5. Church and State
This chapter makes no attempt to lay out a comprehensive, still less a utopian, theory of the ideal relationship between church and state. Yet in some sense debates about church and state are subsets of more comprehensive debates about Christ and culture. Indeed, in some countries debates about church and state are the only form of the Christ-and-culture debates that receive much attention. My aim is to clarify this discussion a little and to demonstrate through this optic, one more time, that choosing one of Niebuhr’s models is an exercise in reductionism.
Clarifying Reflections on Crucial Expressions
In much of the Western world, the word “religion” has primarily negative overtones, in contrast with, say, “spirituality.” If one were to say “religion and politics,” then for most people this paired expression would call up instant comment on the separation of church and state. More precisely, the theme of the separation of church and state would enter the discussion, but not necessarily that expression: the expression itself is used in several countries, but some Western democracies frequently deploy other expressions to wrestle with similar catalogs of concerns.
In fact, we have now stumbled into a host of terms that are used so variably, not to say sloppily, that accurate thought is becoming difficult — the more so if we are trying to take our cues from the New Testament, where some of these words are not found, and the rest are used in ways rather far removed from their dominant usage today. The list of troubling expressions includes “religion,” “church,” “state,” “nation,” “faith,” “society,” and several others I have already probed somewhat in this book, including the words “faith” and “culture.” So a little unpacking seems to be in order.
Religion
Today we commonly think of religion as a particular system of ultimate values in which the pursuit of the ideal life is embodied. The assumption of such a quest necessarily challenges the status quo. This assumption arises most clearly in Christianity and in substance in the Judaism out of which Christianity sprang. But such a quest was very much at odds with surrounding “religions” in the first century, which focused on sacred rites and cultic observance, on preservation and conservation of ancient traditions. The influence of Christianity and the rise of multiculturalism have together encouraged other “religions” to become quests. Where countries have become deeply Christianized, Christianity itself becomes far less questing and far more conserving: in other words, it begins to think of itself as a “religion” in the older, obsolete, pagan sense. Sometimes renewal comes from within the Christianized community: that is, a subgroup restores this essential “questing” element, just as the remnant of God’s people in the Old Testament challenged the degrading status quo into which their nation had fallen. Thus to speak of Christianity in the first century as one of many “religions” is more than a little misleading. To do so gives the impression either that Christianity was primarily cultic and conserving instead of questing and transforming, or that all the ancient pagan religions were, like Christianity, interested in the pursuit of the ideal life, eager for ethical and spiritual transformation, and living with eternity’s values in view.1
Although many English translations of the New Testament use the word “religion” at some point or other, there is no Greek or Latin word in the first century that means exactly what “religion” means in the twenty-first century. The extraordinarily interesting article on religion in the Oxford Latin Dictionary provides ten categories of meaning for the word, two or three related to the earlier sense of “cultic observance” or the like, and many having nothing to do with “religion” at all. The RSV renders 1 Timothy 3:16 as “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion (εὐσέβεια, eusebeia): He was manifested in the flesh. . . .” But the Greek word properly means “godliness” (so ESV, NIV, TNIV) or, in French, piété (Segond, Colombe): this “mystery” regarding the person and work of Christ is the key to our “godliness” or “devotion” or “piety.”2 The Greek word often rendered “religion” in James 1:26-27 is θρησκεία (thrēskeia) and has more to do with reverence and worship than with “religion.” We need not work through other Greek and Latin words: the general point — that the first century had no word for “religion” that meant exactly what “religion” commonly means today — is easily made.
To compound the problem of word meanings, many contemporary Christians, following the example of Western culture at large, increasingly use “religion” in an entirely pejorative sense. Whether “religion” is taken in its old cultic, conserving sense or in the sense of questing for the ideal life, they would say that both of these uses engender structures of thought in which we are the ones performing the “religious” acts, or we are the ones pursuing the ideal life. The danger of such language, they would say, is that the overtones swamp the biblical emphasis on grace, on God working in us both “to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13).
One immediately begins to see the problem. Today we speak of the importance of “freedom of religion.” But what do we mean by “religion”? If Christians busily distance their faith from religion, are we saying that we do not include Christianity among the religions that are supposed to be “free”? Are we saying that only cultic structures of pious observance are to be preserved in freedom, while quests for the ideal life are not similarly protected? Or are we saying that quests for the ideal life are protected, but cultic expressions of the same are not protected?
In fact, for thoughtful Christians who engage in diverse fields of discourse, the word “religion” commonly has slightly different meanings in different contexts. When we uphold freedom of religion as something to be desired, we include Christianity with all other religions, claiming the same sort of freedom; when we explain the distinctive elements of biblically faithful Christianity, we often distinguish Christianity from religion. When we decry the most virulent forms of secular humanism, we are tempted to argue that it is a form of “religion” (i.e., with its own absolutes, its own pursuit of the ideal life, its own “gods,” and so forth), intimating, implicitly or explicitly, that secular humanists cannot fairly write us off as people of “religion” when they are people of “religion” as much as we — though a few minutes later, in another discourse, we decry “religion,” or, in another conversation, defend religious people over against secularists. Small wonder that it is difficult to achieve accuracy of thought and expression on these matters. The reality is that all of us use “religion” in different ways, and we are best off acknowledging the point and allowing the context to guide the sympathetic reader.
Church
Historically this word has been used in highly diverse ways — and, transparently, we must sort out some of this discussion if we are to make progress in thinking through the relationships between “church” and “state.” Those who think of bishops as constituting a third office, distinguishable from, on the one hand, deacons, and, on the other, pastors-elders, often appeal to the formula of Ignatius: Where the bishop is, there is the church.3 For many, the bishop not only defines the church but establishes its valid organic connection with the apostles: there must be traceable descent from the first century to contemporary bishops if a church is to think of itself as validly the church. Nevertheless, the arguments that try to connect this view of bishops to the New Testament documents are exceedingly flimsy. Moreover, the primary alternative explanation for what the church is enjoys a readier defense from those same documents: the church is the people of God called out by the gospel. This suggests that maintaining fidelity to the biblical gospel is of paramount importance for identifying the church. Certainly the apostle Paul makes that point when he asserts that if even an apostle or an angel from heaven (let alone a bishop!) deviates from that gospel, let him be anathema (Galatians 1:8-9). From such texts as these has sprung the view, surely right in its essentials, that the church is the people of God where the gospel is faithfully proclaimed, where the sacraments/ordinances are rightly observed, and where godly corporate discipline operates.
What differences might this polarization of opinion regarding the nature of the church make for our discussion of church and state? The differences are primarily pragmatic: a denomination with an episcopal structure is likely to have one or two or a handful of powerful voices to interact with government authorities, while local churches not attached to such authority structures are more likely to respond piecemeal. Of course, local churches without an episcopal structure may nevertheless group together in powerful associations4 that can support public figures dealing with church/state relations.
For our purposes, another debate over the meaning of “church” is more significant. For many, “church” is merely a collective noun for Christians. If we accept this linkage, discussion of the relations between church and state is tantamount to a discussion of the relations between Christians and the state. Those who hold this view arrive at it in various ways. Some few have a minimalist understanding of “church”: where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, they say, there is the church. They then observe how the church in the New Testament is tightly bound up with spreading the gospel and teaching the Word of God and, because they too equate “church” and “Christians,” give the impression that spreading the gospel and teaching the Word of God are the only valuable things that Christians can do. Others drift toward a maximalist interpretation. Perhaps they have inherited the notion of a parish church made up of all the Christians living in a geographical area. But however achieved, this equation between church and any collective of Christians, such that “church” and “Christians” can be used interchangeably, skews discussion in a maximalist direction. John Stott is a fine example of a Christian leader who takes this approach. When he argues that Christians ought to be involved in various forms of social care, he means, equally, that the church ought to be involved in various forms of social care. In other words, when he asserts that part of the Christian’s obligation is to be involved in some enterprise or other, this is, for him, virtually indistinguishable from asserting that the church’s mission mandates such enterprise.5
But suppose that “church” in the New Testament cannot be reduced to a collective of Christians: immediately the possibilities are more subtle. When the church meets together in the New Testament, it comes with praise to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb; it comes together for mutual encouragement (not least in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs), for the kind of well-rounded admonition, instruction, and correction that the comprehensive teaching of Scripture entails (2 Timothy 3:16-17), and for the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). Its meetings may see the conviction and conversion of outsiders (1 Corinthians 14), and serious matters of discipline are weighed there (Matthew 18:15-18). Its distinctive leaders — pastors/elders/bishops6 and deacons — have certain assigned responsibilities. The metaphor of the church as an organism — at least two distinctive uses of “body,” for instance, not to mention pictures of the church as a unit being the bride of Christ — makes one wonder if one is doing full justice to the word “church” if it can be said to refer to two or three Christians who happen to meet at a bus stop and happily exchange a biblical verse or two. No doubt Christ is with them, but does this small collective of Christians function the way the church does in the New Testament?
There are important entailments for the topic of this book and this chapter. It is hard to ignore the many injunctions of Scripture to do good, to show mercy, to care for the poor, to be concerned with matters of justice. If all such responsibilities belong to the church as a church, to the church as an institution, then surely the leaders of the church — its pastors/elders/bishops and deacons — should take responsibility for them and direct them. But what we find in the New Testament is that the initial leaders, the apostles, were careful to carve out for themselves the primacy of teaching the Word of God and prayer (Acts 6:2). Even matters of justice within the congregation were in some measure handed over to other spirit-filled men (6:1-7). When the distinctive duties of pastors/elders/bishops are canvassed, the priority of the ministry of the Word and prayer is paramount. These ministers preach and teach and evangelize (the ministry of the Word extends beyond preaching). It is within the church that people are baptized and come together around the Lord’s Table. Yet at the same time Christians are busy serving as salt in a corrupt world, as light in a dark world. Like the exiles in Jeremiah’s day (Jeremiah 29:1-7), Christians learn to do good in the city where they live, knowing full well that the prosperity of their city is both for the city’s good and for their good. This may not be the church’s mission, under the direction of the church’s leaders; it is certainly the obligation of Christians.
This discussion suggests that there are opposing dangers for thoughtful Christians. On the one side, some Christians apparently think that faithful evangelism and teaching the Bible are the only things about which they should be concerned. They need not get involved with, say, the indigent, or those who suffer from AIDS or who are abused. They need not concern themselves with the arts. More generally, they certainly do not need to get directly involved with the challenges of government. This stance is in danger of a docetic Christianity that overlooks the wholeness of the Bible’s teaching, that skirts the perennial tension between the “already” and the “not yet,” that simultaneously recognizes our heavenly citizenship and (with Paul) our citizenship in Rome (or France, or Australia, or Kenya). On the other side, some Christians become so engrossed in ministries of compassion and justice to the exclusion of evangelism and teaching the Bible, or so fascinated by the challenges of governing, that they delude themselves into thinking they are faithful when in reality they are overlooking what is central to any Christian’s obligation to the risen Lord. They marginalize their responsibilities as members of the church of Jesus Christ, the church that lives and dies by the great commission.
Mercifully, there have often been better examples of how to hold these things together. I mention three. The Evangelical Awakening witnessed massive social change led by Christians converted under the ministries of Howell Harris, George Whitefield, John Wesley, and their contemporaries. These Christians were instrumental not only in getting slavery banned throughout the British Empire but also in passing laws outlawing child labor in the coal mines and in reforming the prison system. They began countless institutions to help the indigent, and they founded trade unions to tame the rapacity that sprang from the first flush of the Industrial Revolution (three of the first major union leaders were Methodist ministers who were transported to Australia for their pains). But what is remarkable about these leaders is that by and large they were first and foremost gospel Christians, deeply engaged in their local churches, extraordinarily disciplined in their own Bible reading and evangelism. The John Newton who could say that he knew two things, namely, “I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great Savior,” was the same John Newton who encouraged Wilberforce to stay in politics and tackle both the slave trade and slavery itself.
