Lutheran scholar Dr. Gene Edward Veith, Jr., culture editor of World magazine and executive director of The Cranach Institute, a research and education arm of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has spoken and written about Martin Luther's seeing the world in terms of two kingdoms, comparable to the realm of darkness and the realm of light in Jesus' teaching. In Luther's view, Veith says, Christ is the Lord of both the secular kingdom and the spiritual kingdom.

In the secular kingdom, Christ reigns whether or not the subjects know they are his. To paraphrase Proverbs 21:1, the hearts of all human kings, all people in authority, are in the Lord's hand. But the main point Veith promotes is that the secular king can be an intentional servant of God just as legitimately as the ministers, missionaries, or evangelists who find their vocations in the spiritual kingdom.

Vocation, God's Calling

A vocation, in Veith's view, is doing one's calling in whatever can be of service to God. And inasmuch as the earth is the Lord's, and Jesus is king of (all) kings and Lord of all, any legitimate life's work is to be seen as a vocation given by the Lord.

This Lutheran foundational worldview is similar to one built on John Calvin's teachings about vocations, similarly legitimizing any work (other than those that are unlawful or immoral) for Christians wanting to serve the Lord through their talents. Since the latter years of the nineteenth century, scholars in the Netherlands and the United States have greatly expanded on Calvin's thoughts.

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), a Dutch Reformed pastor, scholar, journalist, educator, and political reformer, made the greatest addition to Calvin's foundation, which he laid out in a series of lectures on Calvinism he delivered at Princeton University in 1899. The main point of Kuyper's Princeton lectures, as McKendree R. Langley of Westminster Theological Seminary said in a centennial essay about these lectures, was “that the Christian faith is both for salvation and for the rest of life.” And to show partly what he meant by “the rest of life,” Kuyper established a university, The Free University of Amsterdam, which still thrives as a Reformed Christian alternative institution of higher education.

But Kuyper's main contribution was in the field of political theory. He is credited with having introduced democratic representative government to the Netherlands (which was a monarchy but had been won and lost several times as European superpowers ran over it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). He created the country's first political party, and the first in the world to be based on Christian principles for doing politics and statecraft. Originally called the ARP, Anti-Revolutionary Party (a philosophical dig at the French exportation of their Revolution through much of the nineteenth century), it has more recently been merged with several other confessionally Christian parties to become the largest constituency in the Christian Democratic Appeal. From Kuyper's election as prime minister in 1905, the ARP remained in power most of the time, and the CDA, its successor, is at this writing the party in power. The ARP was the model for the other European Christian Democratic political movements, most of which have been based on Catholic teachings and constituencies.

Despite numerous secularist complaints and warnings that theocrats are taking over the United States government, the only Christian movement with a comprehensive approach to political reform for the United States was established on Kuyper's pluralist principles, which include equal treatment of all faiths, not on theocratic principles.

Public Justice

The Washington-based Center for Public Justice (CPJ) has been working for more than twenty-five years to bring principles of public justice to bear on American politics and government. Its most successful effort has been to help define the Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare-reform law (signed by President Clinton), which requires equal treatment of faith-based and all other non-government social-service organizations that co-operate with government in delivering services. Stanley Carlson-Thies, the Center's director of social policy studies, also helped organize the White House office of faith-based and community initiatives in the first year of the George W. Bush administration.

The Center established that no helping program, whether conducted by government agencies like FEMA or nongovernmental ones like the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and Red Cross, works on a basis of values neutrality. The administrators of government programs can and do impose their own values on their programs and their administration, which competes with more openly defined helping programs.