He’s teaching classes, taking care of things, writing when he can . . . and running for Congress. When long-time Republican congressman Stephen Fincher announced his retirement from Tennessee’s eighth congressional district — a district described as “the opposite of the district represented by Nancy Pelosi” — almost twenty people said they were interested in succeeding him. Among them was Hunter Baker, a middle-aged political science professor who has never held office but has spent years thinking about how Christians should engage in the public square. His latest book, after all, is titled The System Has a Soul: Essays on Christianity, Liberty, and Political Life.

Baker, who teaches at Union University, is a Southern Baptist and a research fellow of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He and his wife have two children. For more about him, see the full interview, which offers his thoughts on character in politics, capitalism and socialism, freedom and the common good — and who he’d vote for in a Trump v. Sanders election.

Why Liberty

A life-long Republican, Baker says that on the issues he cares most about, “I judge the Republican party to occupy the better ground.” For example, “Christians should be pro-life. Period,” he insists and that’s one of the reasons he’s running as a Republican. A Christian can’t be pro-choice Christian any more than he can be pro-segregation. It is possible, he said, “to run as a pro-life Democrat, yes, but it’s barely viable to be a pro-life Democrat today. There may be only two remaining in Congress. They will be completely marginalized by their caucus. Politically, it does not compute.”

He decided to run, Baker says, because he has been growing more concerned about the dangers to religious liberty. It’s a very practical issue for him and he explains his support by starting with the threats. The current drive to force everyone to accept same-sex marriage — and now “gender-inclusive” bathrooms in schools — directly endangers Americans’ freedom to act on their religious beliefs.

Government actions like this make sexual orientation a “protected class,” he says, with the same legal protections against discrimination as race and sex. “That creates an obvious collision between those who think gay marriage and homosexuality are wrong and the government. As a result, you see various American governments cracking down on the dissenters, like those bakers and florists you read about.”

Unfortunately for religious liberty, this is the way modern courts work, Baker observes. Quoting chief justice John Roberts, he notes that this “newly discovered right is going to threaten a right that is actually in the Constitution.” He adds: “The Supreme Court tends to be more zealous to protect the rights it discovers than the ones that are plainly available in the text [of the Constitution].”

Some argue that the new laws only do for sexual minorities what the civil rights laws did for black Americans. Baker rejects the comparison. Civil rights laws were justified by the systematic effects of racist laws and policies on an entire race, he notes. “I tell students that virtue is related to freedom. The segregationists didn’t exercise virtue and the result was a loss of freedom.”

“The problem, though, is that we used this social atomic bomb of equality (something that can erode private judgment, conscience, and faith) in such a way as to radically expand the power of government. And now this same method can be used to impede even upon judgment that is not invidious and systematic in the same way the race crisis was.”

Pro-Market Liberty

A winner of the Acton Institute’s Michael Novak award, Baker supports economic as well as religious liberty. “Government should mostly be directed toward the punishment and restraint of evil” and should not intrude on productive and virtuous people, he says, adding that “free markets tend to produce better outcomes for people: more growth, more opportunity, more life-saving technology, etc.” Government, he says, “can be a lazy shortcut.”

Even though liberals will say that conservatives only care about individual freedom, for him this belief in the market is a matter of pursuing the common good. Conservatives “prefer to move the common good and solidarity outside the realm of coercion and force (the government) and to locate those activities more in the voluntary sphere (family, church, mediating institutions, charities, etc.). . . . Conservatives and Christians (at least those on the right) emphasize spiritual renewal and virtue rather than more government programs.”

But what about all those corporations that have recently come out in favor of “gender-inclusive” bathrooms and penalized states that resisted the federal government’s attempts to make them mandatory? Don’t their actions reflect on the merits of capitalism? Baker answers: “Corporations are not necessarily all that crazy about real capitalism. Many want to achieve great size and wealth and then use regulation to block the up and comers.’

No system is perfect, however. “The logic of supply and demand can take you into some bad places,” Baker says. “Narcotics, pornography, all kinds of things are desirable and yet bad. We can’t just assume the market will take care of everything for us. And that takes us back to the relationship between virtue and freedom.”

It’s not a perfect system but on the other hand, socialism is “dead” and the Bernie Sanders version is “immature.” “Nobody thinks the government should own the means of production any more,” he says, while Sanders proposes that “the state just dictates things to private industry in terms of taxes, wages, benefits, etc. The state loves that. Not a lot of responsibility, but all of the credit.”

In economic matters, Christianity plays a crucial role that even secular conservatives don’t have. “I think one of the critical Christian contributions has to do with the high value we place upon the individual as a person made in the image of God. As long as we keep that front and center, we help give a soul to worldly philosophies.”

Race and Faith

“I don’t know what it is like to be black,” he said when asked about America’s continuing racial divisions. Acknowledging the force of some of the arguments presented by Michele Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which he has just taught in a class, he says, “I suspect she is right that the black community experiences an enhanced level of police attention. And I would guess that she is right about the impact of too many African-Americans having a felony status that affects them for the rest of their lives.”

“More broadly, I don’t have a great answer to racial division other than to say that I do think with many conservatives that economic growth is something of an elixir. More jobs, more opportunities, rising wages . . . all of these things help with division. We’re in a low growth phase. It’s no surprise we are focused on the things that divide us.”

Baker’s also running as an open Christian, and one with a classic testimony. “I may be one of the few people ever to go to Florida State University to become a Christian,” he says, because he went to college “a very secular individual.” He thanks Robbie Castleman, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and the Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell for pointing him to Christ. “I came first to admire the Christians I met and then became intellectually convinced of the resurrection of Christ. My life really began at that point.” As did, now, his life in politics.