the Declaration's principles and argument refute the claims of the Secularists who would kick God out of our politics, laws, and customs. Nor do they support the claims of those Christians who proclaim that our regime is founded on the Gospel or its Christian principles. Compatibility is one thing; identity is another.Our regime does not recognize a triune God whose essence is love. Our regime is ordered to freedom and justice, not to the advent of the Kingdom of God. Nor does our regime command either love of God or love of neighbor as does the Gospel. Finally, Christ founded a Church, not a polity. Salvation is to be found only in Christ and through Christ. It is not to be found in politics, or through politics, or through the founding or reconstitution of the political and social order. That belief is idolatry.
(Sasseen explicitly recognizes that the folks he's arguing with --and by extension Huckabee, whom he was not directly addressing-- are not preaching said idolatry. He's just saying they're making a mistake.)
By way of comparison and contrast, let's set Huckabee's comment
[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards.Beside Fred Thompson's response to a question about whether he'd continue Bush's funding against AIDS "as a Christian, as a Conservative" (questioner's words):
“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson said. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”(He wasn't saying he wouldn't, by the way, just that he preferred not to campaign by such appeals:
“I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that,” he said. “With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you – we’ve got a lot of problems here, and we all may have our one that’s affected us the most, but it’s a broad array. And a president who will tell you the truth is that we have to look across the board and do what we can and what we should based upon the severity of the problem and the chances that our research money will do some good in these areas.”)(Instacurtsy for the Thompson stuff.)
More: See Matthew Spalding's short piece on religious liberty here.
America does not depend on a shared theology, but it does depend on a shared morality. In his First Inaugural Address, the first president said that 'there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness' and that no nation can prosper that 'disregards the external rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.' Jefferson put it more succinctly: The people, who are the source of all lawful authority, 'are inherently independent of all but the moral law.'
