Over the past few years, almost every evangelical I’d questioned about the commingling of politics and religion responded with some variation of “salt and light.” The difficulty is, biblical scholars have never agreed on what, exactly, Jesus meant by this. Surely He was encouraging Christians to be distinct—to flavor this world, to shine in its darkness. But people like Connelly were taking it a step further. They supposed—and preached with absolute certainty—that we should be distinct by fighting for Christian values inside America’s secular political arena.
