An Introduction to the Special Issue: History of Christianity: The Relationship between Church and State

Religion remains omnipresent. She still permeates all of culture, her presence foundational to societies’ most cherished beliefs. Humans still seek God—or an equivalent. If not the omnipotent creator of heaven and earth, then a ghost-like substance labelled “human rights”, a set of transcendent values called “social justice”, or a claim of unsurpassed dignity of a radically choosing self prevail as systems of religious belief. These in effect serve as the “ground of all being”, to borrow Paul Tillich’s phrase1; each speaks to mankind’s refusal to accept the happenstance of blind and chaotic events; each bespeaks the ineliminable hope to find an ideal standard, a moral significance, or an ultimate purpose or mission that can lend life enduring meaning.

In the contest of confessions that marks contemporary life—with the monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam contending with each other and both with deified egalitarianism and liberationist humanism—Christianity has fared reasonably well. Although faith has witnessed a decline in certain urban cells in North America and its atrophy is even more pronounced in certain segments of Western Europe, Christianity remains resilient. A scant 3% of Poles, for example, identify as atheist and only 4% as “nothing in particular”. In Lithuania, 1% call themselves atheist and only 4% as “nothing in particular”. In Greece, only 4% are religiously unaffiliated. In each country, the vast majority identify as Christian. Hungary too continues to see high levels of self-identified Christians. In Russia, religiosity seems to have skyrocketed: according to one Pew Forum report, a striking 71% of Russians identify as members of the Russian Orthodox Church, a number much greater than in decades past (See Pew Research Center 2017). Metropolitan Hilarion reports that the number is perhaps closer to 83%.2 These numbers may well be exaggerated, but the revival of Orthodoxy in Russia remains astounding. Moreover, even at the heart of Western Europe, the decline is less than uniform. In Switzerland, for example, religious vitality is noticeably greater than in the United Kingdom, Sweden, or Northern Germany (Pew Research Center 2017). Even in Germany, since 2016, the Lutheran Church has gained more members than it has lost (Splitt 2017). Moreover, in England, attendance at cathedrals has increased (Wyatt 2017). In Italy, the election to national power of Fratelli d’Italia—a party endorsing traditional Catholic values—and, in France, the expansion of Rassemblement National—a party surging with support from (among others) the most faithful French—testify to the enduring strength of Christianity, even in the bowels of ‘Old Europe’. In fact, only in the Netherlands does a majority of the population self-identify as non-Christian. Add to this the staggering growth of Christianity across China and Sub-Saharan Africa and we can conclude the Christian faith seems remarkably resilient, indeed.3

This is not what many expected. When deism arose in England during the seventeenth century and permeated the subsequent “enlightened” era, the sophisticated spoke of human independence from God and their resolve to follow reason and science wherever they lead. English deists and French philosophes attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the church’s concept of grace and dependence upon God, extolling the rational ability of autonomous humans to establish truth. The deist concept of human autonomy contributed considerably to the modern secular view of government as living outside the concerns of religion or separated from religion in the strict sense. Religion became a “private matter” of self-understanding or personal speculation that had no serious contribution to make within our corporate lives. This concept of church and state continued in the contemporary world, even long after the philosophical and theological community discredited the rational hubris of deism and the Enlightenment, as seen, for example, in Wittgenstein’s rebuke of the hubristic pretensions of philosophical inquiry into the “nature” of things: “what one cannot know, one must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 1922, Tractate 7.1). Today, most professional philosophers find it difficult to escape the phenomenal world, and so they see themselves unable to speak about metaphysical or transcendent ideas, such as value, purpose, or meaning. Wittgenstein once again expressed this sentiment with forceful clarity: “The world”—by which he meant what our senses can perceive and our reason only tepidly inspect by detecting internal tensions among the sentences we use to describe our perceptions—is simply “all that is the case” (Wittgenstein 1922, Proposition 1).

