Separating Church and State?

William Cavanaugh is associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. With close associations with a new theological movement toward radical orthodoxy,Footnote ⁴ his work displays an unusual combination of the conservative and the radical. In bold strokes, he seeks to champion cultural primacy of religion over that of an artificial and incorrigible state in the modern international system. One might suggest that this channels Pope Benedict XVI's assertion of the primacy of Western reason through Noam Chomsky's equation of pirates and emperors.Footnote ⁵ Cavanaugh has an expanding opus of work in peer-reviewed articles and full-length books, including his strongly constructed critique of Chilean authoritarianism Torture and Eucharist and his broad treatise on political theory Theopolitical Imagination. Building on the work of Alasdair McIntyre, Cavanaugh stands as a colleague in the virtue-based political theology of Stanley Hauerwas. However, as a Roman Catholic who would have a natural bent toward the scholastic convergence of theology and polity, he has created a new style of theorizing that combines the liberationist's skepticism of authority with a faith in the institutions of the universal church. Furthermore, he has combined this perspective with the neomedieval analysis of modern globalization identified by Hedley Bull, in which “modern states … share their loyalties, on the one hand with regional and world authorities, and on the other hand with sub-state or sub-national authorities, to such an extent that the concept of sovereignty ceased to be applicable.”Footnote ⁶ Cavanaugh thereby presents a critique of our modern understanding of the state as the repository of social goods. He sees the state as a primary modern rival to the church as a place of reverence and legitimacy, one that is, however, artificial and contrived. In consideration of Jesus' words to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, it would suggest to us that Caesar has little to demand of Christians beyond the mere payment of a few denarii.

Cavanaugh begins with a common assertion of studies of politics and nationalism: that the state as we see it today is a modern construct, dating, in fact, to the late medieval period in which the principle of royal sovereignty was gradually extended to the boundaries of the territorial entities that we now identify as the core of the state system. The state as an administrative apparatus arose, according to Cavanaugh, as a means of consolidating the power of a small royal elite, and not to promote a common good, as is often portrayed in modern philosophizing over the authority of the state. It overrode more time-honored local and traditional forms of political organization, a process that “took place to serve the particular interests of dominant groups, and not as the expansion of common space.”Footnote ⁷

In contradiction to the traditional view of the so-called wars of religion of the 1500s and early 1600s as the ultimate outcome of dueling transnational religious forces, Cavanaugh posits that they were “in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State.”Footnote ⁸ In other words, far from being the curse of religious fundamentalism, the wars of the 1500s and 1600s introduced us to the martial flaws of modern statecraft. The creation of the modern state system ushered in the era of modern warfare, but secularized it, so that the state might arise as the primary repository of social power. It created a justification for the use of war as a means of extending authority and thereby consolidated the state's mediation of just war doctrine as against that of prior moral and cultural communities.

In becoming the primary fulcrum of political order in the post-Westphalian age, the state increasingly took upon itself an all-embracing totality that had never obtained previously. Civil society as a cultural form independent of the authority of the state effectively disappeared as the state penetrated all aspects of society, regulating, streamlining, legitimating, and otherwise controlling it. The state perpetuated the myth of an independent civil society even though it effectively bounded and controlled civil society so that it might claim sovereignty over a social and territorial entity coterminous with the nation. Thus Cavanaugh's critique of civil society is as strong as his critique of the state—a view of civil society as benign and foundational to the state is dismissed as naïve and counterintuitive.Footnote ⁹

Furthermore, the nation-state as a territorial and cultural device arrived with the emergence of the phenomenon of nationalism in the early modern age. Cavanaugh points to the absence of a national common good in the work of Hobbes and Locke, arguing that, in fact, the state arose in the 1700s and 1800s absent a societal base, civil or otherwise. Law here is based on will, order, and ownership, not upon a shared notion of the good.Footnote ¹⁰ Calling upon the well-developed tradition of scholars of nationalism from Hans Kohn to Benedict Anderson, Cavanaugh taps into the notion that nationalism is an invention of the industrializing and modernizing period. The state was, thereafter, a colonizer of the nationalist impulse, not the responsive institutional expression of common beliefs and opinions. It differed markedly from prior political organization in that it did not “grow organically out of the self-government of social groups,” but instead consolidated its control over preexisting social and cultural institutions.Footnote ¹¹

