christian and know nothing about law and medicine and government.
I am saying that under the governments of the United States and Canada, Christian citizens have the constitutional privilege to participate in civil government in every practical way. I am saying that they not only have the constitutional privilege, they have the constitutional and moral obligation to do so.
But I am saying, at the same time, that Christians have the obligation to be intelligent participants. They have the obligation to be versed in the philosophy of civil government. They have the obligation to understand and appreciate the distinction between civil government and Christianity.
But again, such knowledge and intelligence is completely worthless unless the Christian citizen gets into the main stream of the life of his country and plays a practical part in government. This means, again, that the Christian citizen has got to get out in the mud and dirt, in an atmosphere of cursing and gambling and drunkenness, and do battle with the forces that are destroying the very foundations of the institution of civil government. I don’t mind smelling like the Devil’s crowd if I get the smell by fighting them. I had rather have that smell on me than the smell of a theological beauty shop.