God’s Politics

Of the many books on church and state published in recent years, most approach the subject from the political side of things. This one, by Darryl Hart, the prolific historian of religion in America, is different. It begins with a question from the religious side: “What does Christianity require of its adherents politically?” This question, he says, invites another: What kind of faith is Christianity–that is, what is its “religious meaning”?

Emphasizing the teaching of Jesus that “My Kingdom is not of this world,” Hart, a conservative Protestant and former professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in California, writes that Christianity is “essentially a spiritual and eternal faith, one occupied with a world to come rather than the passing and temporal affairs of this world.” It “has very little to say about politics or the ordering of society.” Indeed, it is “apolitical” in the sense that “its message and means, while not indifferent to civil society, transcend all political rivalries.”

Hart might have titled his book A Spiritual Faith or An Eternal Faith, but neither would be as provocative as A Secular Faith. Christians who think “secular” means godless or antireligious may think that “a secular faith” must mean a faith without God, a Christianity without Christ. But for Hart, a secular faith means no such thing.

He observes that “secular” derives from the Latin seclorum, which means “age” or “generation . . . a definite period of time and especially its provisional or temporal quality.” Historic Christianity, he says, has always understood the history between the first and second advents of Christ to be an in-between time.

That’s one sense–and it should not be controversial–in which Hart understands Christianity as a secular faith. The other sense has to do with how Christianity regards and relates to the state and society.

“While Israel fused the political and religious by making Judaism the law of the land,” Hart writes, “Christianity separated what the Old Testament bound together.” In time Christianity, via Protestantism, stimulated questions about “whether church authority extended to all the spheres of life implied by the pattern of Christendom or the Holy Roman Empire.” The result of that questioning was “to reduce the church’s sway over European society”–which reduction is commonly known as “secularization.” For Hart, Christianity is a secular faith because of its contribution to that development.

Hart should not be read here to deny an essential Christian teaching: That Christ has authority over all things, including those denominated as secular. His point is that Christ is Lord but rules in different ways over the world and the church. As Michael Horton, Hart’s former Westminster colleague, has written, God “rules the world through providence and common grace, while he rules the church through Word, sacrament, and covenantal nurture.”

Hart, now director of academic projects and faculty development at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, addresses a basic objection to his position–that culture (including politics) inevitably proceeds from cult, meaning religion. Hart’s response is, first, that Christianity “was planted and grew in cultural soils that were already well tilled and flourishing,” and, second and more important, that neither Jesus nor the apostles taught that Christianity was to be the basis for Christian culture or society. Hart makes the compelling point that Christianity “was a religion without a specific land, city, or place” and that “its teaching transcended the cult-culture relationship as a faith for people from any ethnic background.”

Hart’s understanding of Christianity as a secular faith is not wrong, in the ways he defines it. Nor is he wrong to say that Christianity supports “the separation of church and state,” as opposed to the union of, or an alliance between, church and state. As Hart points out, Christ famously told his disciples to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, distinguishing between the two jurisdictions of church and state.

Significantly, the distinction made by Christ was not found in Christianity’s precursor or competitor religions, a point Bernard Lewis has made in contrasting Islam to Christianity (and whose work Hart cites). The distinction limits the church, for it may not run the state, and it limits the state, for it may not run the church–nor, for that matter, claim to be God. The distinction makes possible civil society, even as it points to a political doctrine of religious liberty, since the state may not intervene in the rendering of what is God’s to God. Hart says Christianity does not yield any social or political norms, but the distinction between church and state is surely a norm of enormous political importance.

A Secular Faith is not simply an explication of what Christianity teaches and requires of its adherents politically. Indeed, “the point of this book,” writes Hart, “is to try to complicate contemporary understandings of the relationship between Christian ity and liberal democracy in the United States.”

Thus, Hart demonstrates the difficulties in regarding America as “a city on a hill,” at least as Christ used that phrase in the Sermon on the Mount. Most commentators have concluded that Christ understood such a city to be the church. The metaphor has special resonance in America because John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used it in his sermon on board the Arbella “to identify the city of which Christ spoke with the society that the English would establish in the New World.” Hart rightly observes that the city on a hill that the Puritans hoped to build, and which later Christians believed America to be, was “an impossibility.” The Puritans were guilty of confusing “the earthly and heavenly cities,” says Hart, who, it should be apparent, has been deeply influenced by Augustine’s City of God.

Hart also asks for precision in the usage of two terms, “religious liberty” and “Christian liberty.” He explains that the latter is not political but spiritual, meaning freedom from the guilt of sin. Yet “some Christians,” he says, “feel that if they may not express their faith in public openly”–by, say, locating a crèche in front of a town hall–“they lack religious liberty.” Hart’s point is that whatever liberty such Christians think they may lack, they cannot be talking about Christian liberty.

Hart also effectively challenges the ostensible need for public declarations that the nation is “under God.” Hart notes that when Christ was asked to whom it is lawful to pay taxes, and spoke of the need to render to Caesar and also to God, he was holding a coin with Ceasar’s head on it, not one that said “in God we trust.” Implicitly, Christ was making the point that a government may have legitimacy even if it does not acknowledge that it is “under God.” Hart concludes that “if Christianity is a religion less concerned with statecraft than with soulcraft, Christian attempts to place the United States ‘under God’ are unnecessary and may actually be a departure from the original teachings of Christ.”

A Secular Faith has some loose ends. The little that Christianity does say about politics or the ordering of society, notes Hart, concerns “certain notions about men and women being created in the image of God or about the sinfulness of human nature and about the legitimacy of personal property.” They “have implications for politics,” he says. Yet he doesn’t spell them out.

Also, while he makes clear that individuals (and not their churches) may be involved in politics, he fails to clarify whether they may consider any “notions” taken from their faith–such as the aforementioned ones about creation or sin or personal property–in their political pursuits. Nor does Hart adequately discuss the nature of government: “The work of government,” he writes, “lacks any overtly religious or spiritual purpose.” That is word-for-word true, but the adjective “overtly” means that government might still have such a purpose. And when construed as an institution of common grace, in a world God rules, it may be said to have a purpose–although, as Hart argues, it is a purpose not to be confused with the redemptive one that belongs to the church.

On matters of politics, Hart is not always the surest guide. In his view there is so much religion in the public square nowadays, and such widespread acceptance of its presence, that (as he puts it) “people without belief . . . may be the real oddity.” Yet people without belief aren’t so odd, if by that he means few in number. In fact, the number of people without belief, or who are agnostics or atheists, has been increasing rapidly since the late 1960s. And most of them are affiliated with the Democratic party. Any account of religion and politics in the past 40 years must consider the presence and influence of this large and growing segment of the population.

Still, this book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion of church and state. Darryl Hart is right to be wary of faith-based politics because of the ways it can trivialize faith. And he is right to be concerned about believers who misconstrue their faith when they step into the public square. Hart’s achievement is to recover for our time the Augustinian perspective in which history is the story of two cities during the seclorum of the church–the City of Man and the City of God. Hart rightly warns against conflating the two, reminding those Christians in America who read his book that “the church is to be a Christian as opposed to an American institution.”

Those with ears to hear, let them hear clearly.

Terry Eastland is publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.