As a result, Cavanaugh views the state as an organization that has (improperly) absorbed and defined civil society as a part of its own ambit. Since the modern state is a collection of unalike interests and serves as the arena for mediation among such groups, it would be overly indulgent to assume it is the repository of the values of all. “The sheer size of the nation-state precludes genuine rational deliberation; deliberation is carried on by a political elite of lawyers, lobbyists, and other professionals. For the same reason, the unitive community that the idea of the nation offers is an illusion.”Footnote ¹² It is a strong illusion, however—one that competes directly with religion for legitimacy.

While Cavanaugh clearly takes aim at the state, it is not the modern welfare state or the expansion of state bureaucracy that vexes him (in distinction to many modern religious neoconservative, and even Catholic, critics of the state such as Richard John Neuhaus or Michael Novak). From the standpoint of political theory, the primary issue for Cavanaugh is the Weberian notion of the state as the “human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of armed force.”Footnote ¹³ Cavanaugh takes aim at the legitimacy of the state as a purveyor of violence in the name of order, in particular targeting state use of torture and military force. He contends that “torture is a kind of perverted liturgy” used by the state to eliminate alternative social bodies.Footnote ¹⁴ The expansion of concern over state use of torture in recent years seems only likely to reinforce the extent to which the state is singularly defined in the Weberian sense by its use of violence. This critique of the state as the bearer of the sword has situated Cavanaugh well as an apologist for the Roman Catholic cynicism toward American actions in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, as well as the arbitrary use of torture and imprisonment in the campaign against radicals.Footnote ¹⁵

Calling upon the nationalistic imagery of civil religion in America, where “the nation competes with the church on the same religious grounds,”Footnote ¹⁶ Cavanaugh challenges the state's claim to secular legitimacy as against the sacred as a false dichotomy. To divest the sacred of the secular and to invest the secular state with a status significant enough to justify murder in war is, in fact, impossible.

The state inevitably creates a comprador civil society that it uses to maintain its imperial, even totalitarian role.

According to Cavanaugh, the Christian approach would be to deny the state the transcendent political role it has arrogated to itself. Cavanaugh views the ideal of the separation of church and state as an artifact of the creation of a notionally secular state in the years following the Treaty of Westphalia. Prior to the creation of the modern state system, according to Cavanaugh, “the civil and ecclesiastical powers were different departments of the same body, with the ecclesiastical hierarchy of course at the head.”Footnote ¹⁸ The definition of religion as a domain apart from the state is, therefore, a modern contrivance: “The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State.”Footnote ¹⁹ If Cavanaugh's critique of the state is correct, the argument for the separation of church and state has wrongly extended Jesus' words to the modern state. Caesar's demands went no further than the denarius, but the modern state requires much more of us: loyalty, legitimacy, commitment, sacrifice, social engineering, surrender to a set of rules and demands, and (perhaps most egregiously according to Cavanaugh) service in war. Instead, the proper community for these efforts would be the sacramental community, for Christians the church community represented in the Eucharist.

The Nation-State as Historical Artifact

Having considered Cavanaugh's theoretical positions, let us first consider his contentions against the state. Cavanaugh brings to the topic of the state an impressive grasp of European history, political theory, and theological reflection. His marriage of the three is largely unparalleled. In particular, his points about the artificiality of the state and its roots in the close of the feudal system are well made. He is certainly correct to point out that the wars of religion of early modern Europe were only euphemistically driven by religion. While the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations and their intellectual predecessors such as Hus and Savonarola brought revolutionary social change to Europe, this only predated the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, each of which has a great deal of blood to commend its own role in international warfare. A survey of the history of anticlericalism will demonstrate that irreligion is at least as lethal as religion, a point that Cavanaugh returns to again and again.Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, the very secular city-states of Italy had already long developed a states system that was very effective as a template for power relations among the squabbling kings and princelets of Europe in the years leading up to the conflagrations of the 1500s and 1600s. When the Thirty Years' War began in 1618, only the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor could press the claim that it was a war of religion. Within a very few years, the defection of France to the side of the northern European Protestant kings was sufficient to reveal the paucity of confessional solidarity as a motivating force for war.