Yet, in the borrowed phrase of contemporary feminism, “she persisted”. Religion, including Christianity, has survived the many assaults marshalled against her. One reason for her resilience is that the contention, popular among deists and philosophes, that Christianity exerts merely a negative influence on society is vastly overdrawn. Along with the negative, Christianity brought many positive ideals to the forefront in its attempt to reshape society. The theology of the church provided much of the spiritual matrix for the development of the most sacred political ideals in Western and world culture. Despite it all, she continues to support these ideals today.

Her spirit of equality and integration, for example, led to the democratic participation of all people in society. Jesus started the process by rejecting the purity laws of the Pharisees or “separate ones” and integrating the people of the land (am ha-aretz) into his ministry. Paul extended the message to the Gentiles and made integration or equality the heart of his gospel, rejecting the artificial barriers that society erected between “Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female” (Gal. 3:28). The Reformation added its emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers”, using the doctrine to establish democratic polities among groups such as the Puritans and Huguenots and changing the structure of civil government in its image. Quakers went even further with the doctrine and became the first group in the world to fight for the wholesale abolition of slavery and the complete legal equality of women.

The Judeo-Christian tradition also brought morality to the forefront in the Western world. In the twelfth century, the growth of canon law placed a check on the wantonness of kings and replaced rex lex with lex rex (i.e., “the law is king”). Later, William Ockham, Jean Gerson, and the decretalists extended the Graeco-Roman metaphysical tradition concerning natural law to speak of the natural rights of citizens—rights to their liberties and possessions that no king or pope might alienate or destroy.

Christianity’s doctrine of total depravity led to placing countervailing forces upon the government. Christianity possesses a somewhat dark anthropology that suspects the motivations and designs of people and their rulers. This doctrine was used to place checks and balances on the branches of government to prevent the hubris of one from gaining too much power and destroying the freedom and participation of others. Puritans emphasized this teaching and developed the concept of federal government, that is, a government based on covenant (foedus) or social contract. For the Puritans, the government was responsible to the people; the people elected the officials and could depose them, even through a bloody revolution if necessary.

Christianity’s doctrine of liberty became central to the West during modern times in defining the essential purpose of government. Paul said, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Do not be enslaved to a yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1). He refused to enslave believers to the details of a legalistic religion or allow anyone to compromise the free expression of another one’s faith (Rom. 14). William Walwyn and the Levellers of the seventeenth century used this passage of Paul in Romans to dream of a society where freedom, pluralism, and the liberty of conscience were its most essential features, where Anglicans, Anabaptists, Independents, Catholics, and Socinians could live together in harmony. They added to the exhortations of Paul the tolerant example of Jesus in rejecting the sword, emphasizing the paradigm of the New Testament over the Old Testament, as did so many other champions of freedom and toleration.

Christianity certainly discounts any strict attempt to separate church and state in an absolute sense. The views of Andras Sajo that citizens should never let their personal religious faith influence their voting habits is inconsistent with the spirit of the faith as disclosed both in her doctrine and her history of pervasive social and political impact. However, this does not imply a simple merger of faith and state. From the very beginning, the church was assigned a different function, role, and “order” to play in society than the state (hypotassō): to preach a gospel of grace and forgiveness outside the mission of the government and its coercive forces (Rom. 13). The message of the New Testament related to personal ethics and individual spirituality and contained no specific intension to recreate society immediately and completely or to make a direct transition into mass political action. The exhortation to feed the poor did not demand the creation of a social welfare state; the exhortation to forgive all debts and turn the other cheek did not call for emancipation from the judicial system or the Department of Defense. The church was summoned to subsist as a cosmopolitan fellowship of believers within a multitude of cultures and systems of governance, not to pick sides in the contest among nations.

Of course, the relation between church and state is by no means unblemished. Slavery, warfare, and at times, a dismissive attitude toward women mark the impact of Christian faith on social life. In part, this can be accounted for by the way its new values represented a threat to worldly empires and were captured, domesticated, and even perverted by forces of the fallen world. However, perhaps there are aspects of the original Christian witness for which it has been necessary—and might remain necessary—to deconstruct under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—the paraclete promised to the earliest disciplines “to lead into all truth” (Jn. 16:13).