Or consider Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), about whom I shall say more in the final chapter. His approach to an early form of “sphere sovereignty” led him to start a Christian university, establish Christian unions, found a Christian political party, and much more of the same. But he insisted in the strongest terms that the church as church not run these movements or be responsible for them. He was a lifelong churchman committed to the gospel; at the same time, he understood the value of wielding godly influence in the broader society. Yet he was adamantly careful not to tangle the church as church in the broader engagements that he vigorously pursued as a Christian. Inevitably this sort of distinction has an important bearing on what we think the relationship between church and state ought to be. When Americans speak of “the wall of separation” between church and state, do they really imagine a wall of separation between the church as an institution and the state, or between Christians and the state?
My third example is a couple of contemporary churches, both in major urban centers, belonging to two different denominations. Both churches are known for the excellence of their expository, Bible-teaching ministry; both have congregations that are growing rapidly, mostly by conversion, with an average age in the low 30s. Both insist on distinguishing between the forms of ministry and service in which the church as a church engages and the forms of ministry and service in which Christians belonging to those churches engage. At one church or the other — the patterns are not quite the same in the two congregations — Christians are involved in helping those suffering with AIDS, running programs for the poor, setting up nonprofit companies with various social ends in view, serving in senior branches of government, bringing Christian witness to bear both in assorted artistic enterprises and in legislative decisions, and much more. The senior minister at one of these churches tells me that a significant percentage of prayer times in his church find Christians beseeching God to help those involved in such endeavors; the senior minister of the other has helped raised funds, outside the church, to finance some of these service operations. Yet neither judges it appropriate for the church as a church to be running these operations.
In any case, in all these examples Christians have been heavily involved in activities widely perceived to be the responsibility of the state. Moreover, in all these examples the elementary distinction between what Christians do and what the church as a church does has obvious bearing on any discussion of the relationship between church and state.
Nation/State
The reason the terms “nation” and “state” need a little probing is that for the Christian, the New Testament documents touching on the relationships between church and state presuppose that the Roman Empire is the “state,” whereas what we mean by “state” today has subtle differences — the more so as we move from state to state. Seven things must be said:
(1) It is worth reflecting a little on an argument advanced by Eric Werner in his book Le système de trahison.7 Werner argues that if a state is neither nation nor empire, treason does not seem all that bad. For instance, for a Japanese citizen to engage in something treasonous is horribly shameful, for Japan is a tightly knit “nation,” not a melting pot of peoples. Add to this a shame culture, and treason seems horribly vile. Again, in the heyday of the British Empire, it was particularly reprehensible to act in a way that would knowingly harm the Empire. By contrast, where a state delights in its rollicking diversity, treason itself becomes democratized.8 There is no “big idea” by which everything must be tested. In America, prosecutors may zealously go after those who have engaged in treason, but the media are never outraged. Rather, they are intrigued, sometimes even vaguely admiring.
(2) The Roman Empire of the first century certainly falls into the “empire” category of Werner’s analysis, but it was nevertheless characterized by a number of polarities that are relevant to our discussion. (a) Rome established law and order, eschewing anarchy, rebellion, and corruption, but especially at the higher levels of government the grossest forms of debauchery and corruption grew exponentially until little more than a shell of discipline remained. (b) Rome’s military might combined with a more-or-less acceptable legal system and excellent roads and communications — not surpassed in the Western world until the eighteenth century — to spread the cherished pax Romana throughout the Empire, and yet it succeeded in this regard by its own brutal use of force. (c) The Empire was astonishingly multiethnic and multicultural, while prizing all things Roman. In the religious realm, Rome, as we saw in the second chapter, arranged god-swaps when it took over fresh territory: it insisted that the local people adopt some of the gods in the Roman pantheon while Rome itself adopted some of the local gods into its own pantheon. Orators like Cicero and Juvenal might despise and decry this invasion of foreign gods, but the emperors established the imperial policy. Yet these foreign deities were soon themselves Romanized and thus domesticated. Above all, these tendencies meant that Rome was (d) simultaneously tolerant and intolerant, syncretistic and exclusivistic.9 Pluralism and tolerance triumphed as long as no religion claimed exclusive truth or threatened the imperial order. The gods were bound up with the social order; they were tied in complex webs of relationships with people, land, leaders, elites, and the emperor himself. Thus the foreign gods “were simply annexed”10 to the pantheon of the Empire — and anything that threatened or was perceived to threaten the Empire called down violent suppression. Of course, the Roman Empire enjoyed a plethora of nongovernmental associations and clubs. Recent research has shown how popular these were — not, as has sometimes been argued, because people were trying to find solace in the midst of a declining culture, but as part of public pietas and even civic loyalty.11 But where Rome detected any possibility of disloyalty and thus perceived the threat of sedition, its response could be brutal.12 This is the “state” that New Testament writers have in mind when they say various things about it.
(3) In the first century most “nations” were perceived to exist within the “state” of the Roman Empire. In Matthew’s form of the great commission, believers are told to make disciples “of all nations” (Matthew 28:19) — and although that injunction could certainly extend to peoples outside the sway of the Empire (one thinks of the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8), most evangelism and church-planting depicted in the New Testament takes place among the “nations” within the Empire. After the breakup of the Empire, whatever order existed was often established by feudal lords who were allied together in forms of government tied to ethnic self-awareness, an awareness fed by common language, culture, and geography. Thus the notion of “nation” enjoyed almost tribal/cultural associations for a long period of time. It enjoyed only loose overlap with the notion of “state.”
(4) Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the rise of the nation-state in Europe (and ultimately elsewhere) transformed the political landscape. Before that time, many tribal/cultural groupings, more or less locally governed, clustered around larger political associations that occasionally realigned themselves in various ways. The change to the nation-state is nowhere better typified than in Bismarck and the founding of modern Germany. Nevertheless, the tension between “nation” and “state” within the “nation-state” runs forward into more recent centuries. Hitler’s National Socialism played with the notion of the German people, the German nation — as easily Volk as Nation — who somehow needed and deserved to be governed by one leader and constitute one nation-state. Only a few weeks ago Canada’s Parliament granted the category “nation” to Québec. The word “nation” is a little more ambiguous in French than it now is in English, and it might in this context mean nothing more than the recognition of a culturally distinctive people. Certainly that is what Prime Minister Harper had in mind, for his final edit of the bill that recognized Québec as a “nation” added the words “within a united Canada.” Not surprisingly, now that Québec may call itself a “nation,” some of the séparatistes want more of the trappings of a “nation” in the political sense, including the ability to conduct their own foreign affairs. The fact of the matter, however, is that they have to look to Ottawa, the “national” capitol, to find such permission (which will not be readily granted). One immediately perceives how slippery and variegated the terminology can be as soon as one steps over the Canadian border into the “United States.” The dynamic tension between the legitimate authority of the individual states and the authority of the federal government in Washington perpetually undergoes subtle shifts. But no state in the United States has the authority to conduct its own independent foreign relations with other countries. To offer one more example of political developments that have confused the terminology: perhaps nowhere has the notion of the nation-state been more at odds with the tribal/cultural perceptions of its peoples than in Africa, where the last gasp of colonialism drew lines on a map and constituted “states” that rode roughshod over countless tribal/cultural (i.e., “national” in the older sense) sensibilities.
The rise of the nation-state placed more and more power in the hands of central government. Mediating institutions — including clubs, associations, unions, local government, education and social elites, even churches and other religious institutions — were increasingly authorized, inspected, held accountable, and in some measure bureaucratically controlled by the state, by the central government. Sometimes this has been done with a light touch; sometimes not. Sometimes the government has seen the church as an ally; sometimes not. As Germany became a nation-state, the idea gained momentum that “the state is not an end in itself but rather the exemplar, expression, and servant of national culture.” Because the church was part of that culture, “Philosophers like Hegel and Fichte, poets like Heine, social scientists like Durkheim, and theologians from Schleiermacher to Troeltsch argued that religion (properly understood) supplies the cultural warmth, the moral inspiration for what Bismarck would call ‘Practical Christianity.’”13 Of course, one might well argue that such Christianity is a long way removed from what is mandated by Scripture. No less important for the sake of the present argument, however, is the implicit vision of the state as binding up in itself and finally expressing and nurturing national/cultural self-identity. In this context the suggestion of a separation between church and state would have seemed ludicrous. Nevertheless, it is the nation-state that is here quietly accumulating ultimate power.
(5) In most Western countries the rise in the authority of the nation-state over against all (other) mediating institutions has marched roughly in step with the rise of a secular outlook. Of course, how this pairing has taken place has varied enormously from country to country. Thus, roughly contemporaneous with the developments in Germany described in the last paragraph were quite different developments in France and America. The American Constitution, and still more the Bill of Rights, set its face against the “establishment” of any church. The French Revolution of 1789 generated a radical anticlericalism that so removed ecclesiastical authority and mediation from public life that the separation of church and state (an expression used in France as early as 1905) “meant specifically transferring church temporalities to cultural associations supervised by a minister of cults.”14 But whether we think of Germany, France, or America, or even a country like the United Kingdom with its established church, it is difficult not to perceive a rising commitment to secularism on the part of the instruments of state — a point developed in chapter 4. Transparently, this reality has an enormous bearing on Christians trying to think clearly about appropriate relationships between church and state.
(6) While states have been accruing more power and now substantially regulate or even control all (other) mediating institutions, at least in the West but also in some other parts of the world, these states are democratic. That is a far cry removed from the experience of the apostle Paul. But if there is some sense in which Christians are obligated to be good citizens, then within a democratic structure they have an obligation to try to change things in a way that was not open to first-century believers. Once again, then, our understanding of the relationship between church and state is going to be influenced in some measure by changing understandings of the state. Better put, how we appropriate the examples and instruction of the New Testament demands the most careful thought.15
(7) If we extend our reflections on the relations between church and state to countries that stand well outside the Western tradition that I have been briefly describing — nations such as China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan, to mention only a few — then how we move from the Scriptures, from Christianity’s foundational documents, to a faithful articulation of appropriate relationships between church and state becomes a daunting task.
But we must first remind ourselves of some of the biblical emphases.
A Survey of Biblical Priorities for the Relationships Between Church and State
As for biblical themes and passages, earlier chapters have sketched (a) some of the turning points in redemptive history, (b) some of the more important elements of Jesus’ preaching of the coming kingdom of God, and (c) preliminary reflections on the remarkable significance of Jesus’ utterance, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” — including some parallel instruction from the apostle Paul (Romans 13). These themes and passages have unavoidable implications for contemporary Christian attempts to think through the relationships between church and state.
In the following paragraphs I shall try to demonstrate some of the diversity in the ways the New Testament treats the relationships between church and state in the first century — and even some of the diversity in Old Testament depictions of God’s covenant people in exile and the ways these depictions prepare the ground. In an earlier chapter I briefly treated Mark 12:13-17 (which includes “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s”) and Romans 13:1-7, and I shall not work through those crucial texts again here. Yet this is a good place to recall that sorting out biblical perspectives on the relationships between church and state is never a mere matter of citing a list of passages, for many of the passages have been interpreted in highly creative ways. A full discussion would require detailed evaluation of the various interpretations. That would turn this book into a work of another sort, so I shall avoid such discussion here, except for mention of two or three aberrant interpretations that deserve brief notice.
