In 1924, Kemal Ataturk shocked the Muslim world. Since 1517, the Ottoman Emperor had held the title of Caliph, successor of Mohammad and, in theory, the spiritual and political ruler of the entire Muslim world. But as part of his program to create a secular republic in Turkey and end Ottoman rule, Kemal abolished the Caliphate, a fixture in Islam for the 14 centuries after Mohammad.

Today there is a movement to restore the Caliphate and with it the Sharia, a body of law based on the Koran and early precedents from Islamic legal decisions. Osama bin Laden, a Sunni Muslim, is the best known leader of this movement, but the Shiite Muslim leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, shared essentially the same vision until his death. Many others do also. The rest of the world rightly fears such a “theocracy,” which its proponents appear quite ready to promote by warfare of all kinds.

Secularists in the United States, trading in part on the understandable fear of Islamic theocracy, accuse the “religious right” of also aiming at a theocracy. In doing so, they distort the political aims of Christians in the public arena. They also overlook two central features of Christian teaching and practice over the centuries.

First, Christian nations have never had a Caliph. Even when the pope claimed the power to command kings, he never tried to become the king of France or the king of England. Even when the Eastern Roman Emperor pushed the church around, he never dreamed of becoming the patriarch of Constantinople. In other words, there has always been an institutional separation of church and state in the Christian world, and with it a competition for power and influence that kept each from gaining total power.

Second, Christian nations have not followed anything like the Sharia, a one-size-fits-all body of law for every Islamic land. Instead, every Christian nation has had its own laws, based in part on the eternal law of God but shaped also by its own needs and traditions. We do not believe that God gave the nations a single civil code for all time in the law He gave to Israel. As the Westminster Confession teaches, God gave to Israel and to Israel alone “sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require” (19:4).

Nevertheless, Jesus Christ rules the nations and calls on kings and peoples to bow to Him. The prophets said that the nations would come to God. Jesus told His disciples to go and teach all nations to obey what He commanded. He speaks to elites and rulers as well as to ordinary men and women. The religious right, like an earlier religious left in the civil rights movement, calls the nation to listen to God’s demands for justice according to His eternal moral law. Abortion is murder, and the blood of millions of infants cries out to God from our land. The marriage bed is undefiled, but unfettered sexual indulgence cruelly harms millions. “My yoke is light,” Jesus said. It is the way of life, not death.

The political aims of the contemporary religious right don’t really go much beyond these two issues, and all people who love life and freedom should embrace them. But even the broader goals of National Confessionalism do not envision anything like an Islamic theocracy—no Caliph, no Sharia, but instead a humble recognition that Christ reigns and His moral law should be respected, as befits “one nation under God.”