The case below presupposes several assumptions, with which one may or may not agree, but it is necessary to declare them from the outset for the sake of clarity.
I take it as a given that human nature exists. We are not self-creating beings, and nor can we change our nature. We can warp our nature, mutilate it, and depart from its laws in innumerable ways that as a civilisation we are currently exploring with great dedication—but that is to do violence to our nature, not to change it. Such a view entails that there is indeed a law of human nature, with which we can seek to align our lives in our pursuit of flourishing—or indeed by our own volition we can depart from that law. The ways by which we may align ourselves with that law are diverse and dynamic, but such dynamism presupposes the acknowledgement of such a law. I further take it as a given that political life—by which I mean the moral or practical ordering of our lives in community, and its regulation through leadership and positive law-making—is proper to human nature. As individual persons, we emerge out of, and naturally maintain, corporate persons.
Such communally reliant flourishing is not accidental to the kind of things we are, but rather it is proper to our nature. Humans are not found to be solitary, non-political animals anywhere on earth, nor have they ever been such. All philosophies that begin from the assumption that human beings are by nature solitary, and merely opt into synthetic communities with accidental forms for some prior, rationally apprehended reason, are flawed in their first principle.
Finally, I take it as a given that we are by nature question-asking and meaning-seeking beings, and hence, we are religious by nature. We ask questions about our origin, our purpose, and our ultimate destiny, and we come up with workable answers to those questions. More importantly, we develop art, mythology, and ritual by which we both seek to embody our quest for meaning and seek some personal encounter with the God or the gods who form the object of our devotions. Religion is baked into our nature.
Thus, because human beings are both political and religious by nature, there has never been such a thing as a secular society. Societies have always been religious. The moment society was declared secular in the 18th century by the French philosophes and their political activists, that society immediately erupted in a religious frenzy of sacrifice, paraliturgical activity, and the deification of the State as a new providential deity, with all the ritualistic expressions proper to religion subordinated to such anti-religious religiosity.
Given that religion is natural to mankind, and political government is the highest natural authority that exists over mankind—that is, mankind instantiated in his communities, nations, and empires, etc.—the proper authority over the religious life of any given natural community is its government. This fact has always been recognised. The Roman Emperor was arbiter over which were the public gods and which were the hearth gods, and eventually he even placed himself among the former. The Athenian statesmen were the protectors of religious life in their polis, and they lawfully executed Socrates for corrupting such religiosity among the young. The barbarian warlords of the north appointed their sacrificial priests and druids just as they appointed their lesser chieftains.
Why, then, is it so alien to us to think of political leaders as the apposite authorities over the religious beliefs and practices of the citizenry? The answer is simple: we are all stumbling about in the shadow of Christendom, and simultaneously we are attempting to run on its fumes.
Political leaders, as the highest authorities in any natural society, are the proper authorities over the religion of their people, which is always some manifestation of natural religion. But our civilisation has historically held that this is the age of Jesus Christ, and consequently supernatural religion has entered the world. Christians claim that their religion does not have its origin in the natural religious impulse of human nature, but has come into the world from without, and in doing so has assumed into itself that natural religious impulse, has transformed it, and superseded it.
In short, Christians claim that their religion is not a natural religion, but a supernatural one. Thus, they claim it requires an institution of purely supernatural origin to be both its interpreter and promulgator, namely the Christian priestly hierarchy. Political leaders, whose role is rooted in the requirements of human nature, are simply not competent to be the highest authorities over this supernatural religion. Thus, in a Christendom model, we have two authoritative institutions on earth, one of natural origin, customarily called the State, and one of supernatural origin, customarily called the Church.
The terminology of Church and State, however, is deeply misleading. States, once they are Christian political communities, are no longer deemed by Christians to be merely natural communities. They are supernaturalised natural communities by virtue of the baptism of their members and the recognition of Christianity by their existent political and legal organs. Thus, in a Christendom model, what we customarily call ‘Church and State’ are more accurately called the spiritual and temporal divisions of the one supernatural community of Christians called the Church. The monarch or prime minister or president of a Christian nation, then, is as much a leader in the Church as any bishop, except as a layman he is ordinarily competent in the temporal matters of that supernatural community, and only extra-ordinarily competent in spiritual and doctrinal matters—whereas this is the reverse for a bishop.
If the Church’s kerygmatic enterprise withdraws from the public arena, or it is excluded from that arena by a political movement of apostasy, this has several harmful effects from a Christian perspective. First, the Church atrophies, as it cannot fulfil its own mission, and it increasingly attempts to justify its own existence by presenting itself as a club committed only to temporal concerns, within the jurisdiction of an increasingly anti-religious State. Second, this situation leads to a kind of moral schizophrenia among the baptised—especially baptised statesmen—who are expected to be Christians at home and secularists at work. Third, such an arrangement does not lead to what is widely claimed—namely a religiously neutral public arena.
