Now, it is true that some magistrates hide the fact from themselves that they are pushing an official state religion while other magistrates step up to the mic and say it out loud. But regardless, whether the magistrate is hiding from himself his religious pushing or whether the magistrate is embracing his advocacy openly, all magistrates push their religion in the same way. This is due to the fact that religion is a hopelessly inescapable concept. It is never a matter of either pushing or not pushing one’s religion as magistrate. It is only a matter of which religion will the magistrate push.
Let’s use an example. In one case the Magistrate might force the citizenry to pay a tax to support a state established church. In another case, such as our own here in the States, the Magistrate says he isn’t doing that. However, the truth of the reality is that the Magistrate is still forcing you to pay a tax to support the state established church. The gimmick is that the Magistrate here has figured out a way wherein you don’t know that you are paying a tax to support a state church. In order to fool you into thinking you don’t have a state established church here in this place where putatively, “the Magistrate has less powers over matters of religion,” the magistrate has hidden from you the fact that he indeed has great power over religious matters because he is taxing you to support the state church and that tax is found in every nickel and dime that goes to government (public) schools. Those government funded schools are in point of fact state churches wherein the state established religion is catechized into children from morning to late afternoon.
So, Rev. DeYoung is just flat out in error. We should say instead;
“A Reformed understanding of the nature of reality should lead one to understand that civil magistrates will always have the same amount of power when it comes to matters of religion, though some magistrates will hide that power from themselves and the citizenry better than other magistrates.”
Because there is no such thing as neutrality, the magistrate is always committed all the time to some God, god, or god concept. There is no lesser and greater. There is only the reality.
DeYoung, despite his good intentions, is not giving us Reformed theology here. To think that it was possible for a Reformed magistrate to have “less power in matters of religion” is to introduce a diminishing of God’s sovereignty as it relates to the state. If God is sovereign, as Reformed theology teaches, then God’s sovereignty ought to be explicitly brought to the fore in the public square by those magistrates ruling in as His vassals. To argue that Christian magistrates should somehow be hemmed in from being “too Christian” in their rule is to deny the sovereignty of God. De Young is giving us here, not only bad anthropology, but also bad theology proper.
DeYoung needs to muse on Van Til;
“The attempt to bring about a neutral culture, in which all religions and philosophies are equally tolerated, is in reality an attempt to dethrone the living God and to enthrone man in His place. There is no neutrality; every culture is either for Christ or against Him.”
When DeYoung argues for less power in religious matters he is arguing that the Magistrate might have the ability to be more neutral in religious matters. DeYoung is not arguing for a Reformed understanding. DeYoung is arguing for a anti-Reformed understanding.