Tag Archives: state church

Christianity and the Social Order (Part 5)

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In part four of our series on Christianity and the Social Order we explored how Christians will by their existence and day-to-day activities indirectly influence this order. In part five we will pursue the question of whether or not, given the inner nature of Christian faith, some public policies are to be preferred over others. This issue needs to be clarified before we can address the legitimacy of Christians attempting to influence the social and political order directly.

An Introductory Reminder

Many Christians take for granted their right and duty, guided by their faith, to exert through political means a moral influence on the social world in which they live. The only debatable issues are what policies, parties, and candidates are most likely to shepherd society to be more like the kingdom of God envisioned by Jesus. They vote, make campaign contributions, place political stickers on their cars, and run for office—all without asking themselves whether Jesus’s moral teachings warrant or even permit their efforts. I designed this series to examine this unexamined presumption.

Christian Preferences for Public Policies

Believers live in many different forms of political order. It is possible to be a Christian in any of them. My question here is this: beginning with the inherent nature and logic of the Christian faith, are certain public policies to be preferred over others? We are not yet ready to ask whether or not Christians—as individuals or as the institutional church in reliance on Jesus’s teaching—may attempt to influence the state to institutionalize their preferred policies.

The Kingdom of God

Christianity envisions a perfect community, which serves as the ideal by which it measures all other communities, including the church. Jesus taught us to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). For Christianity, the ideal society involves universal justice, peace, unity and love of neighbor and love of God grounded in unanimous acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as Lord. Paul explains that the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus aims at Christ’s universal lordship:

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:10-11).

Christians long for the coming kingdom and would prefer that it come sooner rather than later. However, I can detect no reason to think that Jesus or the early church expected the kingdom of God to be realized in its fulness through ordinary political means—war and legislation. It will be God’s work and will arrive only at the end of history when God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Christians should of course prefer that all people freely embrace the values of the kingdom, and in living as light in the world and preaching the gospel, they work toward this end. Given the nature of the kingdom, however, Christians should know better than to attempt to establish the kingdom by political means.

State Church

It seems to me that no Christian should want the state to establish Christianity as the official state religion. Many evils flow from such arrangements: religious persecution, widespread hypocrisy, and the politicization of doctrine. But I think the most basic Christian arguments against church establishment are that the individual act of faith must be free and Christian behavior must arise from sincere love. Legal coercion or worldly advantage are destructive of faith and love.

State Persecution

I don’t see how a Christian could prefer to live under a state that is actively hostile to Christianity. We are called to endure persecution if we must, but we are not obligated to seek it. Surely it is better from a Christian point of view to live in a situation where we can believe and practice our faith freely and share it with others without fear of state persecution.

Freedom of Belief and Practice

The logic of Christianity supports neither coercing people to practice Christianity nor persecuting them for doing so. It seems rather that Christians should rejoice to live within a society where one is free to practice Christianity, some other religion, or none at all.

Next: May Christians argue in the public sphere of a secular state for their preferred public policies? If so, how?

Rethinking Church #13: Privilege Always Comes with a Price

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For the first 275 years of its existence the church endured persecution, spontaneous at the local level, official at the imperial level. Its offense? Non-conformity “to the pattern of this world” (Rom 12:2). Christians would not participate in the pagan ceremonies and sacrifices that accompanied almost every aspect of social life in the Roman Empire. Nor would they pledge loyalty to Rome by offering sacrifices to the “divine” Caesar. Many Christian writers in the Second and Third Centuries wrote works addressed to the emperor arguing that Christianity is neither politically subversive nor morally corrupting.

Only with the Edict of Milan in 313, which proclaimed religious freedom within the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, did official persecutions end. The emperor Constantine I (d. 337) favored Christianity and even participated in the Council of Nicaea (325). Theodosius I (d. 395) took the final step toward establishing Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire by outlawing many heresies and ending pagan sacrifices. The tables had turned. Christian emperors supported the church and persecuted pagans with equal or even greater energy than the pagan ones had persecuted Christians.

Not surprisingly, Christians rejoiced and thanked God for their new freedom and privileges, and Constantine was hailed as a saint and a thirteenth apostle. Can we blame them? Who wants to live as a social outcast, have your property confiscated, be thrown in jail, or suffer torture and death for being a Christian? What was the persecuted church to do when offered freedom to worship as it pleases and organize its internal affairs as it thinks best? When given official status, financial support, and social visibility, should the church have turned them down? Seeing crowds of people enter the churches for worship and instruction, should the church have turned them away? Most of us would have done the same had we been in their shoes.

But privilege always comes with a price. For when the empire becomes Christian, the church becomes imperial. And an imperial church must support the empire. Perhaps most of my readers are clear that this exchange turned out to be a Faustian bargain. I agree. But I want to argue that getting out of that deal with the devil is not as easy as renouncing established churches and ratifying the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As I pointed out in the previous essay, every state reserves to itself the power of life and death over all individuals and associations within its jurisdiction. If it leaves the church alone, if it recognizes its freedom to worship as it pleases, to organize as it sees fit, to choose its own leaders; and if it grants such privileges as tax exempt status, it does so only because—and only as long as—it judges that the church does not work against the interests of the state and in fact contributes to the common good as the state understands it.

It may happen that a state views its interests in ways that largely harmonize with the church’s mission of witness. It may be that this state sees the work of the church as advantageous to the common good. If so, it is not always wrong for the church to use these freedoms and privileges to advance its mission. However in every society, no matter how friendly to the church, there will always be areas where the state’s aims cut across the church’s mission. There are no exceptions to this rule, for “no one can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24). And in some cases, formerly “friendly” states’ views of their interests—of what is good and evil and of what serves the common good—can change so dramatically as to come into fundamental conflict with the church. Hence the church always faces—no exceptions—the temptation to seek or hold on to freedoms and privileges granted by the state by subordinating, compromising, or giving up its mission to witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

At every point in its relationship to the world—from bare toleration, to approval, to establishment—the church should ask what price it has to pay for these freedoms and privileges. How deeply in debt we have already become may not come clear until the mortgage comes due. And come due it will. Perhaps it already has.