I am, therefore, sympathetic to the way in which Cavanaugh presents the origins of the state. However, his contention that the concept of the state is new and that local entities prevailed before the nation-state is stretched. This argument is based on the assumption that the nation-state as a territorial and sovereign entity did not exist prior to the period of state consolidation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To a point this is factually correct—it is true that modern bureaucratic and secular theory of the state dates to this time. But the ancient empires were nation-states in that they created an embryonic notion of the nation, complete with national gods associated with their success. The first conflict in recorded history pitted the nation-states of Lagash and Umma over a water boundary known as Gu-Edin. Assyrian palace inscriptions celebrated the exploits of their military for foreign audiences to consolidate their rule. Egyptians defined themselves quite clearly against their foes among the Asiatics, Hyksos, and others. Jesus' own statement “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's” pointed to the existence of an authority apart from locally conceived communities.

What is more, territoriality in the ancient world was conceived differently only insofar as sovereignty could not be consolidated in the modern sense of defended borders. Often, however, it reflected the very geographic notion of the state that we know today. Thucydides' Greece contended over quite clearly defined spheres of influence, and the division of Greece among city-states was similar to our modern understanding of the state boundaries. Babylonians delineated internal boundaries using standing-stones known as kudurru. Roman power in Britain extended only as far as Hadrian's Wall. Likewise, the Great Wall of China illustrates that the Chinese conceived of frontiers of their own national control. In general, then, the state is not so modern a notion after all. While the medieval conception of the state was very much tied into the feudal system, underpinning it was the imperial concept as an ideal from the past. The European Empire of the day did not simply derive its authority from that of the universal church, as Cavanaugh contends. It was not simply the holy empire but the Holy Roman Empire, implying origins in an early version of the nation-state.

One might also suggest that Cavanaugh's strength as a historian is his weakness as a theorist. Most scholars agree with Cavanaugh, to one degree or another, that the notion of the nation-state has evolved and that the consolidation of the state system arose in the midst of the conflagrations of the seventeenth century. Kenneth Waltz, for example, argued that the rise of nationalism imbued ancient loyalties with a new “loyalty to the state that overrides their loyalty to almost any other group.” He went on to presage Cavanaugh by suggesting that this loyalty replaced that of the church at this time in history.Footnote ²¹ It is also clear that the state arose in many ways to justify the very secular power of royal factions, republican revolutions, and military dictatorships rather than to seek the common good.

But just because the state arose as an artificial concept does not mean that it is just as artificial today. The historic origins of the state are of relevance to history, but they are not necessarily binding upon the contemporary state. Nor do the sins of the father condemn all states to behave as did the states of the Enlightenment. True, the state arose as a means of consolidating the authority of monarchs and to an extent the very idea of the nation-state was a myth back in the seventeenth century. But myths in themselves may have a reality in that they are accepted as prevailing justifications for norms of behavior. Likewise over time, an institution such as the state may evolve to exceed its original mandate. Modern constructivists do not argue that international regimes are necessarily established for the common good, but this does not rule out the possibility that they may be used for the common good.

