A well-founded premise is that public policy is initiated by self-interest. A group petitions the city to expand public parks for new pickleball courts. Residents living in a neighborhood request that their county install a stoplight at a nearby intersection. Both of these succeed because specific interests bring the concerns to those making public decisions. Democracy is rarely this simple. Often, we are driven to public advocacy because we recognize that our self-interest is at odds with others on the same issue. The stakes are higher when the conflicting public problem ties into our deeply held beliefs. Given the opportunity, should the tools of power be used to make public life mirror our deeply held beliefs? For example, should Christians invoke a state requirement to display the Ten Commandments in public schools, require Christian prayers in school, or mix Christian theology in public school curriculum?
A central problem of democracy is whether and how individuals and groups can simultaneously advocate for personal values, while also recognizing, tolerating, and respecting the public sphere as a shared space of divergent, competing, incommensurable held values. Some resolve this by an agency of dominant power in the public space, overtaking the system with the values they support at the expense of all others that disagree. In other words, some claim that since their values are the truth and the democratic majority is on their side, then what is stopping them from transferring their values into law?
Is this how faith-based institutions should equip students to engage as citizens of our democracy: teaching that faith is a catalyst to overpower and dominate other interests in society? I suggest it is not. Rather, I see faith-based institutions equipping students to understand and promote a healthy ecosystem of democracy. As Romans 3:23 states, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Human beings are flawed, imperfectly conveying God’s truth.
The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Unlike public universities, faith-based institutions should help students embrace their faith with conviction, encouraging them to connect how their faith can guide them in addressing public problems. Faith-based institutions must promote the recognition of humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth. The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Christian citizens should advocate their beliefs with virtue and tolerance, even when other participants are locked in a zero-sum outcome. Faith-based institutions should promote a public space more akin to an ecosystem of interests, with a healthy promotion of the American republic. Transferring religious values directly into political institutions endangers any open society, especially when those values belong to a single religious tradition. The American founders understood this in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Christian citizens should advocate for public values that can best promote shared aspirations of justice, liberty, equality, and peace among all citizens and non-citizens. Instead of mounting the Ten Commandments on a wall or prayer in public schools, we should ask whether either promotes a healthy ecosystem of democracy. Teaching self-restraint and limits is a critical part of a faith-based education. An ecosystem of democracy provides a more properly understood, respectful approach to promoting self-interest in a community of competing and often incommensurable values. It should be the responsibility of faith-based institutions to cultivate the civic virtues of tolerance, respect for the law, and using reason for public discourse; some of the virtues the American Founders understood as cooperatively unifying a deeply held faith and an active democratic participation, while optimistically encouraging strong citizens for this world, as well as hope in the one to come.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Article
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz
6 min audio
Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.
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Article
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
Haco Hoang
6 min audio
Hoang describes how her teaching, mentoring, and research at California Lutheran University — including a multi-year collaboration with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy on Lutheran Lobby Day — cultivate civic skills grounded in ELCA social statements and the Lutheran tradition of faith and reason.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Article
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
5 min audio
Trantham shows how Saint Leo University’s Benedictine Core Values shape his civic engagement work — from advising a “Why Vote?” campaign and Constitution Day panels to engaging students in the Unify Challenge for respectful cross-institutional discourse.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Mahn reports on the working group “People of Wondrous Ability: Introducing Faculty and Staff to Lutheran Higher Education,” shares creative ways campuses are introducing colleagues to the charisms of the Lutheran tradition, and frames the issue as a set of reflective reviews that move from national trends to homegrown conversations about the state of college.
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Article
Dual Citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Promise of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark C. Mattes
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Mattes proposes a Lutheran model of Christian higher education that develops conversation between faith and learning while preserving the integrity of each, in contrast to Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Mennonite/free-church alternatives. Drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, his account of myth and symbol, and his understanding of truth as manifestation rather than mere correspondence, Mattes argues that issues of faith can be genuinely public; that the four phenomenological contours of dialogue—risk, listening, mutuality, and open-endedness—mark authentic Lutheran pedagogy; and that Lutheran education is best served when it charts a path between accommodationist and sectarian responses to the liberal-rationalist tradition.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 62 · Fall 2025
15 min audio
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Haak frames the issue by asking how Lutheran colleges and universities understand the changing landscape of religious identification on their campuses, and argues that Lutheran theological commitments — including the work of the Spirit and the Incarnation — call institutions to create places where the voice of “the other” is heard and valued.
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Article
Freedom, Humor, and Community: A Lutheran Vision for Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Jodock’s inaugural lecture for the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus develops three interlocking themes drawn from the Lutheran tradition as a deeper grounding for the liberal arts college than contemporary American assumptions. A sense of humor rests on Luther’s discovery that God takes the initiative—Luther could call himself a beggar, joke about the epistle of James, and credit Wittenberg beer for the Reformation—and underwrites the freedom of inquiry that John Updike traces to Grace Lutheran Sunday School in Shillington. Community, grounded in Augsburg Confession VII and Luther’s 1524 letter to the German city councils, makes the college a community of discourse pursuing wisdom rather than “the same old blockheads.” Freedom is both “freedom from” and “freedom for,” illustrated by Nechama Tec’s Polish Holocaust rescuers and by Jodock’s Holocaust-class corporate role-play in which students voted to build a factory in a death camp rather than risk losing their board seats—a vivid case for educating toward “a passion for justice.”
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Reflection
John 3:16-17
Richard Priggie
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Preached at the Vocation of the Lutheran College conference in August 2007, Priggie’s sermon on John 3:16-17 reads the Greek word “cosmos” as evidence that “God was into globalism long before we were” and calls Lutheran colleges to embrace Matthew Fox’s “deep ecumenism” — an embrace of and care for all created things. Drawing on J.B. Philipps’s Your God Is Too Small and the movie Pleasantville, he invites his hearers to come to Rock Island in order to leave Rock Island, to be Christian in order to be more than Christian, and to find the places where the roads don’t go in a circle but just keep going.