Some think that if the State remains intentionally neutral with regard to religion, such political indifferentism towards religion will leave the religious life of believers to flourish undisturbed by State interference. On this model, the role of the State is not to protect or promote any one religion in particular, or religious belief in general, but only to protect religious liberty. The State would only interfere in the practices of private religious associations if those practices conflicted with State law, such as the ceremonial use of an illegal drug, for example. As John Locke put it, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, “these things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting.” Basically, Locke would have the State permit any religious practice on the condition that it is a private matter and does not conflict with State’s law. In the same work, Locke explains his position in the following way:
If any people congregated upon account of religion should be desirous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law. Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burn any part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to anyone, no prejudice to another man’s goods. And for the same reason he may kill his calf also in a religious meeting … But if peradventure such were the state of things that the interest of the commonwealth required all slaughter of beasts should be forborne for some while, in order to the increasing of the stock of cattle that had been destroyed by some extraordinary murrain, who sees not that the magistrate, in such a case, may forbid all his subjects to kill any calves for any use whatsoever? Only it is to be observed that, in this case, the law is not made about a religious, but a political matter.
Here, Locke initially declares that his position requires nothing beyond religious groups obeying the law of the State. Following this, however, Locke advances an argument that, having subjugated all religious practice to its law, the State may prohibit any practice if it be advantageous from the perspective of secular policy. As the philosopher and theologian Thomas Storck has pointed out, surely on this account, for secular reasons the State may also forbid the transmission of certain teachings by religious groups. For if, say, a religious group disseminated moral teachings that were at odds with those endorsed by the State’s schools, healthcare services, or publicly-funded parades, on Locke’s reasoning there is no obvious reason why the State could not—or should not—use coercion to prevent such moral instruction by the religious group in question. (This shift would be especially likely in States that incorporate into their law ‘hate speech legislation,’ the nature of which is notably ambiguous.)
That a secular State purports to permit any belief or practice is of little significance if it can legitimately, by its own lights, quash such belief or practice for secular purposes at any moment. One can easily envisage, on such a model, how religious practices and teachings would increasingly have to conform to the criteria of the State’s prevailing ideological commitments. In turn, both from an historical perspective and from that of an abstract analysis, the non-Christian State will always emerge as a counterfeit religious magisterium. The only question is whether, having done so, it will be honest about this.
Given that the highest natural teaching authority, namely the State, when secularised refuses explicitly to recognise the imperatives of religion, its citizenry assume that it is rational for their appetite for the infinite—if I may use that phrase—to be transposed onto finite objects. Hence, at best, in such a condition an idolatry of consumerism takes over society, making its members shallow and corroding human culture. At worst, however, the natural religious appetite seeks satiation by a multitude of frustrated and chaotic pseudo-religious causes which erupt into the public arena. Political, ideological, and social differences are then understood not as points for conversation and negotiation, but rather they are viewed through the prism of orthodoxy and heresy. This, in turn, leads to rapid political and social disintegration.
As this disintegration unfolds, in its bid to maintain social stability, the State will naturally attribute to itself final authoritative judgement on religious and moral matters, just as it did in the pre-Christian age. As noted, it will consequently emerge as a post-Christian counterfeit magisterium. Thus, the State will make claims about sex, marriage, family, ‘selfhood,’ when innocent people can be killed, and progressively which opinions it is permissible to hold in one’s cloistered conscience. The State will increasingly interfere with every aspect of its citizens’ lives, implicitly believing its own bureaucratic system to operate as a quasi-providential hand. The last three centuries of Western history have provided ample examples of the State deifying itself, just as the pagan superpowers did in their most decadent epochs.
Paradoxically, the more avowedly secular, irreligious, or areligious a country claims to be, the more religious it is in fact—just read the following lyrics:
You pushed away the severe storm.
You made us believe.
We cannot live without you.
Our lands cannot exist without you!
Our future and hope depend on you.
Even if the world changes hundreds of times,
People believe in you.
These are not the lyrics of an evangelical Christian song about Jesus Christ. This is a North Korean anthem about Kim Jong Il. Human beings will always worship, and that impulse to worship will always find expression at the political level. Either, then, the government will endorse and safeguard conceptions of religiosity that are chaotic and idolatrous, and thus corrosive and immoral, or it will endorse a religiosity that results in the genuine moral unity of the State’s members.