Conceptions of the state evolve over time and relate as much to the way the state behaves today as they do to its putative history. Realist and Weberian notions of the state have in large part given way to more nuanced definitions. Liberal theorists would suggest to us that there are significant differences between liberal-democratic and coercive states.Footnote ²² Even Alexander Wendt, one of the principal defenders of the Weberian notion of the state in international relations today, argues that nation-states have developed different “cultures of anarchy” over the years. Wendt suggests that the “Hobbesian” cultures of the past are being replaced by the “Lockean” and “Kantian” cultures of the present.Footnote ²³ His point is that structures that constrain and control the nature of the state are changing, and changing in progressive ways: “In fact, it seems obvious that today's international system represents considerable progress over that of 500 or even 1500 A.D.; progress there has been.”Footnote ²⁴ Liberal and alternative theorists typically picture the state as a secondary or derivative force in world politics, a Gulliver held down by the ropes of thousands of Lilliputians.Footnote ²⁵ Recent liberal assessments of international society have stressed the extent to which the rise of democratic norms, interdependence, and intergovernmental institutions has tamed the martial instincts of the state.Footnote ²⁶ To the extent that the state reflects an array of contending forces and voices in civil society, it resists categorization as a modern analogue of the secular nationalist replacements for the religions of the past. It is instead a much more complex creature, reflecting both anti- and prosocial behavior.

As to the coercive apparatus of the state, the modern liberal-democratic state has proven less and less likely to demand the participation of its citizens in warfare or to engage in torture against its people, notwithstanding recent concerns over the conduct of the “war on terror,” to which we shall return. While government in the United States has been increasingly perceived as a coercive state in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the concomitant expansion of domestic and international military presence, this is by no means a universal phenomenon. Given the budgetary limitations increasingly placed upon the United States, going into the future, and the tendency among its allies to resist foreign adventurism, there might even be reason to believe it to be a temporary development. Be that as it may, in places such as Europe, Latin America, and Canada, the military impulse of the state has dramatically waned since its high point in the earlier portions of the last century such that praetorian rulers like Hugo Chavez are a distinct minority. In most of the developed world, the state has largely become a mediator of contending social forces, many of which use its institutions as means of making themselves heard. Modern developed states have, therefore, become more like a social contract than those of the past, and arguably this process of evolution may continue as states seek new and innovative ways to engage their citizens.

The evolution of the Western tradition is, therefore, ignored by Cavanaugh in an effort to demonstrate the militant secularism demonstrated by its founders. Yet it is important as well to note that the Western tradition has much to credit the Christian tradition out of which it evolved. Philosophers of the state did not arise simply to grant unconditional authority to the state but to find ways in which the state might serve as a means of Christian charity for those with whom we disagree. Theorists such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and even Hegel arose out of a Christian civilization and spoke to a Christian society even as they sought to create a secular sphere in which those Christians might interact.Footnote ²⁷ It is not until the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century that philosophers such as Marx and Nietzsche began to theorize out of avowedly secular and even pagan principles. Cavanaugh himself is dialoguing with a society that shares much of his Catholic heritage.

These philosophers emerging from the Christian tradition of the state did not create the state as a rival for the legitimacy of the masses. In a sense, they were serving the independence and authority of the church every bit as much as they supported the secular state. Detaching the church from the state (even as an intermediate) was a way to create the church as a separate and unbounded entity. For example, in England, the collusion of church and state led to the creation of a new state church that, in turn, engaged in the persecution of Roman Catholic and nonconformist sects. As a result, the Reformation created a state designed to protect the people from clerical authority combined with that of the monarchy. Ultimately the state's ambitions were tamed to get out of the business of religious persecution entirely, as in the case of American disestablishmentarianism, and only later the modern secular state. Surely, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers were seeking to create space for the ultimate authority of challengers to the state in places such as Britain where the state had improperly overstepped its bounds. In other words, the state rising out of the traditions of the European Reformation and later Enlightenment, pace Cavanaugh, was in effect created to avoid the very crisis of legitimacy that Cavanaugh decries. If it has failed to achieve these ends, it is likely the fault of application rather than design.

Violence, the State, and the Expanding Role of the State

I have stated previously that Cavanaugh's primary complaint against the state is that it has arrogated to itself power over life and death, that modern society has taken too seriously the Weberian proposition that it boasts the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. For Cavanaugh the state is flawed because it is a martial state. But the modern liberal-democratic state is increasingly defined by its very reticence to use armed force. Cavanaugh's interest in the state arose in Chile, where the Pinochet regime used torture and violence as a matter of course. But Chile has shed bureaucratic authoritarianism and embraced a more democratic form today. What is more, South American states have not gone to war in more than a century, with the one exception of Argentina's war over the Falkland Islands. Notwithstanding the American incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan, postcolonial wars of this sort have generally been on the wane. The past decade has been replete with explorations of the democratic peace, and while the jury may remain unconvinced, liberal-democratic capitalist states seem very unlikely once again to pick up the swords of war among themselves.