A few interpreters have understood the “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s” passage to be an ironically powerful way of saying that nothing belongs to Caesar, so nothing should be paid to him.16 Everything belongs to God. How could the God of the Bible share his authority with another? This interpretation then becomes the ground for the kingdom of God to become a “pocket of resistance” perpetually on the alert to criticize the Caesars of this world for their abuse of power. Certainly it is right to remember that God and Caesar do not operate in mutually exclusive domains: God remains sovereign, and Caesar, however imperial, is never more than God’s vassal. Nevertheless, the interpretation that some propose will not withstand close scrutiny. Jesus does not encourage withholding taxes. The traditional interpretation of Mark 12 is surely the obvious one and is in line with the sweeping New Testament tension between inaugurated eschatology and consummation: Jesus already claims that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28), and he is presented as the mediatorial king who exercises all of God’s sweeping authority (1 Corinthians 15), and yet that authority is itself mediated and frequently contested until the consummation. Moreover, the traditional interpretation of Mark 12 has rightly understood the seminal significance of Jesus’ words in detaching his followers from a close identification with one nation, whether Israel or any other. To lose that insight is a terrible price that the “ironic” interpretation must pay.
Similarly, Robert Hurley argues that Romans 13:1-7 is intended to be taken ironically.17 That interpretation enables Hurley to understand the passage to “mean” exactly the opposite of what it actually says. But the literary markers to which Hurley appeals are far from convincing. Moreover, one recalls the consistent pattern of Acts, which not only seeks to record evidence that the Christian movement is not politically dangerous but carefully reports every favorable judicial decision in favor of the nascent Christian church. Further, Hurley’s view does not square very well with biblical exhortations to pray for kings and governors.
Initially more impressive is the insistence by some writers that Romans 13 does not so much tell believers how to govern well as how to be governed.18 In the flow of Paul’s argument, that insight is fundamentally right. Nevertheless, in making his argument, Paul tells us at least a little of what he thinks good government looks like: restraining evil, collecting the necessary taxes, and acting as God’s servant in ruling (which presumably has some entailments regarding righteousness). After all, Paul is heir to a tradition that insists, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people” (Proverbs 14:34). These exegetical observations must be combined with four more bits of data: (a) Many Christians in today’s world live in democracies or limited democracies where it is possible to do good within government in a way not open to most believers in Paul’s day. (b) The Old Testament had already established the obligation of God’s people to seek the good of the city in which they were exiled, even if it was not their permanent home: “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7). (c) The prophet Daniel had given a stellar example of faithful government service, establishing a reputation for integrity within such service while setting boundaries he was not prepared to cross, even if it cost him his life. (d) One of the earliest of the New Testament documents similarly enjoins, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Galatians 6:10). In short, although Romans 13 functions primarily to tell believers how to be governed (even when the governing authority is the Roman Empire), it nevertheless drops a few hints as to what good government looks like, and, combined with other streams of biblical thought, makes its own contribution as to how believers who are active in governance should conduct themselves.
But this is not the only biblical optic on government. Even if we restrict ourselves largely to New Testament Scriptures on the ground that the new covenant people of God, in line with Jesus’ instruction, do not constitute a theocratic nation-state (unlike ancient Israel), the diversity of stances is remarkable. A survey of New Testament themes that contribute to a Christian understanding of the relationships between church and state must include the following (in no particular order of importance):
Opposition and Persecution
The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount pronounce a blessing on “those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). This beatitude is then expanded as Jesus addresses his followers directly in the second person: “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (5:11-12). The persecution presupposes a cultural clash: because the followers of Jesus live by a different set of norms, they are distinguishable from and sometimes objectionable to the larger culture in which they are embedded. In this passage, however, nothing is said to suggest that the persecution is state-sponsored. That changes in Matthew 10. There we are told that Jesus’ immediate disciples not only will face opposition from local councils and synagogues (10:17), but, Jesus warns, “On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles” (10:18).
The expectation that Christ’s people will face persecution, at least some of it explicitly state-sponsored, is not rare in the New Testament. Sometimes it is tied to the thought that Jesus’ disciples cannot reasonably expect to be treated better than their Master (e.g., John 15:18–16:4). The book of Acts reports local persecution in both Jewish and Gentile contexts, while faithfully reporting every judicial decision in favor of Christians — presumably to draw attention to legal precedents that might go some way to mitigating further attacks. Paul’s list of his physical sufferings (2 Corinthians 11:21-28) includes not only deprivations such as hunger and thirst, the effects of savage storms at sea, the dangers posed by thugs and brigands, mob violence, and rounds of floggings meted out by the judicial rulings of synagogues on Jewish adherents, but prison and beatings from Roman authorities (“beaten with rods” is certainly Roman). But the New Testament book that most graphically depicts the Roman Empire as the satanic enemy bent on persecuting and destroying the church is Revelation. The seer John is perfectly aware that sometimes the greater danger to believers is being snookered by the idolatries and comforts of the age (many of the dangers faced by the “seven churches” in Revelation 2–3 have little to do with persecution), but much more of his attention is focused on the imperial cult and the dangers arising from state-sponsored brutality. If the second beast, the beast “out of the earth” (Revelation 13:11-18), works toward massive deception, the first beast, the beast “out of the sea” (Revelation 13:1-10), is “given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them” (13:7).
Restricted Confrontation
Not infrequently the tensions between Christians and the state were registered not at the imperial level but at the local level. They could be triggered by a variety of things, with the other side then making use of the (local) instruments of state authority. According to Acts 16, the preaching of Paul and Silas in Philippi, and especially the casting out of a demon from a female slave who was bringing her owners profit from her fortune-telling, generated such resentment that local officials became involved. The owners “seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, ‘These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice’” (16:19-21). Under additional pressure from the crowd, the magistrates had the two men “severely flogged” and “thrown into prison” (16:23) — and thus local authority has weighed in. At the very least, this implies that the state (in this case, the Roman Empire) is adopting a kind of “hands off” self-distancing from the local problem. If the state in this instance is not the active agent of persecution, neither is it the bulwark of religious freedom.
In some instances we simply do not know enough about the first-century dynamics to detect where, in opposing religious dangers, the political dangers might lie. According to Revelation 2:6, 14-16, the Nicolaitans’ teaching was akin to that of Balaam, “who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality” (2:14). Eating food that had been offered to idols could easily mean participating in pagan cults (compare 1 Corinthians 8 and 10); the reference to “sexual immorality” may have in view the spiritual apostasy against which the Old Testament so regularly warns, using fornication as a metaphor19 — though the link between some pagan worship and fertility cults meant that physical fornication and pagan religion were not always completely distinguishable. Such accommodation God reprobates in the strongest terms: the exalted Christ says to those who have stood firm against such idolatry, “But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (2:6). The strength of such opposition between faithful Christians and the Nicolaitans might have had political ramifications, if the Nicolaitans had the ear of the authorities, but in this case we do not have enough evidence to make a determination.
Of course, Luke carefully records events that turn out another way — when local authority actually restrains mob violence. The city clerk in Ephesus rebukes the mob because he does not want uproar to attract imperial attention and jeopardize the relative independence of the city’s government (Acts 19:35-41). Nevertheless, what begins as purely local confrontation can escalate all the way to confrontation with Rome itself — which is exactly what Paul faces in Acts 26–28. The point to make here, however, is that where there is opposition between church and state, the “state” side of the opposition may be as local as the “church” side of the opposition.
Differing Fundamental Allegiances
Although, as we have seen, the Bible encourages Christians to honor political authorities, pay taxes, and obey the laws (Romans 13), there are limits to this encouragement. When the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem order the apostles to stop preaching, Peter and John reply, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20). That the believers constitute a separate community distinguishable from the common culture is amply evident in Paul’s insistence that the rules of conduct he has laid down apply to the church, not to outsiders. The result is that church members can be disciplined, but obviously not the outsiders. “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?” (1 Corinthians 5:12). Here, then, the apostle is mandating (legislating?) conduct that is differentiable from what is mandated for or expected of other Roman citizens. However much Paul might reprobate the sins of his age, it is no immediate concern of his to pass legislation that would modify those sins. His focus is on the life, faith, and morality of the Christian community, a part of — but highly differentiable from — the larger culture. Small wonder, for, like Abraham who was “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10), so also believers belong to “the Jerusalem that is above” (Galatians 4:26), even if, like Paul, they can also confess to being Roman citizens.
More comprehensively, Paul tells the Philippians, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20-21). The word “citizenship” is inevitably political.20 The first-century Christians may be citizens of the Roman Empire, but they have a more fundamental allegiance: their citizenship is in heaven. Even the title “Savior” had political overtones in the first century: the emperor Augustus was described as “a saviour who put an end to war and established all good things,” while the emperor Claudius was reverenced as “saviour of the world” and hailed as “a god who is saviour and benefactor.”21 The same passage about our heavenly citizenship, Philippians 3:20-21, describes Jesus’ power as so extensive that it “enables him to bring everything under his control” — a claim that would certainly sound at least partly political.22 Inevitably, then, thoughtful Christians maintain some fundamental allegiances that set them apart from other citizens in the Empire who feel no loyalty whatsoever to a “citizenship . . . in heaven.”
Different Styles of Government, of Reign
The kingdom Jesus introduces projects a style of rule radically different from that in the political world. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the dramatic scene reported in Matthew 20:20-28.
20Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
21“What is it you want?” he asked.
She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”
22“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
23Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
24When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. 25Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — 28just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Clearly the expectation of James and John and their mother is that Jesus’ kingdom would be primarily political (however righteous and messianic), and they want primary places in the new administration. When Jesus asks them if they can drink his cup, he is asking if they can share in the experiences and commitments that will befall him — and of course he is thinking primarily of his impending suffering (which is why he asks his Father, in Gethsemane, if “this cup” might be taken from him [26:39]). James and John, awash in overconfidence but not yet having any inkling of Jesus’ sufferings, boldly reply that they can indeed drink Jesus’ cup. With gentle irony they cannot yet understand, Jesus assures them that they will indeed drink from his cup: they will themselves face more than they can yet imagine. Even so, certain appointments in the kingdom are not his to make, but his Father’s. The indignation of the ten toward the two brothers is doubtless motivated by a sense of jealousy and betrayal: the two are trying to get onto an inside track with Jesus that would relegate the others to a second tier. Jesus rebukes the whole lot of them. In doing so he contrasts the pattern of authority in the state with the pattern of authority in the kingdom he is establishing. The one side lords it over others; the other side goes to the ignominy of the cross.
Out of this has come the tendency in many Christian circles to speak of “servant leadership.” The expression is open to abuse. For many, it now says much about being a servant and nothing about leadership. Whatever else he was, however, Jesus was not a wimp. He was a leader of matchless authority — and in New Testament documents that describe Christian pastors, they, too, enjoy leadership that is to be obeyed; they exercise an authority to which others are urged to submit (e.g., Hebrews 13:17). What, then, is the nature of the contrast Jesus is drawing in Matthew 20? It is certainly not between exercising authority and exercising none. The difference is this: the world’s exercise of authority, commonly exemplified in the state, hungers for prestige and praise; its leaders want to be first, and they end up lording it over others, scrambling up the ladder by crushing the skulls of those they are trampling behind them. By contrast, Jesus comes into the fullness of his royal authority by going to the cross, by serving others even to the point of agonizing suffering and the starkest of deaths, undertaken for the good of the people over whom he will rule. The Son of Man “did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). Similarly, Christians who exercise authority in the church do not mark their discipleship to Jesus by abandoning all exercise of authority, but by exercising it within the constraints of a life sacrificially lived for the sake of others.
