A Template for a True Christian Politics

Hang on... I've got this recipe somewhere...

Consider the following three episodes from Western history.

476 AD: The Roman Empire falls. Constantinople preserves a portion of it in the East, but in the West a collection of Germanic tribes (barbarians?) breach the borders, sack Rome, and assume the governance of formerly Roman territory. Roman Christians are stunned and struggle to make sense of it all. Up to that point, Christianity seemed to be on a steady, upwards trajectory. With Rome’s fall, that pleasing narrative fell apart. As the Empire began to falter there were some grumbles to the effect that Christianity may have weakened the Empire and precipitated its downfall; St. Augustine wrote a stern rejoinder in The City of God, reminding the faithful that God’s Providential purposes don’t move in lockstep with man’s earthly ambitions. It’s a masterpiece of political theory, but it doesn’t stop the Empire from falling. A few centuries on, there are far fewer men in the West able to read The City of God.

1073 AD: Hildebrand of Sovana becomes Pope Gregory VII, and vows to restore “the glory of the Apostles” to the papacy and the Church. For some time now, Rome has been a relative backwater, powerfully shrouded in myth and mystery but ineffective on the level of ecclesial governance. Gregory resolves to change that by curbing corruption and exercising real authority as the Vicar of Christ. His campaign provokes a power struggle with secular rulers, especially over the right to appoint local ecclesial officials such as bishops or abbots. (It’s a valuable privilege for monarchs, but Gregory insists that this is entirely the Church’s prerogative.) King Henry IV is so defiant that Gregory excommunicates him, provoking a rebellion against Henry among lower-level princes and lords; to shore up his situation, the king dons a hairshirt, travels to Canossa (in the Northern Apennines in Italy) and sits outside Gregory’s window in the snow for days until the pope is pressured into absolving him. Unfortunately for Gregory, Henry was not truly a changed man. He used this bit of political theater to shore up support, and ended up besieging Rome and driving Gregory out.

1648: The Treaty of Westphalia is signed, officially ending the Thirty Years’ War, along with the Eighty Years’ War (in which the Dutch pushed for independence from Spain). French, Spanish, Swedish, Austrian, and Dutch representatives hammered out an agreement, which most notably included the rights of princes to determine the official faith of their own realm. The Church’s political power was dramatically curtailed, and the Holy Roman Empire became little more than a loose confederation of autonomous states. European leaders also agree to make at least some allowances for the private worship for religious minorities, and to permit emigration for those truly dissatisfied with their religious situation.

Obviously, these are quick, oversimplified summaries of complex transitions, but these were genuinely important moments for Christendom, and I’d call particular attention to three things. First of all, these were all moments of tectonic political change, in which relations between Church and state shifted dramatically. Unsurprisingly then, they all provoked furious discussions of political theology, as theologians and statesmen alike tried to boundaries between the realms of God and Caesar. Second, these moments all contributed something significant to the West’s political development and theory. Changing events led to a new equilibrium, and all of those changes built something meaningful into the political structure that we presently inhabit. But, third, the middle-term consequences of that process were never quite what anyone at the time would have expected.

Rome’s fall led to an extended period of what you might call “decentralized government,” or, less cheerfully, intermittent anarchy. Various tribes and warlords battled for control, and the few remaining elites yearned for centuries to re-establish order and peace in a more Roman-Empire-like form. Now and then (most obviously under Charlemagne and the Franks) it looked like it might be happening… but it never really did. Meanwhile, though, the “Dark Ages” were anything but calamitous for Christian faith, which spread all through the West and became a deep and defining part of its culture.

The dramatic standoff at Canossa sets up a fun debate: Who won? Henry was forced to humble himself to keep his throne; Gregory died in exile. Though he personally came to a sticky end, the Gregorian Reform really did initiate a new era for the Church, with a more powerful papacy. Somewhat ironically though, the political theorists of the next few centuries poured considerable energy into spelling out proper constraints on ecclesial power, and expounding on the proper sphere of secular power. Both in the theorizing and in practice, the Middle Ages now unfolds before us as a kind of ongoing experiment in the interplay of secular and ecclesial authority. A whole range of players (popes, kings, emperors, lords, abbots, bishops) maneuvered around one another, jockeying for status and influence, while the scholars and intellectuals debated the process in the new-but-fast-rising universities. Gregory’s reforms empowered the papacy but also led to a much clearer articulation of its limits.

Westphalia surely did not end European wars, but it did largely defuse the Wars of Religion, to the great relief of the Continent. In many ways though, this set the stage for church-state conflicts of a more existential kind. A century and a half later, the French Revolution broke out, and kings and bishops both found themselves with their backs to the wall. In the modern era, far more people have been murdered by militant secularists than by Christian crusaders, and at the same time princes have lost both their thrones and, where they’ve survived, meaningful control over the faith within their realm. There’s plenty of room for debating how we feel about all this, but this much is clear. It’s not at all what the Westphalian architects had in mind.

How will later generations describe our era? It’s a fascinating question. We seem to be living through another period of political transition. Things feel unstable, in part because all of the load-bearing walls are showing some cracks. Nation-states are still central to our entire global system, but they’re feeling a lot of strain. They’re overcommitted in their social obligations, beset by warring political ideologies, and struggling with a hard slate of practical and moral questions raised by mass global migration. The great powers are again eyeing one another with suspicion, and the possibility of large-scale global conflict seems real in a way it didn’t a decade or two ago. Transnational institutions like the UN, NATO, and the EU are facing hard existential challenges, and on a sub-national level, community and family ties seem to be eroding at an alarming rate while people are vociferously debating the causal story behind falling birth rates. It’s disorienting. It’s alarming. It’s entirely unsurprising that political theology has again become the subject of vociferous debate.

Here are my Bold Predictions. A new equilibrium will eventually be found. Christianity will be very much alive in this new world order, likely more robust than it is today. But beyond that… there will be a lot of surprises. It’s not going to look quite like anything anyone is envisioning now. It never does.

Both secular liberals and postliberals often talk as though we basically know the broad form that church-state relations need to take. And of course, we can say some things; history does contain useful lessons that we would be foolish to ignore, and there are political and moral principles that can be properly derived from natural law and tradition. Still, in the heat of partisan fervor, we tend to overestimate the extent to which our present insecurities stem from Those People Over There refusing to do the right thing. We don’t always know what that is. In fact, I’ll go further: In the big picture, we really don’t know what the world will or should look like a century hence. That’s what we get for living in Interesting Times.

It’s fine to go on theorizing about it, but for Christians the basic “assignment” is always to go on honoring God and Caesar as well as we can. That’s often quite difficult because, as my historical survey hopefully highlights, these two powers have been locked in a kind of non-stop wrestling match across all of Christian history. The sum never gets definitively worked out. It’s not that kind of puzzle. Nevertheless, we are charged with remaining loyal to Caesar so far as our moral and spiritual obligations allow. That duty was underscored by Jesus himself, referring most immediately to a pagan overlord who would sack Jerusalem mere decades after the words were uttered. If the injunction applied to Jews living under the shadow of Roman legions, I’m pretty sure it also applies to us.

What does that mean? It’s a big question, which we’ll continue to explore here at Christendom Reborn. Start here, though. Christianity will survive. It always does. It played a large role in getting us here, and it will continue to leave its stamp on the course of world events.

We won’t win, though, by brandishing “the Christian template” for proper church-state relations, and strong-arming everyone into compliance. There is no Christian template. The church-state question can only be answered in context, and the answers are typically worked out over time.

Take out a quarter and note whose face is on it. Some things never change.