Admittedly, war has not ceased, and some would argue that the past decade has been as warlike as any in the history of humankind, in spite of the unprecedented growth of liberal-democratic principles. But warfare has been confined largely to areas of the nondemocratic periphery. What is more, since 1945 warfare has increasingly pitted substate elements in contestation over the direction of the state rather than states against one another in a pattern Holsti calls “people's wars.”Footnote ²⁸ The concerted response of Western states to September 11th and the ill-begotten 2003 invasion of Iraq are not particularly representative of the modern pattern of warfare. Yet even among NATO allies in Afghanistan, developed nations have displayed their reticence to engage in armed conflict, many of them bound by caveats that keep them out of combat roles, with publics at home fretting that the price of young soldiers' lives is too high a price to pay. The development of fearsome technologies of warfare have certainly increased the lethality of war, but at the same time states are often taken to be less likely to use a nuclear device than would nonstate elements with a radical agenda.

It may seem utopian to suggest, but if scholars such as Francis Fukuyama or Bruce Russett and John Oneal are correct to suggest that there are zones of peace in international politics that will grow as democracy spreads, the state may someday get out of the business of warfare entirely.Footnote ²⁹ Americans have recently come to question the likelihood of a peaceful realm emerging from the end of the Cold War, but modern conflicts have continued to pit the liberal-democratic states individually and together in an increasingly familiar pattern. Outside the United States, the primary preoccupations of many Western industrialized states have moved beyond war and peace toward more vexing issues of social management. Government intervention in favor of social rights has been the primary point of polarization for religious activists in North American and other societies, yet Cavanaugh does not generally address the limitations of the state in regulating or controlling these questions. This is so in spite of the fact that transnational organizations are increasingly affected by these concerns, as demonstrated in debates over the wording of the European Union constitution and direction of expansion or in periodic controversies over family planning initiatives, such as at the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development. A recent issue of The Economist explored the expanded role of government in providing a “nanny state” for its citizens, encouraging their use of green technologies, access to exercise, provision of child care, and discouraging social vices and unhealthy behaviors.Footnote ³⁰ One would assume that such soft paternalism would also run afoul of Cavanaugh's limitations on the state. But consigning these issues to the management of global civil society would also run the risk of compromising with these authorities. Cavanaugh provides us with no general model for temporal management of these affairs other than his vaunted Church.

Even if the state remains first and foremost the purveyor of war, does Cavanaugh's challenge to the legitimacy of the state extend beyond this moral fault? Does a state that engages in warfare either abroad or against its own citizens thereby give up the legitimate right to administer social programs, to build roads, to encourage citizen activism, to print and circulate currency, or any number of other services and projects? In Western societies, the state has shed much of its coercive apparatus and become a service provider. If the state is perverted by its aspirations to rival the faith, is it an institution to be trusted at all? Again, it is unclear where Cavanaugh's assessment will lead us.

The State and Civil Society

I have considered Cavanaugh's critique of the state, but what of his consideration of civil society? Cavanaugh has learned well some of the lessons taught to political scientists over the past few decades. These include that the state is not homogenous nor is it the simple repository of the collective authority of a nation, that the state should not be understood apart from the interests in which it is embedded, and that the state is one of many prominent actors in world politics.Footnote ³¹ He sounds a proper cautionary note about the extent to which the state has permeated much of modern civil society. While he does not always use the terms of political analysis, what Cavanaugh is arguing is that the state has risen to permeate, colonize, and dominate the society in which it is embedded. His critique of the state comes at a time when the future of the state is a matter of significant debate. On one side are political economists and others pronouncing the retreat or the end of the state.Footnote ³² On another side are many suggesting that the state has only found new ways to reassert its authority.Footnote ³³