The contrast is striking. Of course, in the richness of God’s common grace, there are governors who genuinely have a servant’s heart, governors who are not unduly corrupted by honor and power. Sadly, there are ecclesiastical leaders who take their cue as to what leadership is from the surrounding world, who sell their souls for pomp, flattery, and the lust for ever-increasing manipulative control. Yet if Christians follow their Master, then as their influence increases in the world, so their conduct shames the rulers of this world. The different styles of rule, of the exercise of authority, prove so divergent that each is aghast at the other.
The same pattern is deeply embedded in the gospel itself. We must learn to adopt “the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had” (Philippians 2:5) — the attitude of mind that “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage” (2:6) but led him instead to the incarnation, to servanthood, to death on a cross (2:7-8). If we preach Christ in the public sphere, we proclaim the wisdom of God that the world thinks terribly foolish (1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5). Indeed,
in order to understand rightly what it means to have the mind of Christ, we must remember who “Christ” is for Paul: the crucified one. To have the mind of the Lord is to participate in the pattern of the cross (cf. Phil. 2:1-11), for the wisdom of God is manifest definitively in the death of Jesus. Consequently, the privileged spiritual knowledge of which Paul speaks should result in the renunciation of all privilege, all boasting and quarreling.23
In short, the internal dynamic of authority in the church at its best is so very different from the internal dynamic of authority in the world that the trajectories of church and state under such conditions are bound to be divergent.24
The Transformation of Life, and Therefore of Social and Governmental Institutions
The gospel, when believed and obeyed, changes the direction and values of people. “Dear friends,” writes the apostle Peter, “I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). In other words, the moral transformation is self-consciously countercultural. Some Christian belief and behavior will simply seem odd, perhaps slightly antisocial, to many people in the broader Roman culture. But some Christian belief and behavior have the potential for attracting the interest of the state. The exclusiveness of Christian claims will seem both narrow and vaguely threatening in the light of imperial policies designed to accommodate diversity while Romanizing all religions. The absence of images will seem atheistic. And the steadfast refusal of Christians to worship Caesar will appear not only disrespectful but treasonous.
The brilliant little letter to Philemon, though it carefully avoids any hint of advocating the overthrow of slavery, nevertheless lays the groundwork for its destruction. Where such teaching was promoted and in some measure practiced, the social order was being threatened.
In the End, Jesus Wins
The claim that all authority already belongs to Jesus (e.g., Matthew 28:18-20), the promise that he will reign until he has destroyed all his enemies (1 Corinthians 15:25) will certainly be offensive to those who believe they owe no allegiance to Jesus, and it may attract the anger of the state. When the apostle insists that the gospel overturns the wisdom of the wise, whether Jew or Greek (1 Corinthians 1:18-25), we simply cannot avoid the conclusion that Paul was not thinking of something like “private religion”: what he proclaimed was public truth. “At heart, then, there is a fundamental contradiction, even opposition, between the Gospel and the world. . . . Hence, the Gospel as public truth, the Gospel in the public sphere, is not an easy word to speak, for it goes against the grain, and operates from a different wisdom, in the light of which human wisdom is shown to be folly.”25 When we recall that Christians in the New Testament look forward to the consummation, when every knee will bow and confess that Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2:11), when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah (Revelation 11:15; cf. Revelation 19), we perceive that Christian faith in the New Testament, though doubtless highly personal, was never merely private. Inevitably, the larger culture was going to be confronted — and this included the state.
Summary of the Diversity of Biblical Themes
The diversity of stances adopted by various New Testament documents toward the state presupposes some commonalities, while local conditions and complementary theological truths evoke disparate emphases. Owing to the teaching of the Master himself, Christians in the first century understood that the Christian church was not isomorphic with any nation but was a transnational community, and that the sovereign God whom they confessed had ordered the government of the state for good purpose, so that it was incumbent on all Christians to respect and submit to that authority not only in the spirit of good citizenship but out of loyalty to God. Equally, however, the early Christians understood that where the state abused its God-given mandate and commanded believers to do something God had forbidden, or prohibited something God had enjoined on them, they must clash with the state and suffer the consequences, for allegiance to the God who is over both church and state takes absolute priority. And God will be utterly vindicated at the end.
Once these stable points are established, the New Testament can depict not only the Empire’s positive judicial rulings but also the Empire’s most brutal persecution. It can work carefully through subtle confrontations and fundamental differences in the way authority is exercised in state and church, and it can anticipate the consummation when all without exception will bow the knee to King Jesus. Taken together, the texts encourage good citizenship within the Empire while insisting on the Christian’s primary allegiance to a heavenly citizenship. The proclamation of the gospel transforms people wherever it is believed and received, and sooner or later such transformation will either improve the state or excite its opposition.
These divergent patterns do not constitute differentiable typologies of the relationships between church and state. Rather, the surging commonalities work out in flexible ways depending on the vitality of Christians, the character of local government officials, the “accidents” of mob violence, the precedents of court decisions, the intensity of persecution, and much more. These variations in the relation between church and state become more subtle yet when we recall that, when the state opposes or persecutes believers, it usually focuses on Christian individuals rather than on the church as church, while the New Testament documents regularly distinguish between what Christians are doing in the outworking of their faith and what the church as church is mandated to do.
But before we take the final steps of this chapter and reflect on how these biblical variables speak to us today, we must pause to remind ourselves of some historical and theological matters generated by (a) the development of democracy, which alters what good the Christian might do within the corridors of power in the state;26 (b) some of the ways in which Jesus’ distinction between Christ and Caesar have worked out in highly diverse patterns of separation of church and state; and (c) reflection on the corresponding heritage of other religions, not least Islam.
Historical and Theological Reflections
It might be simplest to take four steps.
(1) For Americans, perhaps no phrase defines the relationship between church and state more comprehensively than “the wall of separation between church and state.” But few recognize that “the wall of separation” is not found in the First Amendment; fewer still recognize that, while it is widely used in diverse Western democracies, it carries very different overtones from country to country. A little historical background will not go amiss.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Although the matter is disputed, “an establishment of religion” probably had in view, at the time, the fact that some states had an “established” religion: Connecticut, for instance, was tied to the Congregational Church. Congress was not to meddle in such matters, which had the effect of leaving an established church in some states, and leaving other states without an established church, as the states themselves preferred.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom in Virginia, which Jefferson himself judged to be a novel experiment, made all forms of the Christian faith to stand on the same footing as Islam or Hinduism. True freedom of religion demands both the free exercise of religion and the disestablishment of religion. At about the same time, Jefferson’s friend and rival, John Adams, drafting the Massachusetts Constitution, embarked on a rather different vision of religious freedom. He thought that the state served the cause of religious freedom best by balancing the freedom of many private religions with the legal establishment of one public religion, which he wanted to be Christianity. Thus Massachusetts and Virginia headed in different directions, and according to the Bill of Rights (which included the First Amendment), ratified in September 1789 (note the later date!), Congress was not to interfere.
In the bitter election of 1800, Jefferson, whose radical biblical criticism and whose romantic Deism made him anathema to many conservative Christians, nevertheless won the support of some conservative Christians who cherished religious liberty.27 After receiving a letter from the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut (where, of course, their own religious affiliation was not part of the establishment), congratulating him on his victory and applauding him for his defense of religious liberty, President Jefferson responded on New Year’s Day, 1802. In oft-repeated words, Jefferson wrote,
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
So there it is: a wall of separation. Although this letter did not become common knowledge until the middle of the nineteenth century, the phrase then took on independent life in many countries. The more secular interpretation was that religion is private and may be protected in that sphere, while the state must be secular. It is at least doubtful that that is quite what Jefferson himself meant. After all, in the context of his letter to the Baptists of Connecticut, the President’s purpose was to defend the free exercise of religion, rather than to ban it to the private sphere. Moreover, as is well known, Jefferson ended this missive with a prayer, responding in kind to the Baptists’ prayers for him. But whatever Jefferson meant, the First Amendment was increasingly seen through the grid of that phrase. It entered the vocabulary of the Supreme Court in 1878 (Reynolds v. United States), though probably it played little if any role in the decision. The climax came in the landmark case Everson v. Board of Education (1947), in which Justice Hugo L. Black, writing the majority opinion and citing no precedent other than Reynolds, famously argued that in the words of Jefferson, the First Amendment itself has erected “‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’ . . . That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”28 This set the stage for the kind of jurisprudence that was strictly separationist in the second half of the twentieth century.29 Arguably, the Court is backing away slightly from such strict separation now.30 What is in any case transparent is that the metaphor of the wall in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists has become more central in the mind of the Court, let alone in popular opinion, than the actual wording of the Bill of Rights.
(2) This historical background underlies the plethora of stances adopted by different groups of Americans and other Anglo-Saxons today as to what the relationship between church and state ought to be. It would take a very long chapter to survey them all. Nevertheless, by pointing to a handful of books and articles we may sample some of the diversity and attempt some evaluation. Authors in five of the six categories that I now describe clearly do not think that the “wall of separation” is absolute. One of these first five categories thinks it shouldn’t be there at all. And the sixth wants the wall to be as high and as impregnable as possible.
(a) Sometimes disparate theories of the relationship between church and state are said to be grounded in Augustine, who thus gets blamed (or praised) for slightly conflicting views. Thus the well-researched volume by Robert Dodaro argues that because true iustitia (justice) begins and ends with the adoration of God, and God is knowable only through the mystery of the incarnation, therefore ultimately there cannot be true iustitia apart from Christ.31
By contrast, Robert Markus argues that Augustine conceives of three realms: the sacred, the profane, and, between them, the secular. The sphere of the sacred is bound up with Christian belief and practice; the sphere of the profane concerns itself with beliefs and practices that Christians must repudiate. By contrast, the secular realm occupies neutral space. It is made up of elements from the broader culture that Christians may legitimately adopt or at least adapt.32 Markus’s appeal to an autonomous secular sphere enables him to distance himself both from those who think Augustine ties Christianity irrefragably to public life, and thus to the Constantinian settlement, and from those who think the Constantinian settlement must be rooted out tooth and nail. Christians and non-Christians alike can make use of the goods in this autonomous secular realm, even if they do so with a “different faith” and “different hope.” In fairness to Markus, it is important to observe how carefully he distinguishes this secular sphere from contemporary secular liberalism. Augustine’s secular sphere, Markus argues, unlike secular liberalism, is devoid of moral categories. It is bound up only with meeting material needs, with establishing order and security.
The very recent work by Kristen Deede Johnson33 appeals to Augustine in a slightly different way. The heritage of liberal democracy has taught people to rank tolerance among the highest of the virtues, while what she calls “post-Nietzschean celebration of difference”34 sets such a premium on difference that the result is incompatible with liberal democracy. The way ahead, Johnson avers, is beyond tolerance and difference (hence her subtitle): we learn from Augustine that there is no ultimate harmonization of differences until the coming of the Heavenly City. But Augustine also taught us that Christianity is “nothing if not a public, social ethic embodied in the life of the Church (not, we are careful to note, embodied in the political realm of the earthly city).”35 What we must foster, while we wait for the Heavenly City, is integrity of speech and authenticity of expression as different communities converse — not celebrating difference in itself (for eventually there will be unity, even if we have to wait until the Heavenly City to achieve it), and not celebrating the false guise of “neutrality” cherished by liberalism (for ultimately it requires that all sides abandon all or part of their particularity in order to rank “neutrality” more highly).
