Carl F. H. Henry may be the most important Protestant theologian Americans have never heard of, or perhaps forgotten about at this point. The founding editor of Christianity Today, Henry was to theology as Billy Graham was to evangelism. His insights as an ethicist and public theologian on the foundations for stable political order speak volumes to an age like our own, where the very question of liberal democracy’s survival hangs in the balance. 

The architect of mid-20th century neo-evangelicalism, Henry was a towering intellect whose theologically conservative project, famously spun off in a short volume, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, was awakening Christian fundamentalists (in today’s language, evangelicals) to active engagement in their world. As Henry saw it, biblical Christianity had abdicated its responsibility to speak prophetically to modern social problems and instead, allowed liberal Protestantism to fill that void. For Henry, the problem was that liberal Protestantism had wrongly equated social reform with the gospel itself, sacrificing what he understood as orthodox Christian belief to modernistic formulations of Christian thought.

In the Henrician formula, the success of Christian engagement in culture and the very foundations of culture itself was tied exclusively to its foundations’ integrity. For Henry, the starting point for Christian critique of society was God’s revelation, who had made Himself known in Jesus Christ. Moreover, society’s foundation, consisting as it does of a collection of sinners bent toward self-interest and entropy, would only endure to the degree that social order accepted the transcendent foundations of morality. “A religious belief compatible with the goals of society,” Henry wrote, “such as the doctrine of universal divine judgment, can condition social behavior more than totalitarian coercion, enlightened self-interest, and a merely secular belief that one should respect the rights of others.” Such a statement does not intend to instrumentalize religion for society’s sake inasmuch as society’s inhabitants must recognize their dependence on God for meaningful concepts like authority, family, and truth to be intelligible. 

Henry was never opposed to the idea of rights; he only wished to help articulate how those concepts would come to fullest expression and understanding in light of God. Apart from theistic foundations, Henry feared society would determine morality by convention or other utilitarian means, which he saw as precarious and unstable owing to secularism’s rejection of an enchanted metaphysic. The fortunes of society were a zero-sum contest for Henry. As he wrote, “If the church fails to apply the central truth of Christianity to social problems correctly, someone else will do so incorrectly.” While other Protestants (like myself) have a greater appreciation for such ideas as natural law than Henry did, his point stands: The idea of “unalienable rights,” even articulated from within a natural law paradigm, will eventually require the existence of a God to ground and operationalize such rights.

In a time like our own, where the fabric of liberal democracy seems more frayed than almost any time before, where moral consensus is at an all-time low, what would Carl Henry offer as a form of prophetic warning about the continued viability of ordered liberty? His answer would be that a return to biblical morality as the backdrop of Western civilization is the only meaningful safeguard to resist barbarism. 

It is important to consider that Henry was not an integralist or an advocate for theocracy. Quite the opposite, actually. As a Baptist theologian who firmly agreed with the tradition’s emphasis on the institutional separation of church and state, he was, as one of his intellectual heirs, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., told me, a radical non-secularist. The institutional separation of church and state was an entirely separate issue from the interacting matrix of religion, politics, law, and morality. 

A description of this type cuts against the grain of religion and politics in Western contexts. Our age is one that acts to sanitize public discourse of overt references to God. For Henry, bowing society’s norms to secular influence atrophies a republic’s health. It forecloses society from the standards that give it coherence and external critique. In response, Henry declared that the church’s mission in society is Contra Mundum Pro Mundo, “against the world, for the world.” The role of the Christian in society and the task of the assembled church, according to Henry, is to “declare the criteria by which nations will ultimately be judged, and the divine standards to which man and society must conform if civilization is to endure.” 

The foundations for society, according to Henry, require an explicit awareness of their origin. Social perpetuity and cultural cohesion require retrieval as much as revival. He wrote in the 1980s that “it is impossible to contemplate traditional Western values without reference to the God of the Bible. The ideals that lifted the West above ancient paganism had their deepest source and support in the self-revealed God who was and is for Christians the summum bonum or supreme good.” It is a point of historical reference that Western political order, even when it monstrously contradicted itself in systems such as chattel slavery, was inaugurated by a biblical worldview. 

Notice here, though, that Henry is not calling forth civil religion. As Henry wrote, “it is not the role of government to judge between rival systems of metaphysics and to legislate one among others. Government’s role is to protect and preserve a free course for its constitutional guarantees.” Such an idea is not meant to sacralize procedural liberalism or a much-feted “moral neutrality,” but an understanding that the organic structure of a pluralistic society means that government need not rely on one philosophy, and one alone, to ground a moral norm. Instead, for Henry, despite humanity’s sin, an ineradicable light of nature—a “creation ethic”—exists that still gives common notions of decency to diverse peoples in society. Meaningful social cooperation toward the common good means allowing for a capacious account of transcendent norms to guide society without requiring a confessional state.

In one sense, Henry’s admonition channels a historic strain of conservative philosophy: Religion is necessary to restrain the excesses of human avarice. It is a precursor to self-government. Religion offers an authoritative source for grounding virtue and restraining vice. Building on Tocquevillian themes, Henry saw the experiment of ordered liberty intelligible insofar as the consent of the governed was consenting to something prior to, and much more authoritative than, the government itself—God. To recover the Christian roots of Western order is no different from John Adams’ famous maxim that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate of any other.” In another sense, Henry would never be content to believe that Deism or religion qua religion would, on its own, be sufficient. As a Christian theologian, Henry argued that the revealed ethic of Christianity particularized moral abstraction. That was a gift of Christianity to the world. The unity of the transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty—are not aphoristic, but specified in Scripture. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence,” the Apostle Paul writes, “think about these things.” So Henry would say to a civilization, too.

Long before the French–Ahmari wars of 2019 sparked debate over whether liberal order possessed internal cohesion to ward off its misuse, Henry was averring that “freedom is a noble and precious commodity. Beware those who devalue freedom or connect it with vice and vanity, or try to snare you with beguiling conditions—free if you are lucky, free if you ignore God’s will. They conjoin freedom only with your own strong desires, without accountability, without penalty for the abuse and misuse of it.” According to Carl Henry, such a statement encapsulates the hope of blessing of ordered liberty and the assurance of tyranny of unbridled liberty. Without order, liberty would be tyranny, a tyranny of the imperial Self. It is a reversion to paganism, locating what Henry saw as a moral horizon mediated primarily through human autonomy, the obverse of the moral system Christianity had bestowed on civilization. 

As Henry approached the end of his life in the early 2000s, his writing grew dourer as he observed what he saw as the “twilight of a great civilization.” Were Henry still living, his analysis and message would remain equally sardonic: Return to our classically biblical foundations or face eventual extinction as a civilization, because a humane civilization is no match for unrestrained will in the long run.

Nevertheless, Henry would not be surprised to see where we are as a civilization. He predicted as much. For Carl Henry, a cut-flower civilization like our own is inexorably slouching not only toward the decadence of Gomorrah, but the destruction of Gehenna. Only a return to our roots will save the Western order from its illiberal demise.

Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement.