When American evangelicals began to earnestly engage in conventional politics in the 1950s, a problem emerged. As David L. Weeks put it in a 2001 article, “Evangelicals have never developed a coherent and compelling political philosophy. Instead, they have relied on the moral authority and perspicuity of the Bible as a foundation for their social activism.”[1] He argued that “‘biblical politics’” cannot succeed because “for all its moral teaching, the Bible does not fully address political life; it is not a treatise on political philosophy.”[2] People who try to make political arguments by appealing to the Bible are therefore “hamstrung, philosophically, by the lack of common ground with fellow non-Christian citizens, and, rhetorically, by the lack of a moral vocabulary to use in the public square.”[3]
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