The only reason why we assume that the political arena can be secular or religiously neutral is because in the West we were until comparatively recently a Christian people. Christianity had claimed that political leaders could not ordinarily possess competence to interpret its doctrines nor diffuse the means of sanctification, and hence it required apostles and their successors. Ever since we abandoned the Christendom model of religion’s connection to politics, we have entered a long epoch of competing ideologies. These ideologies always rest on whatever is deemed to command our deepest and most profound longings. At times, ideologies have rested on vague notions of ‘progress’ and the ‘universal brotherhood of humanity,’ at other times they have been based on more concrete objects, like nationhood or ethnicity. More recently, new ideologies have focused on promises of accumulated commodities and the satisfaction of sexual yearning. Every one of the muddled ideological systems that has informed the structure and direction of the modern State has been nothing more than a counterfeit religion of a people claiming to be emancipated from religion.
No sooner will a government claim to be religiously neutral than it will adopt the most fanatical doctrines and practices—as is widely observable today in the post-Christian victim-worship of Western countries and their adoption of liturgical processions and months of festivity in celebration of mere sexual confusion. Moreover, governments will claim powers of encroachment and intrusion hitherto considered unthinkable, treating as heretics those who do not endorse its new religiosity in public, and now increasingly in private.
Just as Christians were persecuted by religious governments for the private practice of their own religion in the Church’s early centuries, so too are Christians beginning to be persecuted by allegedly religiously neutral governments today. In many instances in the West, moral judgements based on theocentric or natural law conceptions of human flourishing have already become criminal offences. The coalescing of persecution advanced by ‘private’ organisations at the behest of the State, with rising identity-based hate crime legislation to rout dissenters from our midst, has fully revealed the fiction of secular or neutral politics.
Granted, there is arguably a moral duty for States to coerce and punish in defence of what they judge to be the overarching truth of human existence and flourishing. My only point is that we should be honest about this. But the modern State is not honest about this; it claims to be secular when it is in fact intensely religious, and its confused religiosity will only intensify in the coming decades.
Christians have always believed the devil’s claim that all the kingdoms of this world belong to him (Matt 4:9), for which reason Christ called him the “prince of this world” (Jn 14:30) and St. Paul called him “the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4). Hence, Christians hold that the State will either be discipled and belong to the Kingdom of Christ—a kingdom which does not have its origin in this world (Jn 18:36)—or it will exist as a fiefdom of Satan’s principality (Jn 14:30). Either way, it will possess one or the other’s species of religiosity. And that is why Christians hold that there is an imperative to make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19).
We ought never to ask ourselves the question of whether religion and government should be separate or admixed, since separation is in practice an impossibility. The only question is: what kind of religion do you want your State to endorse, and consequently to impose upon you?
The Modern State Will Become Very Religious
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
The case below presupposes several assumptions, with which one may or may not agree, but it is necessary to declare them from the outset for the sake of clarity.
I take it as a given that human nature exists. We are not self-creating beings, and nor can we change our nature. We can warp our nature, mutilate it, and depart from its laws in innumerable ways that as a civilisation we are currently exploring with great dedication—but that is to do violence to our nature, not to change it. Such a view entails that there is indeed a law of human nature, with which we can seek to align our lives in our pursuit of flourishing—or indeed by our own volition we can depart from that law. The ways by which we may align ourselves with that law are diverse and dynamic, but such dynamism presupposes the acknowledgement of such a law. I further take it as a given that political life—by which I mean the moral or practical ordering of our lives in community, and its regulation through leadership and positive law-making—is proper to human nature. As individual persons, we emerge out of, and naturally maintain, corporate persons.
Such communally reliant flourishing is not accidental to the kind of things we are, but rather it is proper to our nature. Humans are not found to be solitary, non-political animals anywhere on earth, nor have they ever been such. All philosophies that begin from the assumption that human beings are by nature solitary, and merely opt into synthetic communities with accidental forms for some prior, rationally apprehended reason, are flawed in their first principle.
Finally, I take it as a given that we are by nature question-asking and meaning-seeking beings, and hence, we are religious by nature. We ask questions about our origin, our purpose, and our ultimate destiny, and we come up with workable answers to those questions. More importantly, we develop art, mythology, and ritual by which we both seek to embody our quest for meaning and seek some personal encounter with the God or the gods who form the object of our devotions. Religion is baked into our nature.
Thus, because human beings are both political and religious by nature, there has never been such a thing as a secular society. Societies have always been religious. The moment society was declared secular in the 18th century by the French philosophes and their political activists, that society immediately erupted in a religious frenzy of sacrifice, paraliturgical activity, and the deification of the State as a new providential deity, with all the ritualistic expressions proper to religion subordinated to such anti-religious religiosity.
