What were the founders’ intentions regarding the church-state relationship in the public square and public institutions? In Secularism and the American Republic, F. Leroy Forlines considers these important questions about our nation. In the end, he argues against the secularist idea of strict church-state separation. Instead, he promotes the view of the reasonable accommodation of church and state, holding that the founders intended that the state accommodate religion as a middle way between legal separation and legal establishment.
Forlines establishes this position through the use of historical and legal analyses. Key to Forlines’s contention is his interaction with the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, chief architects of the American vision for church-state relations. He also examines the origins and growth of secularism and analyzes key court cases, including Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum v. Board of Education (1948). Not only does he show that the founders were not secularists, but he also traces the history of secularism as a movement.
Forlines demonstrates the contrast between America’s founding and the origins and growth of secularism. Understanding this contrast, and supporting the intentions of America’s founders, profoundly impacts the interpretation of the First Amendment and the future of religious liberty.
In The Apologetics of Leroy Forlines, J. Matthew Pinson brings together select writings of F. Leroy Forlines on apologetics and the knowledge of God. He begins the volume with a lengthy essay on the apologetics of the foremost systematic theologian of the modern Free Will Baptist Church and the contemporary Reformed Arminian movement.
“Most of my approach to apologetics has derived from conversations with Leroy Forlines. The word apologetics appears only a handful of times in his published writings. He tends more to use terms like epistemology, testing worldviews, metanarratives, and paradigms. As I began to encounter students who were interested in apologetics, I would talk to them about Forlines’s approach. Yet they were at a loss because he had never spelled out in detail, in one place, an approach to apologetics. So for some time I have wanted to write something on the apologetics of Leroy Forlines and to reprint and examine his writings on epistemology, worldview thinking, postmodernity, and secularism, distilling his basic approach to apologetics. This book and my essay herein represent a modest fulfillment of that goal.” —J. Matthew Pinson
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