(b) A recent book by Jeffrey Stout36 attempts a similar but slightly different mediating position. He insists that liberal secularists think of themselves as administrators or arbiters of the public sphere, while in fact they are simultaneously one of the parties in that sphere — a point they regularly overlook. They are one of the participants in political conversation, not the framers and still less the judges of that conversation. On the other hand, Stout wants to remind those he calls “the new traditionalists” (basically those who criticize the liberal secularists) that liberal democracy itself is a “thick” tradition, so the traditionalists should not lay claim to it as if it were all theirs. Nominally, then, Stout wants to trace out a path between folk on the left like Richard Rorty (who wants religion purged from public discussion) and John Rawls (who thinks religion should be confined to well-defined and limited private roles) and “new traditionalists” such as John Milbank, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas. Yet the thrust of the book is more sympathetic to liberal democracy (which pretty soon becomes, in Stout’s usage, indistinguishable from liberal secularism) in general and to John Rawls in particular than Stout lets on. Stout seems to think that if he can show that liberal democracy is itself a “thick” tradition, the new traditionalists will have to embrace it. But contra Stout, democracy is not a conceptual tradition that stands over against Aristotelianism and Augustinianism; rather, it is a form of organizing government that stands over against monarchy, oligarchy, and totalitarianism. Stout offers many helpful insights along the way, but he does not really seem to understand the nature of the religious claims of those he labels “the new traditionalists.”
(c) A range of theologians and movements rejects all models of the relationship between church and state of a Constantinian variety. The worst abuses of Christians against the broader culture have taken place when Christians have enjoyed too much power. These thinkers want a “diaspora” model of churchmanship. Christians, they say, are a pilgrim people in a strange land. We should think of ourselves as the new diaspora, still in exile until the dawning of the consummated kingdom.
In one form of this heritage, complete withdrawal, or a withdrawal as complete as possible, is the only solution that makes sense. The Amish win. But there are more attenuated forms of this tradition, one of them scarcely known and the other well known and increasingly popular. The one that is still relatively little known is ably defended by Darryl G. Hart.37 He strongly supports the view (espoused earlier in this chapter) that one must make a distinction between what the church as church has to say and the way Christians may be involved in the broader culture, including the state. But he goes further and insists that even Christians (as opposed to the church) should not make their political and cultural appeals on Christian grounds. In other words, although they should certainly be involved in doing good in and even to the city, Hart is not happy for the good that they do to be identified as a distinctively Christian product or stance.
Even more suspicious of all state power is the better-known alternative represented by the many books of Stanley Hauerwas.38 The church must be the church — a political body in its own right. If it tries to serve the state, it is soon mired in the compromises of the Constantinian settlement. Christians need to envisage — and advocate — a different form of democracy, one that eschews preeminence and power. Thus instead of ignoring the culture, including the state, we must challenge culture and state utterly and seek to demonstrate a better way by constituting ourselves a Christian culture, a kingdom culture that takes the teaching of Jesus very seriously. If his opponents ask Hauerwas for a theory or justification for the existence of the state, Hauerwas repeatedly insists that he is under no obligation to furnish one. For Hauerwas and most others within this tradition, influenced as it is by the work of the Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder, this way of living entails a commitment to absolute pacifism. Certainly in recent years the polarization and debates between pacifists and just war theorists have become both intense and sophisticated.39
(d) A slight variation on this sort of approach is nicely represented in the recent book by Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee.40 The book abounds in helpful insights and thoughtful exegeses. Above all, it is characterized by a valiant attempt to bring together positions that many have judged to be disparate. For instance, Stassen and Gushee insist that the pacifist and the just war theorist ought to see themselves as closer than they commonly do. Just war theorists who truly understand the teaching of Jesus will surely want to uphold nonviolence and justice, so they should develop their just war theory “as the most effective way to minimize violence and injustice, not merely to rationalize making war.”41 It is entirely wrong to state that the world or government have their own spheres of authority divorced from Jesus and his teaching and then appeal to just war theory instead of to the teaching of Jesus. These and other ways
of marginalizing and compartmentalizing Jesus’ lordship set up some other lord — the government, the need for retribution or nationalism — as lord over the rest of life. They are therefore idolatry. And they create secularism, because they teach that outside the private realm, or a future realm, or an ideal realm, Jesus is not relevant. Instead what are relevant are secular norms or authorities without critique from Jesus. Thus they remove just war theory from correction by gospel ethics, so that it serves some other lord and gets used dishonestly to justify wars that are not just. We argue that just war theory is not autonomous. Either it serves the purpose of reducing violence and seeking justice under Christ’s lordship, or it serves some idolatrous loyalty such as rationalizing a war that we have an urge to make. Either Jesus is Lord over just war theory, or just war theory serves some other lord over Jesus.42
What Stassen and Gushee do not probe are some of the other dimensions that properly contribute to the insistence that Jesus must remain Lord of all. For instance, in line with many other just war theorists, Cole argues that under the conditions and limitations of just war theory Christians are morally bound to engage in just war: that is, not to do so, under those conditions, is a failure to keep what Jesus designates as the second commandment, the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. If it is in our capacity to stop a terrible injustice that is taking the lives of many, and we refuse to do so because it might cost us the lives of some of our own people, what is lacking is love.43 Moreover, others have synthesized the biblical teaching on the kingdom of God in a slightly different way from that espoused by Hauerwas or by Stassen and Gushee44 or insist that the attempt to unify the pacifist and the just war theorist is more problematic than some think.45
A side note: a rather troubling anomaly about the book by Stassen and Gushee, and about a great many others that espouse a similar approach to the nature of the kingdom,46 is the eagerness with which their authors bash the reigning superpower, the United States, for its assorted abuses of power, while arguing that part of the answer lies in strengthening the authority of a really super-superpower, the United Nations. So it turns out that they are not very much afraid of too much power in one place after all; they just don’t like the American locus of power. None of these books raises questions about the astonishing degree of nonaccountability in U.N. structures or the U.N.’s demonstrated adeptness at corruption — displayed not least in the spectacular “Oil for Food” scandal. In other words, when they move from theology and exegesis to try to sound prophetic in the contemporary world, they often sound merely faddish and naive.
(e) Far harder to categorize is the independent and subtle work of Oliver O’Donovan.47 O’Donovan is far from viewing “Constantinianism” as a term of shame or opprobrium. He is in line with the historian Robert Louis Wilken, who argues that, by and large, far from “doing ethics for Caesar” (as is commonly charged), the church after Constantine held Caesar accountable to higher standards — exemplified when, in A.D. 390, Ambrose excommunicated the Christian Theodosius for the massacre he had perpetrated in Thessalonica. Indeed, O’Donovan can go so far as to suggest that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution marks the symbolic end of Christendom, when it prohibits Congress from making a law to establish or hinder religion, for it frees the state from all responsibility to recognize God’s self-revelation in history. This does not mean that O’Donovan offers an aggressive defense of “Christendom.” Rather, he argues that in the wake of Jesus’ triumphant resurrection and exaltation, all the political authorities of the world have been made subject to Christ, who has triumphed over them, so that, at least in principle, they have no power left. Nevertheless, God grants them limited authority to act in this present age, before the ultimate manifestation of Christ’s kingdom. The First Amendment, then, actively denies what the Bible teaches: the state has an obligation to recognize God’s self-disclosure in history. Within this framework, O’Donovan does not argue that Christians should aggressively pursue the establishment of Christian states but says that they will arise from time to time, even though none of them will be permanently established in this present age.
In The Ways of Judgment, O’Donovan asserts that “the authority of secular government resides in the practice of judgment.”48 By “judgment” O’Donovan does not mean to reduce the authority of government to the sphere of the judicial. Rather, judgment is “an act of moral discrimination that pronounces upon a preceding act or existing state of affairs to establish a new public context.”49 So if political authorities have been set in place in the wake of Christ’s exaltation, they constitute a secondary witness to God’s own act of judgment. Using this controlling motif of judgment, much of the rest of the book works through the nature of political authority, the representation of the people, the nature of democracy, and much more. Transparently O’Donovan is in favor of fairly limited government.
O’Donovan’s work has been subjected to probing scrutiny.50 Even if one may criticize some aspects of how he arrives at the point, one of O’Donovan’s great strengths is his ability to carve out a theological grounding for the role of government without sliding into many of the traps into which so many theorists tumble.
(f) Various parts of Christianity’s spectrum in America are not slow to criticize other parts. The left criticizes the right,51 and the right criticizes the left.52 But all such criticisms are exercises in sedate self-restraint compared with the unrestrained rhetoric of the secular far left. Even their titles say a great deal.
In American Fascists: The Christian Right and War on America,53 Chris Hedges lumps just about anyone who is a Christian into a dark conspiracy largely controlled by theonomists. Perhaps the Presbyterian background of Hedges makes him choose this particular target, but whatever the derivation, Hedges is convinced that Christians are about to do to America what the early Nazis did to Germany.
Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism54 is another work that focuses on theonomy (or “reconstruction”). She manages to lump together Timothy McVeigh (a harbinger of “theocratic authoritarianism”), Tim Keller, Marvin Olasky, and D. James Kennedy. She doesn’t mention Rick Warren. She has no idea at all about the variations in belief and outlook among these and other evangelicals — or if she does, she certainly does not normally let on. Worse, when she does recognize a difference, her “approach, like that of all the anti-theocrat authors, is to assume that the most extreme manifestation of religious conservatism must, by definition, be its most authentic expression.”55
In The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us,56 James Rudin foresees ID cards identifying every person’s religious faith, compulsory Bible studies in all government departments and big businesses, preferential treatment for Christocrats (sic), and so forth.
Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,57 ties the dangerous theology rather less to Rushdoony and reconstructionists than to Hal Lindsey and rapture eschatology. Does anyone in the Bush cabinet hold to either theological structure? No matter: they’ve either been snookered or are hiding their real beliefs.
These books reflect almost laughably poor research. Yet in New York City, where these books sell like hot dogs at a baseball game, “evangelicalism” is now a dirty word on a par with “jihadism” or “fascism.” Certainly there are as many kooks on the right as on the left. But what we need is a little more care in trying to find out what people really believe and how they really act,58 and a little less guilt by association and wild extrapolation.
The only reason for bringing these books up here is that most of them appeal to the “wall of separation” as a defense of their position. If we must have conservative Christians in the country, they had better learn that religion is a purely private matter. In other words, Jefferson’s wall of separation lies between the state and all outward expressions of religion that have any bearing on anything in which the state may have a vested interest, not between the state and the church as church. In short, these writers think that the only way the wall of separation can be maintained is by making religion, especially Christianity, as private as possible. Some of these writers feel so much under threat that they think legislation should be passed to ban Christians from public office. How they think the “free exercise” phrase is strengthened by this approach is hard to imagine. In the name of freedom they deeply wish to curtail the freedoms of those who may disagree with them. As America becomes more polarized, issues of the relationship between church and state become more heated and more threatening than ever before.
(3) So far the historical notes in this chapter have focused on America’s peculiar experiments with the perennial tensions in the Western world between church and state. The trajectory in the United Kingdom, of course, looks very different. Because England and Scotland both have their own national church, talk of relationships between church and state really do tend to focus on the church as church, whereas in America talk of relationships between church and state, as we have seen, tend to drift toward talk of relationships between Christian religion and state. In England, it is highly likely that issues surrounding the possible disestablishment of the national church will receive more attention in years ahead, owing to the decline in its influence (some pollsters say that on any weekend in England there are now more worshipers in mosques than in church buildings), to the incipient breakup of the church over doctrinal and moral issues, and to the public disavowal of any substantive confessionalism on the part of the Prince of Wales, who will be its next Head.59 Of course, there are many other models of church/state relations. Some countries (e.g., Hungary), concerned that morals be taught in the public school system, have in recent years invited Christian leaders to teach the Bible within the system. It is not at all clear how long this invitation will stand, but from this side of Hungary’s experience in the Eastern bloc this is perceived to be a wonderful expression of freedom.