Given that religion is natural to mankind, and political government is the highest natural authority that exists over mankind—that is, mankind instantiated in his communities, nations, and empires, etc.—the proper authority over the religious life of any given natural community is its government. This fact has always been recognised. The Roman Emperor was arbiter over which were the public gods and which were the hearth gods, and eventually he even placed himself among the former. The Athenian statesmen were the protectors of religious life in their polis, and they lawfully executed Socrates for corrupting such religiosity among the young. The barbarian warlords of the north appointed their sacrificial priests and druids just as they appointed their lesser chieftains.
Why, then, is it so alien to us to think of political leaders as the apposite authorities over the religious beliefs and practices of the citizenry? The answer is simple: we are all stumbling about in the shadow of Christendom, and simultaneously we are attempting to run on its fumes.
Political leaders, as the highest authorities in any natural society, are the proper authorities over the religion of their people, which is always some manifestation of natural religion. But our civilisation has historically held that this is the age of Jesus Christ, and consequently supernatural religion has entered the world. Christians claim that their religion does not have its origin in the natural religious impulse of human nature, but has come into the world from without, and in doing so has assumed into itself that natural religious impulse, has transformed it, and superseded it.
In short, Christians claim that their religion is not a natural religion, but a supernatural one. Thus, they claim it requires an institution of purely supernatural origin to be both its interpreter and promulgator, namely the Christian priestly hierarchy. Political leaders, whose role is rooted in the requirements of human nature, are simply not competent to be the highest authorities over this supernatural religion. Thus, in a Christendom model, we have two authoritative institutions on earth, one of natural origin, customarily called the State, and one of supernatural origin, customarily called the Church.
The terminology of Church and State, however, is deeply misleading. States, once they are Christian political communities, are no longer deemed by Christians to be merely natural communities. They are supernaturalised natural communities by virtue of the baptism of their members and the recognition of Christianity by their existent political and legal organs. Thus, in a Christendom model, what we customarily call ‘Church and State’ are more accurately called the spiritual and temporal divisions of the one supernatural community of Christians called the Church. The monarch or prime minister or president of a Christian nation, then, is as much a leader in the Church as any bishop, except as a layman he is ordinarily competent in the temporal matters of that supernatural community, and only extra-ordinarily competent in spiritual and doctrinal matters—whereas this is the reverse for a bishop.
If the Church’s kerygmatic enterprise withdraws from the public arena, or it is excluded from that arena by a political movement of apostasy, this has several harmful effects from a Christian perspective. First, the Church atrophies, as it cannot fulfil its own mission, and it increasingly attempts to justify its own existence by presenting itself as a club committed only to temporal concerns, within the jurisdiction of an increasingly anti-religious State. Second, this situation leads to a kind of moral schizophrenia among the baptised—especially baptised statesmen—who are expected to be Christians at home and secularists at work. Third, such an arrangement does not lead to what is widely claimed—namely a religiously neutral public arena.
Some think that if the State remains intentionally neutral with regard to religion, such political indifferentism towards religion will leave the religious life of believers to flourish undisturbed by State interference. On this model, the role of the State is not to protect or promote any one religion in particular, or religious belief in general, but only to protect religious liberty. The State would only interfere in the practices of private religious associations if those practices conflicted with State law, such as the ceremonial use of an illegal drug, for example. As John Locke put it, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, “these things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting.” Basically, Locke would have the State permit any religious practice on the condition that it is a private matter and does not conflict with State’s law. In the same work, Locke explains his position in the following way:
Here, Locke initially declares that his position requires nothing beyond religious groups obeying the law of the State. Following this, however, Locke advances an argument that, having subjugated all religious practice to its law, the State may prohibit any practice if it be advantageous from the perspective of secular policy. As the philosopher and theologian Thomas Storck has pointed out, surely on this account, for secular reasons the State may also forbid the transmission of certain teachings by religious groups. For if, say, a religious group disseminated moral teachings that were at odds with those endorsed by the State’s schools, healthcare services, or publicly-funded parades, on Locke’s reasoning there is no obvious reason why the State could not—or should not—use coercion to prevent such moral instruction by the religious group in question. (This shift would be especially likely in States that incorporate into their law ‘hate speech legislation,’ the nature of which is notably ambiguous.)
That a secular State purports to permit any belief or practice is of little significance if it can legitimately, by its own lights, quash such belief or practice for secular purposes at any moment. One can easily envisage, on such a model, how religious practices and teachings would increasingly have to conform to the criteria of the State’s prevailing ideological commitments. In turn, both from an historical perspective and from that of an abstract analysis, the non-Christian State will always emerge as a counterfeit religious magisterium. The only question is whether, having done so, it will be honest about this.
