Insisting that political leaders are incapable of obeying Christ

The final chapter in Oliver O’Donovan’s magisterial The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996) is titled “The Redemption of Society.” It begins with a discussion of the end of Christendom. The prevailing ethos of the post-Christendom West “is usually expressed in terms of the doctrine of ‘separation of church and state,’ an uncommunicative formula, to be sure, since those words assert nothing that could have perturbed the most traditional apologist for dual jurisdiction in Christendom. The intent of this doctrine, however, in its modern context, is to deny at least one element in the Christendom idea: that the state should offer deliberate assistance to the church’s mission. The development of the modern doctrine was associated with the special conviction of the Enlightenment that religious questions were not open to public arbitration.

“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the ‘establishment’ and protecting the ‘free exercise’ of religion, is the paradigm assertion of this doctrine, and so can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom. There are, of course, many other events which could compete for that role. From the same period one might choose the French Revolution; from a much later one even the 1914–18 war suggests itself. But the American enactment is peculiarly suitable, since it propounds a doctrine meant to replace the church-state relations which Christendom had maintained, it was formulated largely by Christians who thought they had the interests of the church’s mission at heart, and it was argued for, as it still is, on ostensibly theological grounds. But it also bears the marks of the Age of Revolution, reflecting a conception of society constituted from below by its own internal dynamics; government does not form society, but puts itself at its disposal. The evangelical Christians who helped shape the new doctrine wished to deny government the right to interfere. In the name of King Jesus they proposed to instruct princes that they were dispensable to the Holy Spirit’s work, and to send them to the spectators’ seats. But what might have simply been a radicalised announcement of Christ’s triumph, though over-inclined to ‘realised eschatology’ perhaps, made common cause with anti-trinitarian heterodoxy which was permeated by rationalist conceptions of action and providence. So it ended up promoting a concept of the state’s role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state freed from all responsibility to recognize God’s self-disclosure in history.

“The paradox of the First Amendment is that a measure conceived as a liberation for authentic Christianity has become, in this century, a tool of anti-religious sentiment, weakening the participation of the church in society and depriving it of access to resources for its social role. . . .

“[T]here were features of the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century which weakened the Christian understanding of salvation-history, and replaced it with an open-ended concept of historical development, shaped by human action ventured, perhaps, in imitation of Christ but not in obedient faith directed back to his accomplished work. The shift from salvation-history to an unfolding providence undermined the intelligibility of Christian secular government, as it undermined the intelligibility of the doctrine of the Trinity itself, leaving it high and dry on the austere sands of the Quicunque vult without its necessary point of reference in the Paschal triumph. A Deist religion of divine fatherhood seemed sufficient to support the authority which government needed; while in evangelical religion worship of Christ could not unsuitably be seen as the prerogative of the converted view, the church within the church. Meanwhile the Puritan emphasis on the Holy Spirit had nourished a religion of private conscience. All these factors coincided to support the disestablishment thesis. Deists and evangelicals could agree that the state hardly knew enough about God to make a trinitarian Christianity normative. It suited them both to maintain revealed Christianity as a mystery for initiates.

“But this convergence only amounted to a negative strategy of denial. Much damage was to be done in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by anti-ecumenical strategies of this type: social institutions, notably schools, were lost to Christian influence as minority Christian communities, which could not control them, preferred anything to their falling under the control of the larger churches; and so it was in this case, too. By denying any church established status in principle, the framers of the First Amendment gave away more than they knew. They effectively declared that political authorities were incapable of evangelical obedience. And with this the damage was done. It did not need the anti-religious line of interpretation pursued by twentieth-century courts to make this formula, from a theological point of view, quite strictly heretical. The creed asserts: cuius regni non erit finis, and the apostle, that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow’ (Phil. 2:10). The First Amendment presumes to add: ‘except . . .’

“Excluding government from evangelical obedience has had repercussions for the way society itself is conceived. Since the political formation of society lies in its conscious self-ordering under God’s government, a society conceived in abstraction is unformed by moral self-awareness, driven by internal dynamics rather than led by moral purposes. To deny political authority obedience to Christ is implicitly to deny that obedience to society, too. Precisely such a conception arose from the sociology which emerged in the eighteenth and came to maturity in the nineteenth century. Society was an acephalous organism, driven by unconscious forces from within, an object of study and, to the skilful, of manipulation, but in no sense a subject of responsible action. With this conception late-modernity, as we now experience it, stands on the threshold. This, after all, is society as it has been thought about in capitalist economic theory and in revolutionary socialism: it is liberal technological society, which functions like a computer constantly to extend the scope of its own operations in obedience to no rational purpose. The social sciences are the heartlands of this conception, but, to the extent that they have been methodically self-critical and understood their own abstractions for what they are, thought-experiments designed to isolate and examine certain types of relation, they have also pointed to how it may be transcended.

“Society so conceived presents itself as a ‘secular’ reality. Within the traditional meaning of the term, of course, society as a whole could never be secular. [O’Donovan had earlier pointed out that “the corresponding term to ‘secular’ is not ‘sacred’, nor ‘spiritual’, but ‘eternal’,” and they are corresponding terms, not opposites, “secular” referring to this passing age.] Secularity pertained only to certain functions within society which had their raison d’être in relation to this age (saeculum), not the next. The distinction of spiritual and secular was a distinction of two kinds of government within the one society. When in pre-modern Christianity two societies were distinguished as ‘two realms’ or ‘two cities’, they were polarized as moral and eschatological alternatives. There were not a spiritual society and a secular society, only a society of the saved and a society of the damned. . . . The appearance of a social secularity could, however, be created by understanding society as a quasi-mechanical system, incapable of moral and spiritual acts. Such a social organism may, it has been urged, make no moral or religious decisions on its own part, but leave the whole range of such decisions open for its members to make. But this is an abstract conception, not a sustainable proposal. Imagine the questions that such a society would have to avoid deciding: Are sacred ancestral lands protected against plans for mining or other development? Is drug-taking, or sex with child prostitutes, a valid religious activity? Can racial discrimination be practiced to preserve the elect people of God or to safeguard religious caste? May women be priests? Must those in quest of unemployment benefit be prepared to accept work on Sundays or Saturdays? Every actual society reaches answers to these questions which it treats as normative, and so makes definite religious judgments about the proper content of religious belief and practice. The false self-consciousness of the would-be secular society lies in its determination to conceal the religious judgments that it has made.”

— from Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology
(Cambridge University Press, 1996)