A Battle Of Good And Evil: The Reunification Of Church And State

America's growing secularism has raised a fundamental question: Can a free republic preserve its moral foundations

Cole Ellison | October 21, 2026

America has become increasingly secular over the last sixty years. That is a phenomenon worth investigating. What happens to a nation when it abandons the Western principles upon which it was constructed?

John Adams warned us in what seems like a prophetic way that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to govern any other. The Founders understood that our republic could not be properly sustained on positive law alone. It required people capable of governing themselves, guided by principles beyond the will of whoever happened to hold political power.

America cannot be understood through secularism alone. The institutions and traditions were shaped by Christianity and the belief that man answers to an authority higher than himself. Yet we have come to regard this inheritance as something from which we must free ourselves.

I am not advocating for a theocracy by any means. The state should not have any control over the church; it should not compel any religious practices on its people, and it should never force Christianity upon its citizens. But there is a profound difference between separating the institutional authority of church and state and separating a nation’s moral foundations from its religious inheritance.

The former protects religious liberty. The latter risks severing a civilization from its conceptual principles.

The reunification of church and state, as I use the term, means restoring the Christian moral tradition to its rightful place in our public life. It means recognizing that religious liberty includes the freedom to practice, teach, and live one’s faith without treating religious conviction as something that must be excluded from public institutions.

When a society abandons its moral inheritance, it does not leave a vacuum.........

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