source

Secularism means
that religious considerations are excluded from civil
affairs. We live in a time when public secularism is
something of a taken for granted reality in the United
States. Although the U.S. is one of the most religious of
the developed nations, there is still an expectation among
those who define public reality in the media, academy, and
government that appeals to God will be saved for one’s
private life. When someone breaks the pattern by publicly
invoking God as the reason to either embark upon or avoid a
course of action, the reaction is typically one of
distaste, surprise, or feeling threatened. The reason for
the adverse reaction is that secularism is widely believed
to be rationally more attractive than the alternatives and
a superior strategy for attaining social peace in a
pluralistic setting. To swim against the tide of secular
modernity indicates one may be uncivil, unbalanced, and
possibly even dangerous.

The question posed is whether
public secularism is desirable and more specifically,
whether it lives up to its billing. In order to answer
that question, it is useful to look back at how we reached
the current cultural and political moment, in the West
generally and in the United States specifically. Just as
atheism is by definition a reaction against something,
which is belief in the existence of God, so too, is
secularism a reaction against something. In the West,
where the concept was born, secularism is a reaction
against the notion of a religious state, particularly a
Christian one. Thus, if one proposes to make a critical
study of secularism and to consider history in the bargain,
then one must obtain a degree of familiarity with the story
of the Christian church and the state since the time of
Christ.

The Rise of Christianity and the Challenge of Power

For most of human history, religious and political
authority has been unified. Typically, both governmental
and religious rule have been united in a single structure
or the two have occupied distinct organizations, but with a
mutually reinforcing relationship.1
Christians and nonChristians
often attribute the eventual growth of churchstate
separation in the West to the enigmatic statement of
Jesus who famously said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s
and to God what is God’s.”2

The statement referred to a
coin bearing Caesar’s image and appears pregnant with
possible meanings, but a common lesson drawn from the
scriptural moment, employed repeatedly for two millennia
now, is that God cares about sacred things, like a pure
heart and religious observance, and delegates more prosaic
matters like regular law, order, and commerce to earthly
rulers. This single interpretation of what Jesus meant –
the idea of separating the sacred from the pragmatic
business of community governance – is the seedling of the
modern secular arrangement of public affairs. In fact,
secularism is sometimes referred to as the gift of
Christianity to the West.3
Although the Christian thus instructed aimed to be a
good citizen of the empire into which the early church was
1
Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1988), 1.
2
Matthew 22:21, The Holy Bible, New International Version.
3
Some Christians argue for secularism in public affairs as a way
of keeping the faith centered on spiritual matters rather than giving
in to a temptation to focus too much on the purported diversion of
politics. See Darryl Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors
the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
born, obedience carried one important caveat. God must be
obeyed rather than men, so where God’s law differed from
the law of men, Christians would be forced to follow the
higher law.4

The paradigmatic example of a clash between
the two realms involved emperor-worship. At first,
Christians were able to employ the same exemption Jews
enjoyed from the practice, but ultimately the government
sorted out the two camps and began to persecute stiffnecked
Christians whose refusal to subordinate their unique
religiosity to the civil cult of the emperor posed an
apparent threat to the legal order.5

From Persecuted Minority to Rule by the Lord’s Man
Faced with growth of Christian churches, the empire
had the choices of secularization (which was unthinkable),
extermination (which had not worked), or conversion of the
ruler to Christianity.6

What meaning would Christ’s words
about the image on the coin take on if Caesar himself were
a Christian? After battling to win the rule of the whole
empire, Constantine did convert. Because conversion was
4
Acts 5:29. For a classical source of the same idea, consider
Antigone’s determination to give her brother a proper burial despite
the fact that it would violate the law of the state.
5
Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, Frank M. Turner, The Western
Heritage (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 213.
6
Roland H. Bainton, Christianity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1964), 87.

24

seen as a way of dealing with the growth of the Christian
cult and because of his deathbed baptism, his status as a
believer is often questioned. In answer one might note
that the empire was not yet majority Christian and the
practice of baptism at the end of life was commonly
considered a prudential way of cleansing all sin right
before death.7
Constantine held the traditional Christian
belief that God was the God of history who revealed himself
through the resurrection of Christ. He referred to the
faith as “the struggle for deathlessness.”8

Historian Henry
Chadwick asserted that whether or not Constantine’s grasp
of the Christian faith was subtle, the ruler was quite
certain that the Christian God was the author of his
military victory over his rival Maxentius in Rome.9
Christians and non-Christians alike often speak
disparagingly of his conversion as though Constantine made
Christianity the state religion and thus ruined the purity
of the faith by corrupting it with power and wealth.
Contrary to popular belief, however, Constantine did not

7
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Dorset Press, 1986),
127. The deathbed baptism was particularly important for officials who
might have things like torture and imprisonment on their conscience
despite having performed them in service of the state.
8
Bainton, 90.
9
Chadwick, 125.

25

impose the Christian religion on the empire.10 His regime
is more accurately described as having embraced
“provisional religious pluralism.” He believed and said
that “the struggle for deathlessness must be free.”11 His
legislation did favor the Christian church in some
instances, though. He gave residences to the bishops of
Rome and gave large percentages of provincial revenues to
be used in church charity. The law itself also took on a
more Christian flavor. He generated greater protection for
“children, slaves, peasants, and prisoners.” He ended the
branding of criminals’ faces because of the image of God in
man. Courts closed on Sundays unless there was a slave to
be freed.12

Although Constantine’s Christian humanitarianism
continued to influence the law, his policy of religious
toleration gradually fell by the wayside in the West. For
a long time to come the church would come to be possessed
of a different view, which was that of the loving
constraint of heresy and apostasy.

10Chadwick, 127.
11Bainton, 91.
12Chadwick, 128.

26

The Religion of the State, but Not the State’s Religion

Under Constantine, the church first escaped
persecution and then gained the bounty of endorsement by
the most powerful man in the empire. In the latter half of
the fourth century, Theodosius did what Constantine had
not, which was to set up a Christian state where heretics
had their civil rights sharply curtailed and pagans were
tolerated, but controlled. Half a century later,
Theodosius II made serious doctrinal divergences subject to
the death penalty and no longer allowed pagans to serve in
the army.13

Ambrose set a precedent for the independence of the
church when he refused communion to Theodosius for his
massacre of townspeople in Thessalonika after an imperial
officer was killed in a riot there. The emperor did
penance.14 He was the head of the state, but not the head
of the church and had not the power to absolve himself nor
to declare his actions right. The action not only
established the church’s independence, but also showed that
it was not a slave to its private interests.15

13Bainton, 100.
14Ibid, 118.
15Chadwick, 168.

27

Augustine’s State: Necessary Evil or True Justice

Augustine was one of the first major Christian
commentators to live in an empire that was to some degree a
projection of Christianity rather than a threat to it. For
that reason, perhaps, his assessment of the state was
thoroughly mixed.

Augustine viewed the natural state as little more than
the most successful power play in a world of theft and
contest. In one justly famous passage, he remarked:
Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robber
bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms? The
band is itself made up of men, is ruled by the command
of a leader, and is held together by a social pact.
Plunder is divided in accordance with an agreed-upon
law. If this evil increases by the inclusion of
dissolute men to the extent that it takes over
territory, establishes headquarters, occupies cities,
and subdues peoples, it publicly assumes the title of
kingdom! This title is manifestly conferred on it,
not because greed has been removed, but because
impunity has been added. A fitting and true response
was once given by Alexander the Great by an
apprehended pirate. When asked by the king what he
thought he was doing by infesting the sea, he replied
with noble insolence, ‘What do you think you are doing
by infesting the whole world? Because I do it with
one puny boat, I am called a pirate; because you do it
with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.’16

16Augustine, “The City of God,” in Augustine: Political Writings
translated by Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries, Ernest L. Fortin and
Douglas Kries eds. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994),30-
31.

28

For a state to reach out and subdue peoples who have not
endangered it was little more than grand larceny.17 Great
legends arise out of conquest, but Augustine viewed that
path with contempt. In an unfallen world, no one would
ever have servant status imposed upon him by another man.18
Augustine’s account of the pre-Christian state is
definitely that of the glass half empty. In addition to
being a robber band with better publicity, the state is
something to be endured. Temporal life is training for
eternal life19 and one should not complain too much as long
he lives under a state that does not compel him to commit
impieties during his short life.20

With the coming of Christ, however, the state could
aspire to more. The government could, if led by servants
of the Lord, seek true justice and thus form a real
republic rather than continuing to exist as a noble veneer
covering larceny. God placed the empire in Constantine’s
hands for the very purpose of proving that his people could
rule rather than being a permanent protest movement. In
fact, the event of continued Christian leadership would

17Ibid, 32.
18Ibid, 35.
19Ibid, 11.
20Ibid, 41.

29

prove extraordinarily “felicitous” for the people of the
republic.21 Socrates already had part of the puzzle. He
realized good morals were required to purify the mind so
that it might then grasp higher things.22 Taking on the
mind of Christ is necessary to apprehend real justice upon
which to found the republic. Consequently, the Christian
emperor should rule justly and remember he is human. He
will use power for greatest possible extension of worship
of God, fear and love God, be slow to punish and ready to
pardon, punish for ends of government and not for his own
hatred, and grant pardon in hope of correction. There is
an important distinction to be made here when Augustine
spoke of serving God. The old way was to serve God in the
hope that he will grant dominance and subjection. The way
of the Christian is to serve God through charity and
caring. Finally, he will restrain extravagance as much as
it might have been unrestrained by his predecessors.23 This
is the picture of the city of God.