This Special Issue book delineates the various impacts and relations of church and state in Christian history and traces the enduring relevance of church/state relations to contemporary social life. The chapters address four thematic areas: first, the extensive contributions of various Protestant groups to plans for social improvement; second, the history and current application of Catholic teachings; third, a survey and assessment of influential critiques of Christianity; and fourth, reflections on the future course of religion’s interaction with society and state.

In Chapter One, Professor Maciej Ptaszyński of the University of Warsaw examines the movement, championed energetically by various Protestant groups, including leaders of the Moravian Church and the Lutheran and Reformed movements, to reduce tensions and eliminate warfare among Protestant groups and between Protestant and Catholic communities in the early modern period. He finds that the potential for peace was substantial, highlighting the resources within various Protestant groups for the irenic resolution of theological disputes—including the successful establishment of concord among Polish Protestants found in the Sandomir Consensus, the creation of a particular strand of historiography praising the Bohemian Brethren as being authors of a paradigm of peaceful coexistence, and a more general “tradition of dialogue” and “discussion” as the means of resolving theological tension. These supplied an abundant storehouse of resources for the irenic resolution of theological disagreements. History did not follow this path as much as champions of irenicism desired, but the reasons for this are due more to contingencies and the hardening effects of sustained combat than to any uniform theological endorsement of holy war or bitter eristic polemics. As such, the resources for peace among religious groups had an internal source and thus did not depend intrinsically on the interventions of non-church actors, “marginalizing religion to the private sphere of personal beliefs”. Instead, Ptaszyński argues that we must acknowledge the important role of “theologians who developed new models of religious coexistence, drawing on historical experience”.

In Chapter Two, Professor Joseph Prud’homme, the director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College, develops a somewhat similar approach to Ptasynski’s, focusing on the potential within Anglicanism in colonial Maryland to arrest the political and religious persecution of Catholics. History, likewise, did not take this path as much as it could have. Nevertheless, the reason for this has more to do with the weakness of the position of Anglicanism in Maryland, and the absence of an effective Anglican establishment, than it does to a drive inherent within established Anglicanism to root out religious opposition. The latter arose in Maryland, again, more from contingency than first principles.4 In turn, a recognition of this fact can helpfully inform contemporary debates on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause.

In Chapter Three, Professor Stephen Strehle of Christoper Newport University and director of its program in Judeo-Christian Studies surveys the theology of the Religious Society of Friends and the emergence within the Society of a strong repudiation of slavery. Quaker theology is examined by Strehle in depth and is identified as the key driver of the abolitionism that Quakers adopted—the first major movement to call for the wholesale elimination of human bondage.

In Chapter Four, Andang Binawan of the Driyarkara School of Philosophy in Jakarta Indonesia directs our attention to the contributions of Catholicism in Asia, with a focus on the role of Catholic bishops in Indonesia from the middle of the 1960s until the late 1990s, a period of social and political change throughout Indonesia. He highlights how the synodal system of greater regional autonomy for conferences of bishops that emerged from the Second Vatican Council’s aggiornamento empowered the Indonesian Church to adapt quite successfully to pressing issues brought to the forefront during this era. Binawan’s assessment is not only historically insightful, but it highlights points relevant to Pope Francis’s calls for greater synodality in the Catholic Church.

In Chapter Five, Professor Caleb Henry of Franciscan University addresses the issue of religion and education from the perspective of both Catholic teachings and political and educational philosophy. He shows how throughout American history, Catholic teachings have long endorsed school choice, but he also shows how Catholic thought has long wrestled with the issue of social solidarity. He argues that the thought of the eminent theologian cum bishop of Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, provides a roadmap for integrating educational reform and school choice and the flourishing of social solidarity. Yet, he ends his chapter by expressing a certain degree of skepticism about what can be achieved by reference to theological principles given political realities, a cautionary spirit he sees manifesting in the educational writings of John Locke and which he argues we would be well served never to excise from considerations of educational policy. Like Binawan’s chapter, Henry’s work illuminates key aspects of church history while also contributing to important contemporary debates.