The point to observe is that just as democracy has many shapes (as the beginning of this chapter tries to make clear), and just as the concept of the nation-state has several shapes, so the notion of freedom of religion has followed different trajectories. Inevitably these variations change the relationships between church and state. The American Revolution and the French Revolution were not far apart in history, but in some ways they headed in opposite directions. In substantial measure, the origin of the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) aimed to protect (the Christian) religion from the state; the French Revolution was much more interested in protecting the state from religion. In its wake, the value of la laïcité (which variously means something of a cross between laicization and secularization) was unquestioned — and still is.
Comparison of the trajectories from the American and the French revolutions has often been attempted. Results have been mixed. It is worth reporting two of them here. The first is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spent a little time in America before World War II and left with a certain ambivalence over the interplay between religion and democracy in the United States. American Christians of the “free church” tradition (since there is no state church) feel free to challenge and thus curb the ambitions and pretensions of the state; on the other hand, they also seem too ready to identify the respective roles of church and state, or at least conflate them. In the following quotation, it is important to remember that Bonhoeffer always calls these American “free church” Christians spiritualists or enthusiasts:
At this point some thought must be given to the special developments in the Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly in America. The American Revolution was almost contemporary with the French one, and politically the two were not unconnected; yet they were profoundly different in character. The American democracy is not founded upon the emancipated man but, quite on the contrary, upon the kingdom of God and the limitation of all earthly powers by the sovereignty of God. It is indeed significant when, in contrast to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, American historians can say that the federal constitution was written by men who were conscious of original sin and of the wickedness of the human heart. Earthly wielders of authority, and also the people, are directed in their proper bounds, in due consideration of man’s innate longing for power and of the fact that power pertains only to God. With these ideas, which derive from Calvinism, there is combined the essentially contrary idea which comes from the spiritualism of the dissenters who took refuge in America, the idea that the kingdom of God on earth cannot be built by the authority of the state but only by the congregation of the faithful. The Church proclaims the principles of the social and political order, and the state makes available the technical means for putting them into effect. These two quite alien lines of thought converge in the demand for democracy, and it is enthusiastic spiritualism that becomes the determining factor in American thought. This explains the remarkable fact that on the European continent it has never been possible to find a Christian basis for democracy, while in the Anglo-Saxon countries democracy and democracy alone is regarded as the Christian form of the state. The persecution and expulsion of the spiritualists from the Continent has in this respect been fraught with the most far-reaching political consequences. If in spite of this the Anglo-Saxon countries, too, are suffering from severe symptoms of secularization, the cause does not lie in the misinterpretation of the distinction between the two offices or kingdoms, but rather in the reverse of this, in the failure of the enthusiasts to distinguish at all between the office or kingdom of the state and the office or kingdom of the Church. The claim of the congregation of the faithful to build the world with Christian principles ends only with the total capitulation of the Church to the world, as can be seen clearly enough by a glance at the New York church registers. If this does not involve a radical hostility to the Church, that is only because no real distinction has ever been drawn here between the offices of Church and state. Godlessness remains more covert. And indeed in this way it deprives the Church even of the blessing of suffering and of the possible rebirth which suffering may engender.60
One can quibble with quite a few of the details. Bonhoeffer’s analysis depends more than a little on his Lutheran background with its “two kingdoms” theology, and even more on his deep awareness of the vaulting, limitless ambitions of the German state in which he is living. Certainly one may take exception to some of his historical analysis, which in any case now sounds rather dated. Nevertheless it is an excellent reminder of how the relationship between church and state varies enormously from country to country in the Western world, and from period to period within any one country.
Or again, here is Jacques Maritain, writing shortly after World War II when he had moved from France to the United States:
[A] European who comes to America is struck by the fact that the expression “separation between Church and State,” which is in itself a misleading expression, does not have the same meaning here and in Europe. In Europe it means, or it meant, that complete isolation which derives from century-old misunderstandings and struggles, and which has produced most unfortunate results. Here it means, as a matter of fact, together with a refusal to grant any privilege to one religious denomination in preference to others and to have a State established religion, a distinction between the State and the Churches which is compatible with good feeling and mutual cooperation. Sharp distinction and actual cooperation, that’s an historical treasure, the value of which a European is perhaps more prepared to appreciate, because of his own bitter experiences. Please to God that you keep it carefully, and do not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one.61
Once more one could quibble over details. The contrast Maritain perceives is not really between America and Europe but between America and France: when Maritain penned these lines, more than one nation in Europe still boasted a state church (e.g., England) or churches (e.g., Germany), generating patterns of relationships between church and state different both from those of America and from those of France. Clearly, Maritain is describing an America of more than half a century ago. Since then, processes of secularization and backlash have generated a rather different temper in church/state relations in the United States. Moreover, while intellectual and media elites in America adopt many of the stances of (the American version of) postmodernism, elites in France are still deeply committed to structural modernism. Not long ago, President Chirac spoke warmly of the universal project of humanism and of France’s role in propagating it. Yet even after these and other caveats have been entered, Maritain’s observations strike today’s reader as shrewd. At least in part, the American Revolution and its aftermath were designed to support freedom for religion; at least in part, the French Revolution and its aftermath were designed to support freedom from religion. To this day, there are many Europeans who dismiss overt Christian appeal in matters of public policy to the curse of “civil religion.”62
This means that when it comes to freedom of religion, what Christians look for in France is rather different from what they look for in Europe. Some French universities, for instance, prohibit all Christian (or other religious) gatherings on their premises. Where a similar prohibition has been attempted in the United States (sometimes on the ground that Christian groups are intolerant since they will not appoint to office those who are practicing homosexuals), Christians respond by appealing to the First Amendment and, so far at least, have prevailed in court. In France, much more authority rests with the university authorities themselves than is the case in the United States, so what is or is not permitted can appear a little more arbitrary. But the nature of the Christian appeal for use of public university premises is very different. Provided Christians are using their group time for study of the Bible and Christian teachings, the French commitment to academic freedom may respond favorably. Where Christians want to include corporate worship, the French commitment to la laïcité may forbid the meetings altogether.63 So Christians shape their meetings and their appeals around study and teaching. I am not arguing that one heritage or another has all the answers. I am merely pointing out that the shape of the relationships between church and state (including state-sponsored institutions, like universities) can vary enormously, and it is difficult to affix normative status, or even long-term stability, to any one of them. Such differences in outlook account for at least some part of France’s antipathy toward the United States.64
(4) It is time to look outside the world that is historically, by heritage, Christian. Not a few historians and social scientists have assumed that modernity would cause religion to wither on the vine. Transparently, there are so many exceptions to that thesis that new studies are appearing to challenge the old assumptions. One of the most interesting is that of David Herbert,65 who traces out some of the complex ways in which religion may interact with “civil society” (his expression). One of the strengths of his book is its four case studies: the role of Islam in Britain this side of The Satanic Verses, the role of Catholicism in Poland, the role of various religions in Bosnia, and the role of the Islamization (again, his expression) of Egypt this side of Nasser.
This is not the place to review again the fact that Islam has (a) no heritage of “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (b) a rather different view of the nation-state, which is clearly secondary to the ummah, the people of Islam, (c) nothing quite like a national church, still less a denomination, such that discussion of the relationships between church and state, in some Western categories, makes much sense,66 (d) a sense of historical grievance stemming from the decline of its own influence during the past century and a half or so, and (e) a rising sense of power stemming from the “successes” of its own radical elements, from the fiscal power it exerts because of rising oil revenues, and from its demographic advantages in Europe and elsewhere (a birthrate of about 3.5 while Europe as a whole is under 1.4).
There are so many possible directions that developments in the Muslim world could go that prognostication can be little more than speculation. Many writers have charted examples of the growing strength of more militant strands of Islam — whether Wahaabis in Saudi Arabia, increasing Islamicist rhetoric and education in Egypt during the last three or four decades, or small indices like the fact that fifteen years ago a Muslim in Malaysia could convert to another religion without going before a Shariʾa court, but now that small liberty has been taken away and the customary court sentence is punishment. On the other hand, some writers argue that Islam has internal resources to develop its own appreciation for and defense of democracy.67 One watches with interest the competing forces within a country like Turkey, forces that are set out with rare power in Orhan Pamuk’s remarkable novel, Snow.68 The Muslim world is full of ironies and may yet see some remarkable backlashes. Some have argued that Muslims tend to be most open to the West in those countries in which the governments are most vehemently opposed to the West, such as Iran. There is at least some evidence that many ordinary Muslims in some parts of the world are fed up with the violence of their own jihadists, who, far from winning the hearts of the people on the long haul, may end up alienating a lot of them. Or will they constantly find an adequate number of young recruits in countries whose birthrate provides a seemingly endless supply?
In any dispute, personal or national, perception is not everything, but it plays a very big part. Devout Muslims whose only detailed conversation with Westerners has been with those in the liberal heritage are unlikely to be attracted by what they see and hear. The liberal’s elevation of the value of religious tolerance to the highest place in the order of virtues will, to a devout Muslim, appear to be a form of functional atheism. Allah brooks no rivals. If the choice is between Islam and profound espousal of religious pluralism as a good in itself, then to the devout Muslim Islam wins, hands down. Even if that Muslim wants to disavow the violence of the jihadists, he or she will not want to embrace the religious pluralism that characterizes so much of the West.
If that Muslim then meets conservative, confessional Christians, a startlingly new conversation takes place. Now the Muslim meets Christians every bit as committed to confessing the universal sweep of God’s sovereignty as do Muslims. These Christians insist every knee will one day bow to King Jesus. They reject, on a deeply principled basis, the religious pluralism that characterizes much Western thought, if that religious pluralism is presented as the ideal. Yet on the other hand, they equally reject violence as a way of advancing the gospel and delight in the empirical pluralism of most Western democracies, not as an absolute good, nor as the highest of moral virtues, but as the best way forward in a fallen and broken world full of idolatries and errors (including our own). Religious pluralism cannot be an ultimate good, for it will not be found in the new heaven and the new earth, toward which we press; but if in this broken world it curbs violence and coercion, if it promotes relative freedom among those who (whether they recognize it or not) bear God’s image, then we thank God for the gifts of common grace and for the wisdom of the Master who insisted on some kind of distinction, no matter how complex and how little absolute, between the sphere of Caesar and the sphere of God. We reserve the right to proclaim Christ, and we will give our lives to maintain that right; but we have no interest in ostensible “conversions” achieved at sword-tip, and we distance ourselves from forebears who did not see that point clearly.
As for democracy, if we promote it, we do so not because we take it to be an absolute good, still less as the solution to all political problems, and not even because it is an ideal form of government, but because, granted that the world is fallen and all of us prone to the most grotesque evils, it appears to be the least objectionable option. Our eschatology teaches us that the game isn’t over. The way we get to the end is not by military conquest, and not even by the ballot box, but by our Lord’s return — and meanwhile we engage in the proclamation of the good news about Jesus in word and deed and remember that he himself taught us that Caesar has a sphere, under God, that is to be respected, an authority that is to be obeyed.
As I say, when devout Muslims meet Christians of that ilk, the conversation over vision and political ends and means may not be quite as antithetical. But whether Islam can develop the resources to produce its own modus vivendi with a Caesar detached from promoting Islam as part of governmental policy is still far from certain.