To the extent possible, the earthly city should seek
to identify its destiny with that of the city of God. In
this way it could rise above theft, coercion, and

21Ibid, 44-45.
22Ibid, 59.
23Ibid, 44.

30

temporality to strive for an eternal destiny. The city of
God recognizes that there can be no right to do anything
unless it is done justly. There is no right that proceeds
simply from strength. What Augustine declared was later
echoed by Martin Luther King, Jr. many centuries later as
he wrote from the Birmingham jail that an unjust law is no
law at all. He appealed implicitly to the city of God and
explicitly to Augustine’s claim that God’s justice has
little to do with martial superiority.24

Despite his desire for republics ruled by Christians
seeking after true justice, Christ’s justice, Augustine
realized that members of the city of God would sometimes
live in the earthly city without political power (as had
been the pattern for the faith for the majority of its
existence) and that cities where they did reign would be
surrounded by cities with different allegiances.
Christians could live obediently in cities that sought mere
earthly peace as long as those cities did not impede
worship.

25 When in power, they would not seek war with an
24Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in I
Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, edited by
James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992,) 84-
100.
25Augustine, 158.

31

adversary unless visited by iniquity.26 The differences
between the city of God and the city of man would be sorted
out in the last judgment. God would have the
responsibility for sorting wheat from tares.27
Though Augustine’s work seemed to point in the
direction of something like religious toleration, he, like
so many other great theorists, found himself compelled to
make hard choices based on events. His community in Africa
was one of the most contentious spots for Catholic-Donatist
strife. Though everyone involved was a Christian, there
was little forgiveness and occasional violence.28
Ironically, the subject of the long-running dispute
was the persecution the church had been through in the
past. Those Christians who appeared to have lapsed under
coercive pressure wished to rejoin the church or regain
their clerical positions. In the main, the Catholic church
was willing to forgive with appropriate penance, but there
were others (the Donatists) who held the stricter position
that apostasy could not be forgiven and clashed with the
rest of the church. They cherished the memory of martyrs
for the faith and argued that forgiving the offense of the

26Ibid, 149.
27Ibid, 139.
28Chadwick, 219-220.

32

lapsed demeaned the martyrs’ sacrifice.29 Dissatisfied with
the existence of a nearly century-long dispute within the
church, Augustine moved to conclude the issue with a
council. Though he was in principle opposed to coercion as
a method of resolving the controversy and tended to think
it would merely result in fake conversions to his side,
Augustine eventually came to embrace the opposite point of
view. The government began putting pressure upon the
Donatists and met with some success in changing hearts and
minds. Augustine began to believe that a mind changed by
coercion might eventually find itself in true agreement and
thus be really reconciled. Slowly, he embraced a policy of
moderate coercion, and thus, put his own imprimatur on
“paternal correction” of dissidents.30

The council in Carthage (411) that addressed the
situation finally settled on fines, exile of Donatist
clergy, and confiscation of Donatist property. Even with
official policy against them, the Donatists continued on in
Africa for nearly three more centuries. Perhaps the only
reason we are not talking about them today is that they

29Ibid, 221.
30Ibid, 222-223.

33

were eventually wiped off the map by expansionist Islam in
the seventh century.31

The decision to suppress through the vehicle of law
was one the church (in various manifestations) and
Christian states would make at several points in history.
Examples include the Medieval Inquisition directed against
heretics such as the Cathars (who were clearly nonChristian)
and Waldensians (whose heresy looked a lot like
mere Protestantism before its time), witch trials, and the
suppression of both Catholics and Protestants by each other
in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. The idea
behind all of them was that of loving constraint. Love
toward the community and toward the heretic himself
required coercion and hopefully persuasion toward
repentance so that the offender might save his soul. The
“struggle for deathlessness” was no longer to be free.
Rather, it was to be guided by church and state for better
or worse.

The Two Swords: Equals or Senior and Junior Partners?

Throughout the period of the Christian church’s
greatest political power (approximately from the time of
its establishment as the faith of the Roman empire until

31Ibid, 224-225.

34

the Reformation), the notion of secular and sacred spheres
of authority recurred often as the church and kings of
Europe wrestled over their relative powers. Pope Gelasius
analyzed the state and the church as “the two swords,” but
left uncertainty over whether the church claimed to the
superior to the state and that the state merely derived its
power from the church.32 Thus, we have the series of iconic
moments described in Brian Tierney’s The Crisis of Church
and State such as the crowning of Charlemagne (800) by the
Pope (possibly unintended by Charlemagne),33 the Investiture
Contest(1075-1122) in which kings battled with the church
over who had the power to appoint bishops (which the church
ultimately won),34 King Henry IV standing barefoot in the
snow to ask the forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII (1077) who
claimed to the right to depose wayward rulers,35 and the
Peace of Venice in 1177.36 In these events we see the
church seeking to supervise kings and kings seeking control
over the church. It is very much the situation that still
obtained at the time of the Reformation when Martin Luther
32Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 10.

33Ibid, 17.
34Ibid, 24-36.
35Ibid, 54.
36Ibid, 111.

35

complained in On Secular Authority that no one does their
duty and we are left with the ridiculous circumstance of
souls “ruled by steel” and “bodies by letters.”37
At all points in the history of church and state in
the West between establishment of the Christian church by
the Roman empire and the period prior to the Reformation
the primary question was not which church was the true
church or what religion kings would embrace. For the most
part, kings became Christian and their realms became
Christian and the church was the Catholic Church. The
social order was a Christian one and the battle between
church and state was over which institution had the mandate
from God to exercise various powers. Did emperors hold
their power from popes and could popes depose them? Who
had the right to appoint clergy with responsibility for
religious services and religious fee-taking in certain
geographical areas? These were the sort of questions that
created the most controversy, not the kind we have been
dealing with during the past few centuries in which the
questions have been which religion will give form to the
social order, if any, and to what degree will religion be
permitted to impact the public square.

37Martin Luther, “On Secular Authority,” in Luther and Calvin on
Secular Authority, edited and translated by Harro Hopfl (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 32.

36

As for secularism as we know it today, meaning the
ordering of the community without reference to God, it did
not exist. In its place, there was the idea of the
secular, which carried the simple meaning “in the world.”
The best example is the distinction made between clergy of
the Catholic Church who served in segregation from the
world, like those praying and working in the monastery, and
those who had responsibility for a parish. The priests
with parish duties were known as secular clergy. The
modern definition of secular is “without reference to God,”
but the older meaning of the word was quite different as
the above demonstrates. The idea of “secular” clergy going
about their work administering the sacraments, giving aid
to the poor, and yes, even collecting tithes, burial fees,
and other church revenues without reference to God is
ludicrous. In the world we are discussing, secular simply
referred to activities conducted in the world as opposed to
those directed toward a purely supernatural plane.38 State
and ecclesiastical authorities wrestled, but they wrestled
within the context of Christian right and wrong.
To give the proponents of secularism their due, one
can point to a church practice that favors their point of

38John Finnis, “On the Practical Meaning of Secularism,” Notre
Dame Law Review, no. 73: (1998), 491.

37

view. The pre-Reformation Catholic Church proposed
different standards for how people differently situated
should live. Christians were separated into two classes.
The first group, composed of monks, nuns, and others who
had given their lives to the church, operated like a team
of spiritual athletes who would embrace poverty, celibacy,
and pacifism in order to better plead for the world before
God. This group lived by the counsels of perfection as set
out (though without any such distinction) by Jesus in the
Sermon on the Mount. The second group, which included just
about everyone else in Christendom, would live in the
sinful world on terms more amenable to ordinary human
behavior and would dirty their hands with commerce,
marriage, and just war.39

It would be a stretch to say that the second group was
expected to establish a public order that operated without
consideration of God, but it certainly operated with a
different set of expectations and definitely contributed to
the idea of true religion as something that is private and
mystical rather than publicly relevant. Abraham Kuyper
(1837-1920), former Dutch Prime minister and Calvinist
exemplar, would later imply that the Roman church created

39David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General
Theory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 4.

38

secularism by wrongly dividing life into consecrated and
profane sectors.40

The Surprising Return of the Classical World

Although the pre-Reformation West was based on a union
between the church and the crown, there were intellectual
movements stirring in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
that began to open the door to the idea of a society
without “the one true church” as its bedrock. Such
stirrings could be seen even within the church. For
example, Pope Innocent IV wrote about government as a
necessary human activity and that infidels could have
legitimate human governments. He was possibly influenced
by his study of Roman natural law arguments and implied
that Christians had neither the right to dethrone pagan
rulers nor the authority to pillage their goods.41
The impact of classical sources on Innocent’s thinking
was not an isolated instance. By the end of the twelfth
century, the Crusades were beginning to yield an unexpected
cultural influence upon the West. The Eastern world had
successfully preserved and engaged the work of Aristotle

40Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1931), 51.
41Tierney, 152. Innocent’s position anticipated Roger Williams’
by several centuries.

39

and other classical scholars who were nearly lost to
Europe. These new works presented a different way of
thinking about society. The major consequence of the reemergence
of Aristotle into a Christianized society was to
make it possible to think about the state without necessary
resort to theology.42

Thomas Aquinas is a key figure in any study of
secularism and the church. Though he is to this day the
Catholic Church’s prime interpreter of faith and reason,
Aquinas is also a key figure in setting up the premises for
a secular state.