In Chapter Six, Professor Patrick Gardner of Christopher Newport University continues the examination of Catholic teachings, focusing on the meaning of religious freedom as expressed in church councils and encyclical decrees. He shows how there is quite a bit of misunderstanding surrounding the meaning the Church assigns to the term religious freedom and its scope. Specifically, he examines the question of whether the Church endorses the freedom of individuals to choose atheism or irreligion as well as the freedom to publicly promote their adoption. He shows that the Church endorses freedom primarily because of its relationship to faith: freedom in matters of religion derives its primary value in terms of its status as a precondition for genuinely and freely choosing to be Catholic. The freedom of conscience of an atheist must be preserved, not so much because the freedom to choose against God is valuable in itself but because the space for freely embracing faith must always be left open; at the same time, the promotion of atheism holds no specific dignity or right in authentic Catholic teaching. However, Gardner argues that this view must be tempered by the pastoral orientation of the Church as the Church confronts an increasingly secularized society. Gardner’s work, grounded in a careful review of the history of Catholic teachings, is especially timely as Christian faith indeed faces the challenge of mounting irreligion and anti-religious sentiments within sectors of Western life (one can think of the extremist organization, “The Freedom from Religion Foundation” and its litigious campaigns against any public expression of Christian devotion). Important in itself, Gardner’s chapter also helpfully prepares us for the chapters that follow that explore important and influential critiques of Christianity.

In Chapter Seven, Professor Fuk-Tsang Ying of the Divinity School of Chung Chi College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong explores the discourses against Christian faith articulated by leaders within the People’s Republic of China in the first few years of the Chinese communist regime. He provides an incisive account of the impact of the Party’s call for “suprapolitics” in the late 1940s, a call which sought to reorganize and redefine key aspects of Christianity.

In Chapter Eight, Professor Steven Frankel of Xavier University in Cincinnati Ohio examines the influential critique of revealed religion advanced by Baruch Spinoza and Spinoza’s advocacy for a civil religion of charity, tolerance, and deference to political authority in matters of religious dispute. Frankel surveys Spinoza’s positions and their connection to the emergence of a specific form of liberal commercial democracy, also highlighting the ambiguities within Spinoza’s contentions. Throughout this work, Frankel relates Spinoza’s impact to Stephen Strehle’s account of the emergence of secularism as a social and intellectual force in the Western world (Strehle 2018, 2020).

In Chapter Nine, Professors Brian Robert Calfano of the Department of Journalism and William Umphres of the School of International and Public Affairs at the University of Cincinnati provide a broad-ranging assessment of religion’s historical impact on political life and its potential to shape public affairs in the future. Religion holds tremendous potential to enrich public life. This requires willingness by all to permit religion to muster citizens of faith to political and social engagement, an engagement that will often find expression in checking state power so as to protect religious freedom and also in enabling state power to advance policies that are informed by religious values. Yet Calfano and Umphres argue that the integration of faith and politics also requires a broadly shared spirit of prudential citizenship, by which they mean a willingness among religious adherents, and their non-religious countrymen, to “confront and interrogate one’s motives and desires” and to “re-evaluate and re-visit assumptions and priorities”.

In Chapter Ten, Sean Oliver-Dee of the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford and Professor Joseph Prud’homme develop an additional reflection of the history of religion’s contributions to public life and the potential contributions religion and religiously inspired concepts can make in the twenty-first century. They focus on the concept of covenant. They preface their assessment first by surveying indicators of social decline in contemporary industrialized democracies, pointing to declining measures of personal health and wellbeing. They then ask if the concept of a covenanted community could provide an antidote to these alarming trends. To answer this question, they examine the religious roots of the concept of covenant and then argue that covenant remains relevant to contemporary life: covenant can be construed in a way that promises improvements in the health, wellbeing, and flourishing of individuals in our era of the “global village”.

In all, Christianity is a remarkable tradition which continues to display striking resilience despite facing, in the past as in the present, a range of challenges. She will no doubt continue to influence the affairs of society in the years ahead. This distinctive volume makes a significant contribution to the study of the history of Christianity’s connection with social and political life, and it should help us to understand important contemporary developments involving church and state with greater acuity.