Given that the highest natural teaching authority, namely the State, when secularised refuses explicitly to recognise the imperatives of religion, its citizenry assume that it is rational for their appetite for the infinite—if I may use that phrase—to be transposed onto finite objects. Hence, at best, in such a condition an idolatry of consumerism takes over society, making its members shallow and corroding human culture. At worst, however, the natural religious appetite seeks satiation by a multitude of frustrated and chaotic pseudo-religious causes which erupt into the public arena. Political, ideological, and social differences are then understood not as points for conversation and negotiation, but rather they are viewed through the prism of orthodoxy and heresy. This, in turn, leads to rapid political and social disintegration.
As this disintegration unfolds, in its bid to maintain social stability, the State will naturally attribute to itself final authoritative judgement on religious and moral matters, just as it did in the pre-Christian age. As noted, it will consequently emerge as a post-Christian counterfeit magisterium. Thus, the State will make claims about sex, marriage, family, ‘selfhood,’ when innocent people can be killed, and progressively which opinions it is permissible to hold in one’s cloistered conscience. The State will increasingly interfere with every aspect of its citizens’ lives, implicitly believing its own bureaucratic system to operate as a quasi-providential hand. The last three centuries of Western history have provided ample examples of the State deifying itself, just as the pagan superpowers did in their most decadent epochs.
Paradoxically, the more avowedly secular, irreligious, or areligious a country claims to be, the more religious it is in fact—just read the following lyrics:
These are not the lyrics of an evangelical Christian song about Jesus Christ. This is a North Korean anthem about Kim Jong Il. Human beings will always worship, and that impulse to worship will always find expression at the political level. Either, then, the government will endorse and safeguard conceptions of religiosity that are chaotic and idolatrous, and thus corrosive and immoral, or it will endorse a religiosity that results in the genuine moral unity of the State’s members.
The only reason why we assume that the political arena can be secular or religiously neutral is because in the West we were until comparatively recently a Christian people. Christianity had claimed that political leaders could not ordinarily possess competence to interpret its doctrines nor diffuse the means of sanctification, and hence it required apostles and their successors. Ever since we abandoned the Christendom model of religion’s connection to politics, we have entered a long epoch of competing ideologies. These ideologies always rest on whatever is deemed to command our deepest and most profound longings. At times, ideologies have rested on vague notions of ‘progress’ and the ‘universal brotherhood of humanity,’ at other times they have been based on more concrete objects, like nationhood or ethnicity. More recently, new ideologies have focused on promises of accumulated commodities and the satisfaction of sexual yearning. Every one of the muddled ideological systems that has informed the structure and direction of the modern State has been nothing more than a counterfeit religion of a people claiming to be emancipated from religion.
No sooner will a government claim to be religiously neutral than it will adopt the most fanatical doctrines and practices—as is widely observable today in the post-Christian victim-worship of Western countries and their adoption of liturgical processions and months of festivity in celebration of mere sexual confusion. Moreover, governments will claim powers of encroachment and intrusion hitherto considered unthinkable, treating as heretics those who do not endorse its new religiosity in public, and now increasingly in private.
Just as Christians were persecuted by religious governments for the private practice of their own religion in the Church’s early centuries, so too are Christians beginning to be persecuted by allegedly religiously neutral governments today. In many instances in the West, moral judgements based on theocentric or natural law conceptions of human flourishing have already become criminal offences. The coalescing of persecution advanced by ‘private’ organisations at the behest of the State, with rising identity-based hate crime legislation to rout dissenters from our midst, has fully revealed the fiction of secular or neutral politics.
Granted, there is arguably a moral duty for States to coerce and punish in defence of what they judge to be the overarching truth of human existence and flourishing. My only point is that we should be honest about this. But the modern State is not honest about this; it claims to be secular when it is in fact intensely religious, and its confused religiosity will only intensify in the coming decades.
Christians have always believed the devil’s claim that all the kingdoms of this world belong to him (Matt 4:9), for which reason Christ called him the “prince of this world” (Jn 14:30) and St. Paul called him “the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4). Hence, Christians hold that the State will either be discipled and belong to the Kingdom of Christ—a kingdom which does not have its origin in this world (Jn 18:36)—or it will exist as a fiefdom of Satan’s principality (Jn 14:30). Either way, it will possess one or the other’s species of religiosity. And that is why Christians hold that there is an imperative to make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19).
We ought never to ask ourselves the question of whether religion and government should be separate or admixed, since separation is in practice an impossibility. The only question is: what kind of religion do you want your State to endorse, and consequently to impose upon you?
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