We must look at Muslim states from yet another perspective: How do Christian churches fare under Muslim governments? In other words, if we are asking questions about church and state, what is the nature of the relationship when the state is Muslim? Here there is considerable variation. During the last five years in Indonesia, close to four thousand Christians have been martyred and many church buildings burned to the ground. This is not the result of the policy of central government, but local governments have certainly looked the other way. In Malaysia, Christian churches have substantial liberty, provided the Christian community maintains its locus primarily among the Chinese segment of the population. Even so, to build a church building with a steeple and cross, even for the Chinese Christian population, is forbidden, for such accoutrements are judged too provocative. Malay churches in Malaysia do not officially exist, and Malays (most of whom are Muslim) who convert to Christianity face enormous difficulties.
Open churches among the Saudi population do not exist, and a Saudi who converts publicly from Islam to Christianity is unlikely to survive. It is illegal to build any religious building other than a mosque. In Turkey the official public policy favors more freedom, but there are many local variations, and many common irritations: for example, it is difficult to get a government job if you are a Christian, and in some areas any open witness like passing out free New Testaments risks a severe beating. In Iran there are sporadic outbreaks of violence against Christian church leaders. So the question must be asked: How will churches in the more restricted Muslim countries view their governments?
Of course, the same question could be asked of non-Muslim persecuting regimes. A recent survey by Open Doors assigns the title “worst country for Christian persecution” to North Korea. Where such persecution is more-or-less unremitting and frequently violent, the more benign of Niebuhr’s models will seem simply irrelevant to most Christians living there. Where opposition, persecution, and even martyrdom await Christians with any public face, expansive chatter about theoretically ideal models of possible relations between Christ and culture is little more than speculative farce.
It is time to draw some strands together.
(1) Our survey, though far from comprehensive, shows how difficult it is to talk about the relations between church and state without addressing the broader topic of the relations between Christians and the state, and the still broader topic of the relations between religion and the state. The interplay of these polarities is extraordinarily complicated, owing not only to different histories in different countries but also to different understandings of democracy, different assumptions about secularism, different visions of God and of faithfulness, very different religions, and so forth.
From a Christian point of view, it is unhelpful to speak of “the Christian West” or of “our Christian nation” or the like.69 In America, this is not only because of the legal force of the First Amendment (however it is interpreted) but also because nowadays the numeric shift in numbers of Christians, from West to East and from North to South, is so dramatic that such expressions sound increasingly parochial and out of date. Still more important, talk of “the Christian West” actually stifles the advance of the gospel in parts of the world where countervailing religions and ideologies want people to believe in the stereotype of the Christian West so that Christian claims can be dismissed as merely Western. Above all, Christians who wish to be faithful to the Bible will remind themselves of their heavenly citizenship. Not to understand this is to identify too closely with the kingdoms and orders of this world, with disastrous results both materially and spiritually. As Peter Swift has put it, “If a Muslim becomes a Christian, the civilizational cost is self-evident; he becomes estranged from his roots, and those he leaves behind are dismayed at the civilizational defection their loved one has undergone. The cost of becoming a disciple of Jesus is to leave behind the civilizations of this world and find one’s identity within the Kingdom of God. What a tragedy if that cost is cheapened by being perceived as a move westward rather than heavenward!”70 Of course, the complementary truth is that we do live here and now in some particular country, and as Paul can declare himself to be a Roman, so I may declare myself to be Ugandan, or Canadian, or Australian, or French, or Japanese. Certainly there ought to be no confusion for Christians as to where their primary identity lies, even while they remember that the Christian Scriptures themselves enjoin us to submit to the authority of the state except where doing so involves the believer in disobedience to the God in whom all authority is finally grounded.
(2) Most who read these pages live in democracies. Compared with Christians of the first century living under the Roman Empire, this reality brings new freedoms and new responsibilities. On the side of freedom, it is difficult to imagine a Christian in Judea about A.D. 65 singing, “And I’m proud to be a Judean man/For at least I know I’m free.”71 Yet on the other hand, the biblical injunctions to submit to the state as to God means, in our context, that we must take our obligations toward a participatory democracy seriously. This, combined with the moral obligation to “do good to the city,” involves believers in matters of government at some level (all the way from voting to influencing government to legislating and governing) in ways impossible for Paul or Luke — and this means that today it is more difficult to develop a “them” versus “us” mentality typical of believers under totalitarian regimes. While that may improve our sense of participation, doubtless it also increases the possibility of being snookered into confusing the kingdom of God with our own government or party.
(3) The subtlety of these dangers demands more attention. Consider, for example, the oft-repeated advice that if we wish to influence the broader culture through the media and in the corridors of power we must translate our Christian values and priorities into secular categories. Is this good advice? Yes and no. Clearly, the advice reflects pragmatic wisdom. On issues from race to abortion to poverty to homosexuality, we are likely to appeal to a broader range of people if our arguments are not couched in Christian categories and if we manage to form “co-belligerencies” on some strategic issues. Yet we would be naive not to perceive that that is precisely where the danger lies. If all of our energy is devoted to making our stances acceptably popular by appealing to goals that are broadly secular, it is a short step to enabling those secular values to take precedence over a Christian frame of reference that bows in principle to the Lordship of Christ.72 In other words, we ourselves may come to put such stock in our clever adaptations that they mean more to us than the biblical frame of reference that generated the stances in the first place. Moreover, because politics is regularly a pretty vicious form of interchange, our opponents are likely to sniff out our Christian beliefs anyway, and then they will blast us for hiding them and trying to appear secular when we are in reality religious wolves in secular sheep’s clothing. Then we will be damned not only for our views but also for our dissembling.
Worse still, our form of discourse may be signaling that we think the secularists are right: we ought to avoid making any appeal to our “religious” convictions because we support the separation of church and state. That public stance gives subtle advantage to the extraordinarily dangerous view that “the wall of separation” prohibits Christians — or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or animists — from participating in the shaping of public policy, instead of defending the view that the wall of separation prohibits entangling the government with the establishment of the church as church. If Christians are not allowed to argue in the public arena as Christians, then implicitly we are supporting the contentions of Pete Singer and Richard Dawkins and their friends, to the effect that atheistic secularists are the only people who are arguing their case from a “neutral” position.
Five further layers of subtlety call for attention.
(a) When the government hands out money for community benefit — for a job creation program, say, or to help AIDS sufferers — should any of that money go to non-ecclesiastical Christian (or other religious) organizations that try to serve the community in these ways? In many democracies, that is what happens; in some democracies, that is precisely what does not happen. In the United States, it is one of the things that is currently being tested. One might have thought that such indiscriminate largesse is no breach of the First Amendment provided different religious organizations similarly organized receive equal benefit, for then it is hard to see how there is “establishment” of any one religion. But that, of course, is an “originalist” reading of the Constitution. For some decades, courts have tended to limit such distribution of funds if any part of them goes to a distinctively religious component (e.g., teaching the Bible as well as distributing food to the poor). In many ministries, however, it is almost impossible to separate “religious” and “secular” components. From a Christian perspective, it is highly undesirable to do so. I would have thought that there is no breach of the First Amendment if there is a substantial state interest in the ministry and if the support provided by the state is happily distributed to similar ministries of various denominations and religions when citizens of those denominations and religions are similarly organized — but of course, one must deal with the courts and their decisions as they are, not as one wishes they were.
(b) At the local level, the impact of demography, working out in democracy, must surely come into play. Where a neighborhood is predominantly Muslim, or Christian, or whatever, there should be no pressure on government to provide equal support at the local level to all religion-ministries that may be supported elsewhere in the country. In other words, as unreasonable as it sounds to some, a little common sense in these discussions would be a good thing.
(c) Much more so than in any other Western democracy, America has developed the fine art of individual whining. If a school that receives state dollars puts on a Christmas play with a Christmas theme, all it takes is one vociferous atheist or vociferous Muslim to complain about his or her child feeling alienated or wounded, and school administrators are likely to shut down the Christian traditions and resort to a bland “Season’s Greetings” presentation, usually involving Martians or others of indeterminate race, culture, gender, or creed who cannot be in competition with our convictions. Of course, if the school is located in a neighborhood where many religious traditions compete, then a great deal can be said for celebrations that inform the entire community of those different traditions. But where there is one whiner worried about loss of self-esteem, one begins to wonder why there is little concern for community self-esteem, for forbearance within the community, for community pleasure at supporting the majority tradition.73
(d) More complicated yet is the broadly moral arena. Some American states, not to mention Canadian courts, have legalized “marriage” between homosexuals. Most Western democracies run or sanction large gambling establishments. Confessional Catholics and Protestants alike will be displeased with the former, and confessional Protestants will be displeased with the latter. Their own liberties are not curtailed by such legislation or judicial decisions, of course: they are not forced (at least, not yet!) to sanction homosexual marriage or to gamble. But many Christians will see such steps not only as contrary to the “norming norm” of Scripture but also as deeply harmful to society. Whether they think the harm comes in the social categories of deteriorating families and desperate addictions and bankruptcies, or in the theological category of the threat of God’s wrath on the nation, or some combination of the two, they feel morally constrained, not only out of loyalty to God but out of concern for the nation, to influence policy in another direction. In other words, we would prefer to see laws in place that forbid certain conduct because we are convinced that such conduct is bad — bad both theologically and socially. Secularists will view this as religious meddling; we view it as the entailment of love for our neighbor and as inescapably tied to our confession that Jesus is Lord. Secularists may well view Christian political efforts along these lines as frightening examples of theocracy; Christians may well view secularist rhetoric as an attempt to stifle Christian efforts to pass laws they judge to be moral — indeed, as a sign of desperate moral decay that does not care for the well-being of the nation, let alone for the glory of God.
It is unclear how far such polarities can go without democracy itself changing its shape. Indeed, most efforts to point the way forward implicitly adopt either a Christian or a secularist stance. For example, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan clearly understands that all religions implicitly challenge the state’s monopoly on law. Their appeal to transcendent authority challenges the exclusive claims of the state and insists, in effect, on the right to “a life outside the state.”74 With remarkable optimism, Sullivan thinks she can meet this need by passing laws that guarantee equality. But this of course means that the secular view of the state is basically correct, and that such a state, wisely operating, wishes merely to protect the (implicitly erroneous) views of religious citizens.
(e) All of the reasoning of these last few paragraphs is nothing other than an attempt at prudential wisdom as we try to work out, in the light of current social and political conditions, a handful of entailments to Jesus’ “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” If the developing tension is not between secularists and Christians, however, but between secularists and deeply committed Marxists or devout Muslims, the roiling outcome may be quite different. We return to the fact that neither of these traditions has within its respective heritage a component of thought that expects the Marxist or Muslim community to be distinguishable from the state or that feels under mandate of its founder to preserve that distinction.