When put to a specific question involving the church
and its prerogatives, Aquinas seemed to favor something
like theocracy, which of course fit the world in which he
lived where the Catholic Church was at the height of its
power. For example, Aquinas thought that those who had
always been unbelievers, including Jews, should never be
coerced to embrace the faith. However, appropriate force
could be used in preventing them from interfering with the
Christian faith via blasphemy, “evil inducements”, or
persecution. This appropriate force was Aquinas’s
justification for the Crusades. Once a person had accepted

42Ibid, 159.

40

the Christian faith, they were fairly subject to physical
compulsion to render their fealty to the church and to
God.43

Aquinas also entertained the question of whether it
was acceptable to have unbelievers governing believers.
While it was tolerable for unbelievers to govern for
reasons we will explore further below, he insisted that the
church had the option to use its God-given authority to
direct the end of that dominion by unbelievers. The
rationale for this power invested in the church was that
unbelievers deserve the loss of their control over those
“who are being transformed into sons of God.” Per Aquinas,
the church exercised or refrained from exercising this
power as it felt was necessary.44

Despite the answers Aquinas gave on the specific
questions of the church and its authority over unbelievers,
heretics, and blasphemers, it was his broader reasoning on
the nature of the state that has contributed to the Western
tradition of thought about the nature of the state as it
regards religion. Aquinas did not have the same grim
assessment of the world without Christ that Augustine did.

43Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologiae,” St. Thomas Aquinas on
Politics and Ethics, translated and edited by Paul E. Sigmund (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 61.
44Ibid, 62.

41

Instead of a world so desperately alienated from God it did
not even know what justice was and could only hope to find
a lesser earthly peace, Aquinas saw a world incompletely
understood without God but still capable of realizing much
good, including justice. The state arose from the social
nature of man and existed entirely within the realm of
reason.45 Aquinas’s state was actually prior to the family
or even the individual because it represented the body of
mankind while subsidiaries like families and persons were
merely parts like fingers and arms. People are naturally
dependent on the state and cannot live without it. If they
do, they are not human, but are rather “a beast or a god.”
Natural men have a social instinct.46

What Aquinas failed to address was the tension created
between his two perspectives. If he was right that the
logic of the state proceeds directly from man’s social
nature and that we can know that without knowledge of God,
then the state could theoretically operate independently of
the church. Aquinas did not spell that out, but it was a
natural deduction from his work, despite the fact that
Aquinas declared earthly rulers subject to the pontiff.47

45Ibid, 96.
46Ibid, 97.
47Bainton, 202-203.

42

Then again, the conflict was perhaps more apparent than
real, because Aquinas insisted upon the truth of biblical
revelation and the need for the church to provide full
understanding of God’s world as faith extends the powers of
reason by giving it information beyond what the senses can
assemble on their own.

Regardless of Aquinas’s own ultimate settlement of the
church’s authority over a state that existed even in
unilluminated nature, he poured water on seeds of
secularization. In a world where popes and kings regularly
disputed their bounds, it was a near certainty that new
voices would pick up on the Aristotelian/Thomistic notion
of the state’s natural existence established by pure reason
and develop that into a brief for the superiority of the
state over the church for ordering society.
In the early fourteenth century, Marsilius of Padua
did just that. Invoking Aristotle as his authority,
Marsilius declared that all governmental power arose from
the will of the citizenry48 who together hold a “primal lawmaking
power.” This group would produce good laws after
debate and discussion because “no one consciously injures

48Understanding citizens in the restrictive sense of the times –
e.g. no slaves, no women, etc.

43

himself.” In essence, good laws would follow from the
exercise of self-interest by the governing group.
On the spiritual side, Marsilius used scripture to
deny the primacy of Peter or any other centralization of
the authority of the church. He also asserted that it is
God who can punish or remit sins rather than any
representative of the church who would claim to be able to
do so on his own discretion. Not only were the claims of
the papacy erroneous, but it also had failed to realize
that Christ set a model of humble subservience before it.
The church and its agents should make themselves thoroughly
obedient to the state, just as Christ had been even to the
point of death on the cross. For a pope to claim to rule
anything, was in direct contravention of the Gospel.49
Marsilius’s theoretical church was completely subject
to the power he called “the legislator” which represented
the will of the citizens. This church had not even the
power to deny sacraments nor to excommunicate. Only the
“legislator” would wield those powers. In short, the
church was owned by the state lock, stock, and barrel. One
might pause to note that Marsilius’s use of scripture was
extraordinarily selective, as was his selection of

49Marsilius of Padua, “Defensor Pacis,” Medieval Sourcebook;
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/marsiglio4.html; Internet;
accessed Oct. 16, 2006.

44

quotations from church fathers like Ambrose.50 Although his
arguments against the papacy and some of its claimed
potencies may have held water, his view of the church as a
spiritual subsidiary of the state and “the legislator”
could not survive a trip through the New Testament. Why
exactly were the apostles in trouble if they were not
obeying God rather than the state? At best he could argue
the church should conduct its activities and take its
punishment if deemed illegal, but he could hardly argue
that Christ or any of the apostles simply offered meek
obedience to the state. In some ways Marsilius anticipated
the Reformers (as with his attacks on the presumed power of
the papacy), but in others (such as his notion of the utter
subservience of the church) he anticipated totalitarian
states of the future.

In their reliance on Aristotle, both Aquinas and
Marsilius prefigured the Renaissance period that would
emerge nearly contemporaneously with the Reformation in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Renaissance humanism
gloried in the information about the Greco-Roman classical
world that became more readily available and emphasized
careful study of original sources both with regard to

50Ibid, “Conclusions from Defensor Pacis,” Medieval Sourcebook;
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/marsiglio1.html; Internet;
accessed Oct. 16, 2006.

45

classic texts and Christian ones. The interest in classic
texts damaged the claims of Rome directly as with the
exposure of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine
which purportedly deeded a large chunk of Italian real
estate to the church and indirectly by focusing attention
on scripture rather than the tradition of the church. As
deconstructionists of Catholic claims humanists were in
consonance with the spirit of the Reformation, but as
enthusiasts of the classical world who found inspiration in
a civilization built on a basis quite different from
Christendom they were a different sort of men.

Three Icons of the Sixteenth Century: Calvin, Luther, and
Machiavelli

Although the Reformation is often noted as the period
that made religious pluralism a hard reality in Europe,
pluralism was not the goal of the Reformers. Martin
Luther, Jean Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and a host of others
entered into intense confrontation with the reigning
Catholic church. They were not fighting for the right to
be tolerated or to tolerate. Rather, they sought to reorganize
society along Christian lines in what they saw as
the correct ways to do so. In addition to taking issue
with various doctrines of the church regarding matters like
indulgences, the proper number of sacraments, the status of

46

the Pope, marriage of clergy, etc., reformers had their own
ideas about the correct way to resolve the contest between
church and state with regard to social authority. Luther
and Calvin, reformers par excellence, contributed directly
to the further drawing of lines between religious authority
and secular authority in their writings.

Calvin’s idea of secular authority very clearly
resolved the boundaries between church and state. Rather
than having the church answer to the state or the state
answer to the church, Calvin proposed that each entity
answered directly to God for the responsibilities entrusted
to their care. The church was to provide for teaching of
the word of God and worship. The state would have sole
authority over governing, subject to the church’s nonbinding
guidance.51 Such a state as Calvin envisioned,
however, could not really be thought of as secular in the
modern sense because a Calvinist government would take
great care to suppress heresy and blasphemy. To Calvin,
the king held his power only through the hand of God and it
would be ridiculous for God not to care whether his chosen
servant protected right worship and doctrine.52 If the king
51John T. McNeill, God and Duty: The Political Thought of John
Calvin (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 41.
52Ibid, 46.
47
failed to do his duty by God, the people could expect
punishment from God directed against the nation. In the
face of Catholic persecution of Calvinists, the reformer
suggested lesser magistrates could represent the people and
bring correction to a wayward ruler.53
Though Calvin’s solution to the theo-political problem
had little in common with secularism as understood by the
modern reader, it clearly contributed to the idea of
separation of church and state by decisively making the
state independent of the church. Calvin’s scheme
ironically rises out of an explosion of pluralism, but does
not do much to account for it in terms of toleration. His
state still wields the sword in enforcement of orthodoxy.54
Of course, in Calvin’s view the great difference would be
that a state such as the one he envisions would enforce a
substantially more correct orthodoxy than what went before.
The end result of Calvin’s formulation is to come down
squarely on the side of kings and emperors who contended
through the ages that they did not have to account to the
church for their leadership, but rather that they were
accountable for their leadership directly to God rather

53Ibid, 81.
54Ibid, 54.

48

than to the earthly head of the church and that they had
their own responsibility to God to protect right religion.
Luther’s solution to the church-state issue was
decidedly more radical. Rather than take a side in the
debate that had raged through the centuries, Luther re-drew
the map.

Luther wrote On Secular Authority to answer a pressing
question. How can the sword of the state be reconciled
with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, wherein meekness and
nonresistance are commended to the believer? Because of
his dissatisfaction with the traditional Catholic answer
that the Sermon represented a “counsel of perfection”
(itself a secularizing idea), Luther developed his own
doctrine of the two kingdoms and God’s use for each. His
approach maintains the authority of the Sermon on the Mount
for every believer, while explaining the continued
existence of the state and God’s purpose for it.
Thus, he argued that all mankind must be divided into
two parts: “the first belong to the kingdom of God, the
second to the kingdom of the world.”55 This first group,
living in the reality that Christ came to establish his
kingdom in the world, has no need of the sword. The entire
55Luther, 8.
49
secular apparatus would disappear for lack of need if all
the world were true Christians.56 After all, Paul told
Timothy that laws are for the unjust, not the just.57
However, the second group is not living according to
Christ’s gentle counsel and neither are most who would take
the name “Christian.” As a result, it is God’s will that
the secular sword and laws are to be rigorously employed
“to punish the wicked and protect the just.”58 The law also
helps us recognize our sin. Without our subjection to the
secular sword, the world would become a “desert.” But
because God has ordained government, enough peace exists to
allow men to support their families and serve God.59
So, we have two governments: a spiritual one to
fashion “true Christians and just persons through the Holy
Spirit under Christ” and a secular one to maintain outward
peace. No land will tolerate a truly Christian government
without disaster. The wicked are too numerous.60
Bear in mind that Luther’s tough-minded view of the
need for a secular sword does not devalue the necessity of
56Ibid, 9.
571 Timothy 1:9.
58Luther, 7.
59Ibid, 10.
60Ibid, 11.
50
the spiritual government. The secular arm alone will be
marked by hypocrisy and a lack of justice. It needs the
spiritual government as much or more than the spiritual
government needs the secular.61 In fact, the spiritual
government plays a key role in making fit citizens and
rulers.
Despite their lack of need for the restrictions of
secular government, the Christians are not called to
separate themselves from the state or object to their
participation in it. They should willingly hold themselves
in subjection to the state in order to “attend to what
others need.” Participating in government is no different
than any other service rendered unselfishly to another.
The Christian visits the sick, though he is well himself;
so should he support the work of government, though he does
not need its restraining hand. The Christian is helping
his weaker brother to “enjoy peace” and have “his enemies
kept in check.”62
And therefore if you see that there is a lack of
hangmen, court officials, judges, lords or princes,
and you find that you have the necessary skills, then
you should offer your services and seek office, so
that authority, which is so greatly needed, will never
61Ibid, 12.
62Ibid, 14.
51
come to be held in contempt, be powerless, or perish.
The world cannot get by without it.63
Far from being a passive spectator or holding himself
pure behind the monastery wall, the Christian is to be
active in government. Although it is not stated directly
here, one might make an inference that the importance of
preventing authority from being held in contempt would
include keeping the government just.
Because service in the secular government is a service
to God’s mission of restraining villainy and maintaining
order in the world, it would be wholly unchristian to say
that there is anything which serves God and which yet a
Christian should not do, for there is no one more suited to
serving God than a Christian.
In the same way it is right and necessary that all
princes should be good Christians. The Sword and
power, as a special service rendered to God, are more
suited to Christians than to anyone else in the world,
and so you should value the Sword and power as much as
the married state, or cultivating the soil, or any
other trade instituted by God.64
Nevertheless, the Christian must bear one thing in
mind. His business with the state is always done as a
community service. He is never to use the state to
vindicate his own claims. On the personal level, the
63Ibid, 15.
64Ibid, 18.
52
teaching of Christ remains “a strict injunction to every
Christian. And rest assured that those who avenge
themselves and litigate and quarrel in the courts for their
goods and honour are mere pagans bearing the name of
Christians, and will never be anything else.”65
The two kingdoms have their own kind of law. “Where
the soul is concerned, God neither can nor will allow
anyone but himself to rule.” Authorities must “see the
folly of trying to compel belief . . . by means of laws and
commands.” In the area of faith, the Church is supreme and
should not encourage the state to create Christians by
compulsion. Even the Church should take care only to
command “what is certain in God’s Word,” particularly with
regard to salvation.66
Force cannot bring about belief. The individual has a
responsibility before God. Each must decide at his
own peril what he is to believe, and must see to it
that he believes rightly. Other people cannot go to
heaven or hell on my behalf, or open or close [the
gates to either] for me. And just as little can they
believe or not believe on my behalf, or force my faith
or unbelief. How he believes is a matter for each
individual’s conscience, and this does not diminish
[the authority of] secular governments. They ought
therefore to content themselves with attending to
their own business, and allow people to believe what
they can, and what they want, and they must use no
coercion in this matter against anyone.67
65Ibid, 20.
66Ibid, 23-24.
67Ibid, 25.
53
At this point, Luther is offering a revolutionary
idea. By placing the individual’s belief or non-belief in
the government of the church (which is controlled by the
Sermon on the Mount), he creates room for a substantially
new liberty and for the flowering of more genuine religious
commitments. The Church will now be responsible for seeing
that no master other than God will be permitted there and
it shall not employ the sword in the process.
Secular rulers should forget trying to rule souls,
while bishops should cease ruling towns. Secular rulers
and bishops who do not understand this proper relationship
are experiencing the punishment of God.
God has made them to be of perverse minds and has
deprived them of their senses, so that they want to
rule spiritually over souls, just as the spiritual
authorities want to rule in a worldly manner. And
[God’s purpose in all this is] that they should
thoughtlessly pile up on themselves the sins of
others, earn his hatred and that of mankind, until
they are ruined along with bishops, parsons, and
monks, all knaves together.68