(4) The consequence, then, is that we have additional reasons for thinking that Niebuhr’s fivefold typology, as influential as it has been, simply will not do. It will not do because, as we saw in earlier chapters, it offers us alternative ways of thinking about Christ and culture, whereas one of his types cannot be justified by Scripture, and the other four can all be found in Scripture, prompting questions about whether they are alternatives or components of a bigger pattern — a pattern that begins to emerge when we follow the Bible’s story line in the categories of biblical theology. Moreover, the fivefold typology is not very effective at interacting with current discussions over postmodernism. And now we find it lacking in an age when notions like “the Christian west” cannot really be sustained, when multiculturalism has shaped many decisions of the Supreme Court, and when immigration patterns force us to think about the way non-Christian religions, notably Islam, are likely to view the typologies Niebuhr proposes. In short, as influential as it has been in the past, Niebuhr’s fivefold typology now seems parochial.75
(5) Two of the elements of religious liberty that Christians espouse are freedom to convert from one religion to another (or to none) and freedom to evangelize. Most Muslim countries will happily allow non-Muslims to become Muslims, but not the reverse. Part of the reason lies with the imperialist expectations of Islam, but part lies in quite a different understanding of “conversion” as compared with the notion of conversion espoused by Christians. To become a Muslim, one need only confess that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. One is supposed to commit oneself to the five fundamental practices of Islam, but plenty of nominal Muslims don’t bother. Becoming a Muslim, then, means coming to adopt a position and perform certain practices. This is not normally thought of as coming to know God: such talk is presumptuous, for God is so transcendent that we cannot know him directly. Becoming a Muslim means submitting to the will of God as revealed in the Qur’an, more than coming to know the God of the Qur’an. By contrast, Christian conversion, though it includes changing an allegiance and adopting some practices, is understood to be connected with the work of the Spirit of God in one’s life. Regeneration transforms one’s life, and the walk of faith in Jesus Christ enables us to speak of knowing God in a way quite different from our life before conversion. A child who grows up in a Christian home may well speak of the moment of his or her “conversion” at, say, age 8 or 15, or after attaining adulthood; a child growing up in a Muslim home would never speak of being converted to Islam. Islam demands conformity to the system; Christianity demands the internal transformation sometimes called regeneration. A person contemplating changing to Islam must simply exercise an act of will — of willed commitment to a new allegiance. Enormous social pressure may be applied to keep that person aligned with these new-found Muslim commitments. According to Paul, a person contemplating Christ must be enlightened by the Spirit or remain merely “natural” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In short, we have a high stake in preserving a place for “conversion” that is intrinsically supernatural (however much it involves the human will), that demands what some traditions call “soul liberty,” and that certainly extends beyond mere practice.
Philip Yancey reports a conversation with a Muslim who told him, “I find no guidance in the Qur’an on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society and no guidance in the New Testament on how Christians should live as a majority.”76 That may not be quite true, but, as Yancey points out, it does highlight “a central difference between the two faiths. One, born at Pentecost, tends to thrive cross-culturally and even counter-culturally, often coexisting with oppressive governments. The other, geographically anchored in Mecca, was founded simultaneously as a religion and a state.”77
(6) Perhaps this is the place to affirm that, however complicated the theoretical discussion becomes over the relationships between church and state, the most attractive outworking by far is found in the individual Christian or group of Christians who, precisely because they live out their faith, become involved not only in bold witness but also in ways of helping others in the community that cross many thresholds normally controlled by government agencies. A church starts a center in its poor area of town to mentor kids without dads, to help kids to read, to look after some of the sick and the elderly, to start a school that has far more care, discipline, Christian influence, and rigor than in the available options, and so forth. Let the critics cry “Foul!” and demand that religion be private. We serve a Lord who will not allow us to be silent and retreat.
(7) Finally, in all Christian reflection on these matters, however much we wrestle with the complications arising from Jesus’ utterance, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” we cannot forget, not for a moment, that Jesus is Lord of all, yet at the same time the end is not yet. I know of no finer brief statement of the resulting eschatological tensions than that written by Richard John Neuhaus in the 1981 founding statement of the Institute on Religion and Democracy:
Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the first and final assertion Christians make about all of reality, including politics. Believers now assert by faith what one day will be manifest to the sight of all: every earthly sovereignty is subordinate to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The Church is the bearer of that claim. Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all the kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed. Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social or economic order of this passing time. At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope.
1. In fact, during the first three centuries pagans sometimes thought of Christianity as a “philosophy,” reflecting a time when “philosophy” meant something like worldview — an entire frame of reference that established meaning, direction, values, theory of origins, and the like, such as the philosophy of Stoicism or the philosophy of Epicureanism. Contrast the more restricted contemporary sense of “philosophy,” which refers to a fairly narrow academic discipline with assorted branches and, on the whole, with much more interest in critiquing worldviews than in establishing them.
2. Hence TNIV’s “the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in a body. . . .”
3. It must be said, however, that Ignatius’s formula is not as unambiguous a support for the threefold office and for definition of the church by appeal to episcopal office as some think. Ignatius himself was not concerned to focus on the office so much as to defend the truth. In Protestant confessionalism, the church is marked, at the very least, by the gospel, that is, by the truth, and by faithful observance of sacraments. This truth is what Ignatius was trying to uphold. It is anachronistic to read into Ignatius’s formula an emphasis on the office per se at the expense of the primacy of gospel fidelity with which Ignatius himself was concerned.
4. “Associations” rather than “denominations”: this is why an expression such as “the Baptist church” can refer to the local church that meets around the corner, but not to an ostensible denomination — unlike, say, “the Anglican church,” which can have either local or denominational reference.
5. For instance, of his many relevant writings see the easy way in which “church” and “Christians” can be swapped back and forth in Issues Facing Christians Today: A Major Appraisal of Contemporary Social and Moral Questions (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1984). More explicitly, see his Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1975), 24: “Now [Jesus] sends us, he says, as the Father had sent him. Therefore our mission, like his, is to be one of service. He emptied himself of status and took the form of a servant, and his humble mind is to be in us (Philippians 2.5-8). He supplies us with the perfect model of service, and sends his church into the world to be a servant church” (emphasis added). I am grateful to Mark Dever for the latter reference.
6. I shall use “bishops” and “overseers” interchangeably.
7. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1986.
8. So, for that matter, does heresy — but that is another argument.
9. See especially Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1-27. Cf. also D. Jeffrey Bailey, “Development and Diversity in Early Christianity,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49 (2006): 45-66.
10. The expression is that of P. Garnsey, “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 6.
11. So, rightly, Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
12. Here Harland does not seem to read the sources rightly: see the telling critique of Wendy Cotter, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 68 (2006): 542-43.
13. Russell Hittinger, “The Churches of Earthly Power,” First Things 164 (June/July 2006): 28.
14. Hittinger, “The Churches of Earthly Power,” 28.
15. For an impressive defense of the nation-state, see Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, New French Thought Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
16. E.g., Johnny Awwad, “The Kingdom of God and the State: Jesus’ Attitude to the Power and Governing Structures of His Day,” Theological Review 22 (2001): 35-60, esp. 48-52.
17. “Ironie dramatique dans la mise en intrigue de l’empire en Romains 13, 1-7,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35 (2006): 39-63.
18. For example, Brian J. Lee, “Govern Well or Be Governed? The Christian and the Civil Authorities in Romans 13,” Modern Reformation 15/6 (November/December 2006): 16-19.
19. There is no better treatment of that theme than that of Raymond C. Ortlund Jr., Whoredom: God’s Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology, New Studies in Biblical Theology; Leicester: IVP/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), recently reprinted as God’s Unfaithful Wife: A Biblical Theology of Spiritual Adultery (New Studies in Biblical Theology 2; Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003).
20. Cf. Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Text Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 461: “Most interpreters recognize that πολίτευμα has added significance in a letter sent to Philippi. This is not, however, because the rendering ‘colony’ fits. Rather, under the provisions of the Roman form of constitutional government conferred on the city by Octavian in 42 B.C., Philippi was ‘governed as if it was on Italian soil and its administration reflected that of Rome in almost every respect’. So, writing to Christians in a city proud of its relation to Rome, Paul tells the Philippians that they belong to a heavenly commonwealth, that is, their state and constitutive government is in heaven, and as its citizens they are to reflect its life (cf. also 1:27, where Paul uses the cognate verb πολιτεύομαι).”
21. For discussion of this point, along with relevant inscriptions and references, see Peter Oakes, Philippians: From People to Letter, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 110 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 139.
22. “In the first century AD, the one whom most people would see as saving in accordance with his power to subject all things to himself was the emperor” (Oakes, Philippians, 145).
23. Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 47.
24. Some whose experience and study of government have been restricted to the best of the Western tradition will find my insistence on this divergence overstated. All I can say is that they have not looked closely at governments in, say, East Asia, the Central Asian republics, Africa, Latin America; they have not read widely in history outside the Western canon. Sometimes bullying governments are nothing but the incarnation of thugs, of course. But very often an undergirding philosophical structure shapes the exercise of authority — whether the tribal authority vested in the leader of the clan, or the elitist self-congratulation of Plato’s (and Harvard’s) philosopher-kings, or the oligarchy of the Marxist nomenklatura who alone rightly implement Marxist teachings, or the assumption of Confucian polarities that place rulers “up” and everyone else “down.” Rulers in such traditions may be good or bad according to their own lights, of course, but good is never measured simply along Christian axes. The second-century emperor Hadrian was a “good” emperor in the sense that he was energetic, well organized, disciplined, and so forth. Had there been trains, he would have made them run on time. He could also be brutal toward Christians, and he listened to pagan voices urging that the Empire was weakening owing to Christian influence. Certainly the West has had its share of awful leaders, but we are blind to our heritage if we fail to observe how many universally admired good leaders have brought into government with them something of the distinctive Christian emphasis on service.
25. Paul Trebilco, “Gospel, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Perspectives from the New Testament,” Evangel 24/2 (2006): 42.
26. I briefly touched on some of these issues in chapter 4 of this book. I have not attempted to say anything about the history of the rise of democracy and its integrated legal tradition: that would require another sort of book well beyond my expertise. For an erudite and provocative analysis, see the first two volumes (a third one is planned) by Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, repr. 1983); Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006).
27. Many of them had of course been influenced by Roger Williams, refugee from Massachusetts and founder of Rhode Island. Recently James Calvin Davis (The Moral Theology of Roger Williams: Christian Conviction and Public Ethics, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004]) has argued that although Williams’s ecclesiology was distinctive, much of his argumentation derived from his Reformed convictions somewhat modified by his understanding of natural law, rather than from mere pragmatics or moral relativism.
28. The rhetoric appealed to the role of Jefferson as a leading architect of the First Amendment, with the aim, of course, of interpreting the First Amendment in terms of the (later) “wall of separation” letter. But Jefferson was in France in 1789 when the First Amendment was drafted and ratified.
29. One of the more important histories of the Court is that of James Hitchcock, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, vol. 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses; vol. 2: From “Higher Law” to “Sectarian Scruples” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). One of the things that Hitchcock makes clear is how the later Justices view the state as over religion. Even commentators who are a long way from supporting an “originalist” reading of the Constitution and Bill of Rights commonly find the Court’s decisions on the relationships between church and state to be a mess of inconsistencies and poor argumentation: see, for instance, Charlie Fried, Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
30. See the compelling essay by John Witte Jr., “Publick Religion: Adams v. Jefferson,” First Things 141 (March 2004): 29-34. See also Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem — And What We Should Do about It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Perhaps it should be said that some who think this is the case argue for a modified “originalist” position: Randy E. Barnett (Restoring the Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004]), for instance, thinks that the controlling “grid” by which the Constitution is to be read and preserved is whatever interpretation of it contributes to liberty, to which, after all, the framers were committed. Yet as soon as one adopts a selection of original themes only, one is necessarily adopting a stance that is both uncontrolled and amoral (unless one has made a prior commitment to the view that liberty is the summum bonum).
31. Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
32. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
33. Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
34. Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism, 250 — but the expression recurs frequently in her work.
35. Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism, 257.
36. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
37. See especially his A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); or, in briefer compass, his “Christianity and Politics: The Difference Between Christians and the Church,” Modern Reformation 13/5 (September/October 2004): 32-33. See also Willis B. Glover, Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture: An Essay in the Interpretation of Western History (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984); Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2006).
38. His most important books of political theology include: Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989); Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991); Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991); Hauerwas, Where Resident Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996); and Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004). See also the essay by Daniel M. Bell Jr., “State and Civil Society,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, Blackwell Companions to Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 423-38.