Paul clearly teaches that while we are to be subject
to civil authorities, their power has a limit. They have
mastery over evil-doing, but not faith. Christ
distinguished what belongs to Caesar and to God to make
68Ibid, 27.
54
exactly that point.69 A prince is not even empowered to deal
with heresy. Bishops must fight false doctrine, because
God’s Word is needed more than the sword. Heresy is not
spiritual and can not be put down with secular power “even
if it were to fill the whole world with blood.”70
But no one does their duty and we are left with the
ridiculous circumstance of souls “ruled by steel” and
“bodies by letters.” As a result, lawless princes are
earning the contempt of God and the people. The
established order may not be able to hold in the face of
such a vast loss of confidence.71
It should be clear from the foregoing that Luther was
not anxious for the Church to abandon the secular kingdom,
but rather that it would stop jealously reaching for the
power of the state while neglecting its own duties. At the
same time, the state must focus on restraining injustice
and chaos instead of attempting to set church doctrine or
punish heretics. The bottom line is that Luther called for
the church to be the church and the state to be the state.
The point is not that they should ignore each other and
69Ibid, 28.
70Ibid, 30.
71Ibid, 32.
55
exist in isolation, but rather that they should fulfill the
purposes God sets before them.
In summary, Luther’s state was God-ordained, just as
Calvin’s was, but its competence was much more limited.
Theology was for the church. Law and order was for the
state. Lest we go too far and consider Luther’s state
completely secular in the modern sense, we should recognize
that Luther thought blasphemy was a punishable offense and
assumed a Christian moral context within which the state
would operate. The entire reason for the existence of the
state in Luther’s mind was that God cared for people living
in a fallen world and wanted to give them protection. In
addition, despite Luther’s clear views on the proper
distinction between the church and the state, he, like
most, saw the church as an official entity established by
law and accepted the notion of the nobility as emergency
bishops during the tumultuous times of the early Lutheran
church’s emergence. Wolfhart Pannenberg described this
idea of the secular well when he wrote, “The disassociation
of the secular state power and its laws from the context of
the dual power within Christendom led to the modern secular
state, which is a completely different matter than the
secular power of kings and emperors where the social order
56
is based on Christianity.”72 Luther’s groundbreaking work
remained rooted firmly in the latter historical context.
Machiavelli was roughly contemporaneous with Luther
and Calvin, but the Florentine political philosopher was
not concerned with the correct theology of church and
state. Nevertheless, his work made it very clear that
neither love of the church nor some natural law of right
should determine the way of the prince. In his thin
classic The Prince, Machiavelli spoke to the matter of how
a noble should rule. His prescriptions were not
particularly concerned with pleasing God or honoring man.
Instead, he focused on effectiveness. Perhaps a better
word is winning.
In the Christian view of the world, defeat is no
shame. After all, Jesus experienced a massive worldly
defeat when he suffered crucifixion. What is right in the
Christian sense is to succeed by God’s standard rather than
by the world’s measure and to bear persecution rather than
to do wrong. Even a king should wield the sword only in
the cause of justice. Machiavelli’s advice to the prince
was based on a decidedly different scale of values. For
example, he advised the prince to make certain any harm
72Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Christian Division of Church and
State,” Becket Fund; http://www.becketfund.org/other/Prague2000/
PannenbergPaper.html; accessed April 27, 2007.
57
done to an opponent is severe enough to forestall any
possible future revenge.73 He also insisted that the entire
line of a displaced ruler must be extinguished so as to
remove all hope of their return.74
Machiavelli even undercut the noble concept of honor.
He was unambiguous in advising the prince to break a
promise whenever it was advantageous. He need not worry
about ruining his reputation or the value of his word
because there would always be others willing to be
deceived. Appearances remained important, though. The
prince should strive to be seen as faithful, religious,
humane, merciful, and trustworthy. At the same time, he
should be ready at any moment to break free from any of the
above.75
Machiavelli treated the church and the pope as nothing
more than additional players on the geopolitical scene,
which was understandable given some of the church’s
activity in his day.76 In dealing with how a prince should
conduct himself in order to effectively achieve his goals
rather than worrying about higher concerns like justice,
73Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984), 11.
74Ibid, 9.
75Ibid, 58-60.
76Ibid, 39-41.
58
holiness, virtue, etc., the strategist came closer than any
of his contemporaries to setting standards similar in tone
and content to the secularism of the modern world.
Weberian social science is largely predicated on this same
basis. Effectiveness rather than the right, should govern.
With The Prince, Machiavelli may have created political
science as we came to know it in the twentieth century. He
may also have created modern secularism. None of these
estimates mean to suggest that no one before Machiavelli
acted on the basis of raw interest rather than a higher
sense of the good, but he was certainly one of the first to
say so with candor and to be widely noticed. In truth,
much of Martin Luther’s critique of the Catholic church had
to do with his perception that the church was conducting
itself as though guided more by Machiavelli’s counsel of
interest rather than by the scriptures. He wanted it to
stop acting in a Machiavellian manner and to concern itself
more with holiness.
Uneasy Pluralism: Consequence of the Reformation
What may have ultimately been of more importance than
the influential writings of figures like Calvin, Luther,
and Machiavelli was the brute fact of plurality created by
the upheaval of the Reformation. Although disputes
59
predating the Reformation resulted in compromise and
reunification or dissenters put to death, the popular
movement behind the Reformers and the cast of nobility who
supported them presented too large an obstacle for the
Catholic church to overcome. The result was that
Christendom split and Europe developed an uneasy coexistence
between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anglicans, and others. The solution that emerged at
Augsburg in 1558 after much loss of blood and treasure was
to have each country follow the religion of its ruler,
while providing for some degree of toleration.
We may have yet to know what the long term
consequences of the Reformation will be, but at the time of
the wars of religion that brought great suffering to Europe
in its aftermath, many were disappointed with the legacy of
reform and wanted to get away from the divisiveness of
religion and focus more productively on problems that might
be more agreeably solved. It is at this point in the story
where we reach the nugget of most modern political thought
regarding religion. It is a short step from disgust with
the wars of religion to secularism in which religious
concerns are carefully segregated from public discourse.
Besides war and a disdain among intellectuals for
religious controversy, another key consequence of the
60
Reformation was that kings grasped the opportunity created
by the Catholic Church’s new vulnerability to seize
resources for their project of centralizing governmental
control over their nations. The process of converting
church resources to public use was referred to as
secularization of church holdings and it was widely
supported by Protestant church leaders who felt the
Catholic church had enriched itself at the expense of local
communities.
The Social Contract
Following the time period in which religious conflicts
raged, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacque Rousseau
offered solutions to the problem of pluralism based on the
concept of the social contract. These writers lived in a
time of proximity to serious theo-political strife and
persecution.
Hobbes response was elegantly simple and presaged some
of the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century.
He viewed men in a state of nature as being engaged in a
war of all against all. Unregulated life would be “nasty,
brutish, and short.” Without government to manage the
situation, all would be in nearly constant fear of violent
death. In order to escape this fear, men would trade their
61
shabby freedom to the immense governmental authority of
Leviathan in exchange for safety from violent death.
Instead, they would render their obedience. Rather than
accommodate pluralism, Leviathan would simply take complete
responsibility for social cohesiveness and would maintain
total control over faith and doctrine.77 There are echoes
of Augustine and Martin Luther in Hobbes’s estimation of
the plight of natural man. At the same time one cannot
help but think also of ideologies employed by Hitler,
Stalin, and Mao in this account of freedom and government.
John Locke had a different view of human nature. Even
without government people might be reasonable and tolerant,
but they might also realize that their core freedoms, such
as the right to enjoy private property, would be relatively
more secure with a government formed by social contract.
He dealt with the notion of religious pluralism in his
Letter Concerning Toleration and recommended strongly
against coercion and persecution. As a Christian writer
living in a divided Christendom, Locke addressed his coreligionists
theologically. In Locke’s view, the New
Testament presented a God who has no interest in being
worshipped by people with swords at their backs and hands
77Thomas Hobbes,Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a
Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (London: University Press,
1651), 83-89.
62
pressing down on their shoulders forcing them to kneel. If
God wanted something like that, he would never have endowed
human beings with free will. He would have simply created
believers with correct doctrine.78
Locke also invoked his conception of the social
contract in making the case for toleration. His people
living in the state of nature were not desperate Hobbesian
folk constantly in fear for their lives. Rather, they
perceived a relative benefit in ceding some of their
freedom in order to gain greater security of their temporal
goods and their person. Thus, upon entering the social
contract they have not given up their right to freedom of
religious belief and confession. The social contract does
not deal with religion because it offered no benefit to the
contracting person with regard to that part of his life.
Toleration is part of the deal because the only part of
religious belief that is relevant is that which enables a
person to fulfill his or her part of the deal by not
stealing, murdering, breaking promises, etc. This last
part is why Locke denied toleration to atheists. They had
no religious foundation upon which to build and thus
nothing to back up their commitment. They could promise,
78John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” The Constitution
Society; available from http://www.constitution.org/jl/tolerati.htm;
accessed April 27, 2007.

63
but why would they not break their promise without any
concern for justice that one can never truly escape? The
suspicion toward atheists serves to emphasize a
discontinuity between Locke and modern secularists.79
Locke also argued for toleration against the
overwhelming historical preference for one king, one
religion, and one law because he thought there were
concrete benefits to its practice. He argued toleration of
other religious opinions was not a costly activity.
Rather, it actually could make the government more secure.
People who were oppressed plotted against the existing
order. Those who enjoyed their freedom would support the
regimes under which they lived.80
Locke’s vision of the church as a persuasive entity
rather than a partner in coercion and of the state as an
instrumental entity focused carefully on its core
competencies of the public good and safety carried echoes
of Luther’s view. His ideas about toleration came to
dominate the Western liberal democracies of the future and
particularly the United States.
Rousseau, who would become one of the key inspirations
for the French Revolution, did not buy into Locke’s notion
79Ibid.
80Ibid.
64
of the state focused on temporal goods. He saw the state
as dealing with a larger part of the person than merely the
protection of property and security of person. Rousseau’s
state addressed hearts and minds as well as bodies and
wallets.81
Rousseau knew that prior to the coming of Christ
political and religious authority had been united and that
while Jesus spoke of a kingdom of another world, the
reality was that Christians tended to seek to unify
political and religious authority just as others had before
them. He identified the Christian states that overtook the
pagan ones as “the most violent of earthly despotisms,” but
he might have changed his mind had he seen the French
Revolution in action a few decades later.
On the one hand, Rousseau complained about the
Christian states in which a kingdom of this world undercut
the promise of a kingdom of another world. On the other,
he complained that in Christian states one could never know
which master to support, the king or the priest. He did
81Jean Jacque Rousseau, “The Social Contract: Book One,” The
Constitution Society; available from http://www.constitution.org/jjr/
socon_01.htm; Internet; accessed April 27, 2007.
65
not appear to consider the possibility that a degree of
tension between the two authorities might be healthy.82
He thought Hobbes was correct in recommending a
forcible reunion of political and religious authority under
the Leviathan, but wrong to suppose that Christianity could
be part of a successful system. To explain his antipathy
to Christianity as part of the public order, he divided
religion into three types: the religion of man, the
religion of the citizen, and the Roman Catholic type which
resulted (per Rousseau) in two systems of governance always
in conflict. This third type he immediately discarded as
unworkable. The second type, the religion of the citizen,
is the old divine cult united with civil laws. Dying for
country was martyrdom. Disobedience of the law was
impiety. The problem with this civil faith was that it was
false and credulous. It also left the rest of the world
outside of its relationship with God, thus creating “a
natural state of war with all others.” The first type, the
religion of man, was a purified Gospel Christianity.
Rousseau saw Christianity as essentially anti-social
because all true Christians would be otherworldly directed,
and any tyrant could seize rule of the nation while
82Ibid, “The Social Contract: Book Four,” The Constitution
Society; available from http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_04.htm;
Internet; accessed April 27, 2007.
66
Christians counted it nothing relative to the promise of
heaven. He also thought a nation of such people would have
the opposite problem of the civil cult group. While the
civil cultists would be too aggressive with their tribal
god behind them, the Christians would be too passive both
domestically and with regard to invaders.83
What was needed was something new, a system of belief
that would unify leadership and the people under one simple
rule that was neither superstitious nor anti-social. With
that, Rousseau humbly proposed a civil religion. Each
citizen must have one so that he will love his duty, but
the civil religion is only needed with reference to
morality and the duties that bind people to each other.
The apparent meaning was that civil religion should keep a
merchant from lying, but not instruct him on something like
the nature of prayer. Above a civil religion that made a
man love his country and deal honestly with fellow citizens
there was a theoretically acceptable cloud of opinions
about the other world where the sovereign has no authority.
Individuals could think what they liked about the “life to
come” as long as they were “good citizens in this life.”84
83Ibid.
84Ibid.
67
This religion of the state was to be direct and
simple. It featured the god of the deists who rewarded the
good and punished the evil in the next life. The social
contract and the laws that resulted from it would be viewed
as holy. The only “negative dogma” as Rousseau put it, was
intolerance writ broadly. Rousseau refused to distinguish
between civil and theological intolerance because he
thought one could not “live at peace with those we regard
as damned.” To admit theological intolerance would have
meant the sovereign was not truly sovereign and that some
higher authority had other requirements. Anyone who dared
to say there was no salvation outside the church would be
driven from the state.85
Rousseau’s argument is susceptible to significant
criticism. For example, his portrait of true Christianity
was clearly a caricature. He need have looked no further
than Luther and Calvin (major intellectual presences by
then) to see both arguing persuasively for the Christian
soul to be completely engaged in society as a service to
his or her brothers and sisters. His immediate dismissal
of the two authorities system of kings and popes embodied
by Catholicism was also too quick. He was right about the
potential ills of double authority, but he failed to
85Ibid.
68
consider the potential benefits. For example, a person
with no remedy at law (even in a case of gross unfairness)
could go to the ecclesiastical courts to seek justice via
equity. It is also possible that having multiple
authorities could be freedom-enhancing as they have the
potential to strive to check the ambitions of the other.
In addition, Rousseau manipulated history for his own
purposes. According to his version of events, when Rome
fell to barbarians it was the fault of Christianity for
having sapped the old pagan valor. But when Arabs were
conquered by barbarians, Rousseau found causation in the
Arabs’ having become “prosperous, lettered, civilized,
slack, and cowardly.”86 The bias against Christianity was
evident in the comparison. Surely one could argue the
Romans, too, were civilized into vulnerability well before
the Christian faith became powerful in the empire.

American Story: Religious Expatriates and a New World
The lives of John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards offer
helpful entries into the story of the Puritans both as they
struggled for simple survival as a covenant community and
then as they tried to retain their community through
subsequent generations while they eased away from the
86Ibid.
69
covenant existence they labored so mightily to maintain in
the seventeenth century. The Puritan culture was based on
Calvinistic theology, particularly that of calling and the
close relation of church and state. Calling meant each
person inhabited his/her particular place in society by the
sovereign hand of God. The baker was called to be a baker,
the farmer a farmer, the preacher a preacher, the governor
a governor. Each station had clear duties and one should
perform them rather than agitate for a different station.
To do other than to perform one’s duty would be a kind of
rebellion against God. The result was a sort of frozen
hierarchy in which deference was expected. To present the
matter so starkly, however, is not completely fair because
there was an underlying tenderness toward family and
brotherhood toward the community that coexisted with the
rigidity of calling.87
The Puritans saw the state as a covenant entity with a
sacred relationship to God. Unlike Luther or Locke, who
saw the state as mostly instrumental, Calvin viewed the
state as a matter of priority to God. Because God invested
rulers with authority over other men, Calvin concluded that
God would first be concerned that rulers acknowledge that
87Edmund S. Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas (Indianapolis, IN:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xv-xvii.
70
their authority proceeds only from him and that ensuring
correct doctrine and worship were primary duties of the
governing authority.88 To some extent, this arrangement is
similar to that sometimes endorsed by the Catholic Church
in the past. The key difference, however, was that
Calvin’s state did not answer to the church at all. It had
its own direct calling from God and made decisions
independent from the church. One sees this understanding
played out in the events of Winthrop’s life, in which he as
the governor had to deal with the religious variances of
Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. He encouraged Williams
to leave89 and excommunicated Hutchinson outright for her
refusal to be corrected in matters of the faith.90
Roger Williams matched his Puritan forebears in
religious zeal and perhaps exceeded them in his desire for
a pure and righteous church. Where he differed so greatly
as to require he take his leave from the community (despite
an apparent affection for him on the part of Winthrop) was
on the matter of the connection between the church and
community governance. Unlike the Calvinist Puritans,
Williams thought the government should not be involved in
88Ibid, xx-xxviii.
89Francis Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding
Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 251-252.
90Ibid, 298.
71
ensuring proper religious doctrine at all. He did not
think God cared much for the holiness government could
bring about.91
Although Williams was full of concern for religious
purity, he also reasoned like Locke about the nature of
human society. He saw government as something inherent in
human society that seemed to work reasonably well whether
run on the principles of Christians, Indians, or Turks. In
fact, it sometimes worked better with those who were not
Christians. He had his experience living with Indians from
which to compare and draw conclusions. This phenomenon
suggested to him that governing was a practice with
something like an independent excellence. Either one knew
how to do it well, like captaining a ship, commanding an
army, or doing the work of a doctor, or one did not. The
competence to govern did not depend on one’s opinions about
God. This competence focused itself on bodies and
property, but not on beliefs, at least not on beliefs about
religious particularities.92
Although he is often embraced by secularists because
of his courageous stand against loving constraint of
91Roger Williams, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” in Puritan
Political Ideas edited by Edmund S. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill,
1965), 208.
92Ibid, 212.
72
heretics and for religious liberty, it is not clear
Williams would pass muster with the secularisms of the
modern day. Government for everyone (Christian or not)
worked in part, Williams was sure, because of the six
things written on the heart of every person: “1st. That
there is a Deity; 2d. That some actions are nought; 3d.
That the Deity will punish; 4th. That there is another life;
5th. That marriage is honorable; 6th. That mankind cannot
keep together without some government.”93 These beliefs
were the basis of common government. Correct Christian
doctrine was not needed for earthly community.
Just as Williams thought the nature of governing
precluded making faith the center of it, he believed the
nature of faith precluded government working as the
guarantor of orthodoxy. An iconoclast like Luther, he knew
coercion could not make a man believe something he did not
accept in his own mind and heart. Instead of turning him
around, religious coercion would only have the negative
effects of either turning its object into a hypocrite or
tarring its employer with the evil of violence. Williams
was ahead of his time, but not by too much. He eventually
93Ibid, “Williams to Daniel Abbot, Town Clerk of Providence
(January 15, 1681),” in Puritan Political Ideas, 224.
73
set up his own successful colony in Rhode Island on the
principles he espoused.
The descendants of Puritans in the era of Jonathan
Edwards were noticeably different from their forebears in
Winthrop’s (and Williams’s) time. One key difference was
the presence of the Awakening. Individuals were having
direct experiences of God that threatened to upset
allegiance to a standing order. Distinctions developed
between the Old Lights and the New Lights. The New Lights
wondered whether the Old could even understand them or have
the same kind of relationship to God they did.94 Should one
who had been so close to God give deference to one who had
obviously not been awakened or was even actively opposing
the Awakening as some kind of dangerous spiritual fraud?
Edwards was a partisan of the Awakening. His community was
significantly less settled than Winthrop’s as they dealt
with the problem of finding the right answer to the
question of exclusive church versus comprehensive
Christendom. Edwards encountered a Christendom model and
tried to move it in the direction of a regenerate church
94George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 24-26. In the section at hand,
Marsden references Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and
Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986). Also see George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 238.
74
membership. In consequence, he lost his pastorate.95
Edwards’s course had implications for secularism in both
directions. A move toward a regenerate church was
inherently secularizing because large portions of the
community would have little to do with the church and would
surely become less and less attuned to Christian
expectations about society. On the other hand, continuing
the comprehensive Christendom model kept lots of lukewarm
individuals in the church and led, historically speaking,
to stagnant churches that declined through the centuries.
The strong covenant model of the Puritan community did not
ultimately survive the tensions it created. Although the
first generation was composed of those who desperately
wanted to worship according to their beliefs and wanted to
maintain those beliefs, they ultimately could not maintain
their cohesion with a model of church intended to be
synonymous with geographic communities.
American Awakening
The Great Awakening revivals had a powerful impact on
colonial America. They were the most significant public
events of any kind during the period from about 1740 to
95George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003), 350-356 and 369-371.
75
1840.96 As was mentioned earlier, the Awakening divided
Christians into groups like New Lights, who saw
authenticity in spontaneous religious experience, and Old
Lights, who were skeptical of experience and preferred to
see established clergy lead parishioners along. The
division reinforced the sense already kindled by the
openness and freedom of the New World that the individual
was more important than anyone previously believed. The
absolute individual was replacing the absolute ruler and
the absolute church.97 Historian Mark Noll notes that what
began happening in the Awakening was greatly facilitated by
the conditions of frontier existence. The established
churches could compete with those who adapted to the
situation at hand and who preached from commitment rather
than from credentials and training.98 Historian Patricia
Bonomi saw the Great Awakening as having been critical to
the development of the urge to stage a revolution against
the mother country. For the first time, many Americans
96Mark Noll, The Old Religion in the New World: The History of
North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 96.
97H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 100.
98Noll, The Old Religion in the New World, 54
76
developed the willingness to challenge settled authority,
particularly if it failed to comprehend the awakened self.99
How the new willingness to challenge authority if one
felt he had God on his side played into the Revolution is
not the business of this dissertation, but the impact of
Awakening on the divide between church and state is. By
giving rise to a group of persons who were more intensely
seeking God and had an experience they felt was authentic
and needed to be explored, the Awakening gave force to the
notion of the regenerate church fellowship independent of
ties to the state. Awakened Christians did not want to
continue to support the old order. They wanted to
voluntarily support their new one.100
The colonial United States leaned toward established
churches, but the reality of increasing pluralism, a lack
of clergy, and the simple fact of tremendous availability
of land and freedom eventually overcame the logic of
establishment completely. More because of social realities
than by design, the United States became a nation of
disestablished churches, which also happened to become some
99Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society,
and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 161.
100The treatment of this theme nonpareil can be found in Nathan O.
Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1989).
77
of the most vigorous churches in the world, particularly in
comparison to their European counterparts. Thus, although
the new nation’s constitution explicitly ruled out the idea
of a nationally established church, the U.S. was a nation
where the churches were increasingly influential rather
than less so.
The United States is a particular focus of this
dissertation and will thus be revisited in detail in
subsequent chapters. For the purpose of this survey,
however, it is sufficient to say that the American
Revolution differed from European counterparts in that it
took on the throne of England without need of an anticlerical
campaign designed to cripple a centrally
established altar operating as a buttress for the state.101
The result is that the American approach to politics, law,
and religion has been marvelously productive of freedom,
but has also been a frequent source of controversy.

The French Revolution and the End of the Ancien Regime
What was happening in America was a new thing both for
the church and for the state. Though it was not planned,
the combination of vast spaces and lack of church
enforcement mechanisms scattered the carefully ordered
101Jose’ Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 27-29.
78
pieces of church-state union and eventually resulted in a
free-wheeling pluralism that energized churches for the
challenge rather than enervating them, which conventional
wisdom expected. The Catholic church was a player looking
for toleration rather than a dominant force, and
Protestants vied with one another for the hearts of the
people. Although there were state establishments, they
were far from secure in the dynamic religious environment
of the new lands.
Europe, on the other hand, was still Europe. Throne
and altar were still intertwined and royalty occupied the
top ranks of the church just as it did the state. To want
to change society meant to reform both the state and the
church together. France became host to the Revolution that
upended the old arrangements entirely, at least for a time.
Although the revolution failed and ended with Napoleon and
a new concordat with the Roman Catholic church, the
intellectual influence of those few years has been felt
through the last two centuries. It was as Alec Vidler
memorably wrote, “a sort of atomic bomb of which the
fallout is still at work” that initiated the fall of the
ancien regime.102
102Alec Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the
Present Day (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 11.
79
The revolution began at a time when the Catholic
church still possessed a great deal of political power. It
was said of the bishops that “they administered more
provinces than sacraments!”103 Although it was incongruous
with Christian theology, most of them were nobles of some
sort.104 The lower clergy were more humble men who often
knew more about farming than theology. The difference in
station between the two groups led to different attitudes
toward radical reform. Unsurprisingly, the lower group
favored change.105
Although Voltaire may have been careful to keep his
servants from hearing his ridicule of the church for fear
they would steal the silver in a fit of liberation, he was
not shy about spreading his views to the literate class.
Skepticism and unorthodox views were in fashion in Paris
where men like Voltaire and Rousseau were celebrities.106
Between the growth of skepticism, the failure of the church
to act with spiritual vigor equal to its political zeal,
and a humble lower clergy looking up at bishops living in
opulence, the church was not well-situated to handle a
103Ibid, 12.
104John McManners, The Oxford History of Christianity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 290.
105Vidler, 13.
106Ibid, 13.
80
revolution. Its vulnerability rapidly became evident when
the pace of events accelerated to the point of radical
change that would be deemed so even to this day.
The Revolution began in 1789 when Louis XVI convened
the States-General to help deal with a financial crisis.
The solution grew much larger than the problem to which the
assembly had been directed when it developed into a fullfledged
transferal of political power controlled by members
of the bourgeoisie. The part of the Revolution that
interests us in our current investigation is the shape of
church-state relations that resulted. In the swirl of
early revolutionary activity, it came to pass that the
national church was completely remade. Unlike the later
Russian Revolution which would aim at destroying the church
and putting no new one in its place, the French Revolution,
like Rousseau, thought a religion of the state
indispensable. Thus, the new government constructed a
Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 that equated
dioceses with civil department boundaries without the
pope’s permission, left the pope without authority
(maintaining primacy of honor) over the national church,
and made appointment of bishops a matter of civil election.
This first move already represented a potent intrusion on
the church’s usual prerogatives despite the fact that the
81
French had typically enjoyed a fair amount of independence
from Rome. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy also made
clergy employees of the secular government, which paid them
a salary. The encroachment upon the church brought about
heavy opposition from within the church and has been blamed
for making the Catholic Church a long-term enemy of
political liberalism. Battling against the opposition, the
government required an oath of clergy to support the new
measures. About half refused and were forced out of their
clerical functions. The refusers attempted to continue
their work. The pope condemned the new governing documents
and the French people suffered divided loyalties.107
Later came the Reign of Terror, when the revolutionary
government embarked upon a course of dechristianization. In
1793, the Republic unveiled a new calendar starting with
the opening of the revolution. Each tenth day rather than
seventh was a day off. Shortly thereafter the government
declared the Cathedral of Notre Dame to be a Temple of
Reason. Members of the legislature traveled to local
communities and enforced the new policy by closing
churches, forcing priests to marry, and generally engaging
in persecution of the faithful. Interestingly enough, the
107Kagan, et.al, 658.
82
most infamous of the revolutionaries, Robespierre, opposed
the dechristianization for its likely negative political
consequences.108
Robespierre became dissatisfied with the abstract
worship of reason and initiated a new civil cult more in
line with Rousseau’s earlier proposal. The Republic
established the worship of the Supreme Being which declared
in part:
1. The French people recognize the existence of the
Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.
2. They recognize that the worship worthy of the Supreme
Being is the observance of the duties of man.
3. They place in the forefront of such duties
detestations of bad faith and tyranny, punishment of
tyrants and traitors, succoring of unfortunates,
respect of weak persons, defence of the oppressed,
doing to others all the good that one can, and being
just towards everyone.109
The legislation went on to institute festivals reminding
man of the divinity of God and of human dignity with names
based on revolutionary events, benefits of nature, and
human virtues. All who had talents sufficient to
contribute to the greater beauty of the festivals received
a general call to embellish the events.110
108Ibid, 666-667.
109John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution
(New York: Macmillan, 1951), 526-527. Quoted in Kagan, 668.
110Ibid.
83
Robespierre did not last and neither did the Cult for
the Worship of the Supreme Being. The Thermidorian
reaction that ended the Reign of Terror saw the practice of
Catholicism once again permitted and a revival of genuine
Catholic piety followed. Napoleon took advantage of the
instability that followed the revolution and came to power
as a military ruler. He re-established relations with the
Roman Catholic Church whereby the two parties negotiated a
concordat declaring Catholicism the religion of a great
majority of the French people. The state paid salaries for
bishops and parish priests in exchange for the church’s
relinquishment of claims for the return of its confiscated
property. The Organic Articles of 1802 established the
supremacy of the state over the church. Bishops gave oaths
of loyalty to the nation.111
Although the French Revolution featured powerful
fireworks between church and state, the most impressive
religious consequences of the Revolution and of Napoleon’s
leadership may have been indirect. One of the primary
reasons Napoleon had so much military success was that the
revolution had given common men and women a much greater
sense of participation in the nation. Thus, when Napoleon
went to war, he could put massive numbers of fighters in
111Kagan, 679.
84
the field and could conscript more from the populace as
needed thanks to their loyalty to the nation and their
charismatic leader. Modern nationalism was becoming a
great force in the world and was beginning to show it
(often paired with ideology) could provide a potent
substitute for religion in the hearts of men and women.112

Analysis
The foregoing survey and comment on church and state
in the west covers about 18 centuries. It is impressive to
note the incredible importance western culture has placed
on working through the question of church and state, both
in terms of concrete events and answers proposed and
considered. Rome solved the problem by permitting
pluralism under a sacred canopy of common emperor worship.
Constantine led as a Christian and supported the church
with public funds, but willingly tolerated members of pagan
faiths as full citizens or something close to it. In very
short order the pattern for government in the West became
enforced religious conformity. Given the patterns of
history, it is not surprising that the newly Christian
empire so quickly succumbed to the logic of one king, one
law, and one faith. On the other hand, given the radical
112Ibid, 681.
85
nature of the Christian faith and its emphasis on mercy,
weakness, and values distinct from those of the world
perhaps disappointment is warranted.
In working through the history of church and state in
the west, we discover a set of questions that guide the
course of development. At the risk of oversimplification
those questions are: 1) What is the state? 2) What is the
church? 3) What is the proper relationship of the two?
What is the state? The question is susceptible of
many answers. In our experience and in that of our
forebears, the state is and has been the institution
responsible for the leadership of the community. It makes
and enforces laws to regulate our interactions. It levies
taxes to fund its activities. It protects the community
from other states. In the course of doing these things,
the state has a tendency to generate a moral identity.
Just as a person can be judged by his or her attitude
toward certain things and by actions, so too can a
collective institution. It can be compassionate or harsh,
generous or tightfisted, wise or foolish, democratic or
totalitarian. Through most of the course of western
history, it is fair to say that the state has been
Aristotelian and/or Christian in the sense that it was seen
86
as striving toward some kind of community excellence.113
The state (and the church with it) meant to guide persons
toward a good life (and in the case of Christians, a good
afterlife as well). The obvious drawback to that view of
the community is that it required a pretty high degree of
conformity from citizens whether they agreed with the
program or not. Thus, those who were not true believers or
were true believers in something else, ended up as either
hypocrites or martyrs. The result was a loss of human life
and the sapping of the vitality of institutions, such as
churches, which ended up watered down with everyone (the
comprehension model) instead of thriving with those who
agreed (the regeneracy model).
The idea of the state as a collective venture into the
good life fits the thinking of Augustine’s Christian
republic exercising loving constraint, Aquinas, Marsilius,
Calvin, Rousseau, the Puritans, and the French Revolution.
Although the group placed together here seems quite far
apart in many respects, it is the same in the sense that
all the participants endorsed a state leading its citizens
toward some ideal which includes religion as part of the
required program with at least partial control of the
113Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 185.
87
religion by the state. The diversity of the group
underscores how strongly people have historically believed
that religion and state must travel together under unified
control.
Over against that group we might collect another
gathering of persons with a much more limited idea of the
state. This second set sees the state as a much more
focused venture with a role that is primarily negative, in
the sense that it prevents things from happening, rather
than positively leading people toward a good life. To be
more specific, one might characterize this group as seeing
religion as very important to a community, but on a
voluntary basis, and thus not subject to regulation by an
earthly sovereign. Such a state is instrumental rather
than ideal or ultimate. It is a state designed to restrain
evil and to exercise tolerance about the things that are
not primary in its competence. In this stream, one might
place Constantine, Augustine’s non-Christian state, Luther,
John Locke, Roger Williams, and probably the American
founding generation. For this second group, however,
religion remains critical to making citizens and is the
glue of society in the sense that it underscores
commitments and makes everyone accountable to a heavenly
judge who witnesses all things. Some might question
88
Williams’s inclusion in this list, but his belief that
religion was unnecessary for a properly functioning society
was undercut by his certainty that everyone believed in a
deity who would punish in the next life.
The other major question is that of the church. What
is the church? Is it a mass movement destined to always
cast a challenging vision toward the prevailing social
ethos? Is it a retreat from the world where saints gather
to live the Christian life away from the irredeemable rest
of the world that has no eternity in its future? Is it the
basis of Christ’s kingdom with a charge to grow and
eventually bring all of life into harmony with God? Is it
a partner to the state in building the kingdom of Christ,
or shall it overwhelm the state’s worldliness? We can find
among our survey Christians who thought very differently
about the role of the church. Their views were surely
influenced somewhat by the position they and other
believers found themselves in relative to history. For
example, the early church was essentially born as an
embattled minority. When an emperor became a Christian,
surely it seemed like a long-awaited deliverance from
persecution and a potential boon to the world because the
message could spread unhindered. And imagine the situation
of the medieval church. For centuries after the fall of
89
the empire the church had been the center of civilization
every bit as much or more than various kingdoms. Its
claims were universal rather than centered on the
territorial rights of a bloodline or conquest. It might
have been strange if it did not see itself as the true
source of government over all peoples. In the Age of
Gutenberg, it is not surprising that the Reformation
occurred and that pluralism took hold as the interpretation
of the Bible became the activity of many rather than few.
That pluralism eventually overwhelmed the Reformation’s
confessional states just as surely as it had overcome the
Catholic Church’s leadership of Christendom. Even today
the many different models of the church exist
simultaneously. The one difference is the loss of
adherents to the view that the church should hold a
position of primacy over the state and that the state
actually derives its power from the church. The advocates
of real theocracy among Christians are very few. The live
debate between Christians in the present has more to do
with the degree to which the Christian faith should inform
politics and how explicitly Christians should appeal to
their faith in political debate and policy formation. It
seems to be the consensus of Christians in this millennium
that the church is a voice calling the state to
90
righteousness and justice rather than to be a state or a
supervisor of the state itself.
The question of where the state gets its power has
also been contentious. Certainly, kings and popes sparred
over whether the state had an independent authorization
from God, or if the church somehow conferred legitimacy
upon the state. The Reformation effectively settled that
controversy in favor of the state having an independent
license from God to do its work. Exactly what that work
entailed was not agreed upon, but that the state was
accountable to God rather than the church was the consensus
of the Protestants and eventually became the position of
the Catholic Church as well. Deciding that the state was
authorized to do its work by God did not end the matter,
though. Then, there was the question of how God empowered
a state. Was it simply that whoever managed to mount a
throne had God’s blessing or that power somehow flowed from
the people and that they, as the purported beneficiaries
and servants of government, were also its earthly source
rather than mere succession of blood. Western liberalism
eventually triumphed, bringing democracy and the will of
the people as the determiners of who would wield power and
how. Some parts of the church agreed with that course and
others did not. In Europe, the established churches mostly
91
sided with the crown and the traditional structure of
society. America was a different story. The American
churches, particularly those that were growing and vital,
were a key part of the movement toward democratization.
The American story is the subject of the next chapter. The
Christian faith could be seen as giving support to either
the European or American position.114 The New Testament is
clear in its claims that God places rulers on the throne
for our good and at his pleasure. When bad rulers come,
their power may be interpreted as a judgment on a given
community. At the same time, the growing emphasis on the
Bible text, increasing access to it, and the Protestant
project of inculcating literacy in order to make Bible
reading possible led very logically to democracy. A person
standing on scripture could very effectively oppose a
public leader who was, in the Christian point of view,
simply another fallen human being in need of a savior.
The Secularism Solution
The brief review and analysis of the history of church
and state in the West prior to the modern period
demonstrates a recurring intellectual, emotional, and
114Robert P. Kraynak has written in support of what I’m calling the
European proposition. See Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and
Modern Democracy: God and Politics in a Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
92
spiritual need to reconcile the claims of faith,
government, and pluralistic communities. That ongoing
process of reconciliation has always been difficult and has
at times been productive of extraordinary conflict.
Politically speaking, the spring of secularism was the
wars of religion. As was mentioned earlier, the aftermath
of the Reformation was disappointment, at least among
certain classes. Instead of a newer, better church, there
emerged several churches, different brands of confessional
states, and decades of wars both internal and external. The
crisis of religious war sparked a search for solutions.
Hobbes advocated dictatorial control by a sovereign to whom
the people would willingly submit for safety. Locke
proposed toleration based on government sticking to its
more pragmatic functions. Rousseau pushed for a new
deistic civil religion that would act as a kind of common
denominator for citizens. Hugo Grotius sought a basis for
law outside of confessional religion in natural law that
all men could observe. All of these efforts centered on
finding a new common ground for people that extended more
broadly than confessional religious bases for society.
In this vein of common ground the deism of the
eighteenth century became popular as the “rational”
alternative to Christian “superstition.” Deists held to
93
the traditional idea that a society had to have a religion
as the foundation of good citizenship and moral
accountability. Although there were varieties of deism,
the typical beliefs encompassed a God who guarantees
justice via the application of punishments and rewards in
the afterlife. It is a distilled version of the Christian
faith that avoids questions of miracles, complicated
doctrines like the trinity, and ritual disputes such as
whether a person should be baptized via immersion or
sprinkling and at what age. Although we do not discuss
deism very often outside of historical surveys the
propositions are highly recognizable as representing the
worldview of a great many people today. Proponents of
deism such as Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, and Voltaire viewed the philosophy as a more
scientific outlook on religion and as a more peaceful one
as well. It was deemed more rational because it opted to
accept the witness of “nature” over that of scripture.
Instead of accepting the Bible at face value, deists looked
at the creation and deduced there must be a creator. They
studied their hearts and found a desire for justice and
reasoned the creator must be more scrupulously just than
they were. Deists imagined their creed more peaceful
because of its avoidance of disputes over Christian
94
doctrines that caused potent divisions within the church.
Of course, polemical deists such as Tom Paine attacked
Christian revelation and/or the churches directly in order
to make their case for natural religion and thus engendered
hostility and tumult in religious affairs in the same
manner as the deism of the French Revolution did.115
Deism represents a very important step in the process
toward divorcing public affairs from any consideration of
God for three reasons. First, the deistic God is more
removed from human affairs. He has created the world and
expects us to make our way in it. This is a significant
difference from the God of the Bible who invites a certain
human dependence. Second, deism was at its height during
the period surrounding the founding of the American
Republic, which was the first to be conceived in the
western world without a nationally established church.
Third, deism depended heavily upon the design argument for
God’s existence. It is no mere coincidence that the
enthusiasm for deism as rational religion virtually
disappeared in the post-Darwin nineteenth century when the
design argument was reeling. The death of deism
corresponded with the rise of true secularism, which is its
115Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1895).
95
heir. The movement toward deism in the United States was
parallel to secularism in its aims. It proposed to be a
more peaceful approach to the theo-political problem
endemic to the western world and a more rational one as
well.
Just as deism sought to drop specificity of religious
beliefs in favor of a simpler and purportedly more natural
conception of God and his interaction with the world, true
secularism sought/seeks to drop God, in theory making the
public order accessible to all persons, believer and
unbeliever. Everything else, including general morality,
would be held constant or would yield to something better
founded upon scientific understandings. The success, or
lack thereof, of that project is the subject of the last
half of this dissertation. But first, we have to drop by
the United States of America. Because the United States
formed its new republic during the period of deism’s
ascendancy and at the height of the Enlightenment, the
claim is often made that the United States is founded upon
a legal secularism and that public secularism is, in
essence, America being true to its own best nature. The
course of secularism in America is the subject of the next
chapter.
96
CHAPTER THREE
The American Model, the American Controversy
Because the United States Constitution is a document
written mostly in broad generalities in contrast to the
specificity of an annotated code, the original intent of
the founders is a frequent focus of argument. In the
period since the United States Supreme Court incorporatedfairly simple. One group, which ten
the religion clauses of the First Amendment against the
states and subsequently began making significant changes to
earlier practice, there has been constant battle over the
question of what state of affairs the founders were
attempting to achieve and what they believed personally
about the Christian faith.
The contours of the debate at the popular level are