Yet even if we accept Cavanaugh's argument that the state is an artificial construct of modernity, his contention that the “public realm outside the State is, however, largely a fiction, as is therefore the ideal of a noncoercive public marketplace of ideas” seems to be an overstatement.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, the work of several prominent social scientists has reinforced the extent to which religion and politics reflect the noncoercive public marketplace of ideas that Cavanaugh denies.Footnote ³⁵ The choices that citizens make for identification with religious and nationalist movements seem to contradict the premise of Cavanaugh's all-consuming state. Many modern political scientists see the erosion of state power as one of the most important developments of the post–Cold War era. In many areas of the world, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, or Haiti, state failure has given way to anarchy. Elsewhere structural adjustment, neoliberalism, and budget crunches have limited the capacity of the state to achieve many of its aims. In the midst of the retreat of state capacity, states may take new forms and use non-governmental agencies and civil society actors to reinforce their authority, functioning as hegemonic blocs (to use a Gramscian turn of phrase).

On the other hand, civil society actors may increasingly present an insurmountable obstacle to the state and may operate increasingly in ways that ignore the authority of any one given state. In the words of Robert Cox, “Civil society is itself a field of power relations; and forces in civil society relate, in support or opposition, to powers in state and market.”Footnote ³⁶ Civil society seen in this way is not solely the penetrated space described by Cavanaugh but instead a field over which state and social forces may do battle. Cavanaugh's use of the term civil society seems closer to the notion of civil religion in the sense of the cultural trappings and underpinnings of the state in society. On the other hand, the typical use of the term in political science today tends instead to refer to the various plural groupings that contend with the state. Often they do so as veritable equals to the state, far from Cavanaugh's “intermediate associations.” If, as Cavanaugh states, the church must “promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish,”Footnote ³⁷ how would this be done outside the assertion of its role within civil society, as understood by analysts such as Cox? By using this artificially narrow notion of civil society, such that civil society cannot even be conceived outside its relationship to the state, Cavanaugh unfortunately seems to miss the power of his church in civil society fearing that it might be compromised by simple semantics.

In the field of civil society, it is not just the state with which the church must contend—there is a constellation of actors that vie for the loyalties of citizens. If the state is indeed “a source of an alternative soteriology to that of the church,”Footnote ³⁸ it is certainly not the only one. Obviously, other religious movements present a challenge to the logic of the nation-state: sometimes these movements even overtly boast the language of alternative soteriology.Footnote ³⁹ Islamist movements boast that “Islam is the solution”; others foster ideals of an Islamic economic system; an Algerian group is even known as the Islamic Salvation Front (front Islamique du salut). Elsewhere, organized crime syndicates, sometimes coupled with resistance movements such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), have arrogated to themselves the role of ultimate arbiter of life and death. In spaces such as these, the church has often viewed the state as (at worst) the lesser of two evils as an interlocutor or protector. For example, in my own study of the church in Egypt, I have found that Christians have largely internalized a distrust of the state in keeping with Cavanaugh's critique, but they also tend to place greater trust in the state than they do in some of the radical elements of civil society. None of this detracts from the centrality of the Coptic Orthodox Church to the regulation of social affairs within the country. In this case, the church has not necessarily surrendered to the logic of the state so much as it has enjoyed the protection of the state when it turns a blind eye.

But Cavanaugh is generally interested in the role of the Christian church in the Western (and notionally Christian) traditions of political discourse. He bemoans the gradual surrender of the power of traditional authorities in European civilization, accepting for themselves the role of “intermediate associations” defined by their relationship to the state. For example, he cites the experience of the university: the level of transcendent independence enjoyed by the university in the medieval period came to be undermined by its subordination to the nation-state during the Enlightenment.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, civil society institutions, and even the church itself, have come to accept the geographic and social boundaries of the state as definitive.Footnote ⁴¹

In the developed world, the surrender of the church (and of other actors) to the logic of the nation-state is uneven in its application. Two general models are posited for representation of organized interests: the corporatist model and the pluralist model. In the pluralist model, groups are self-constituted and are granted the autonomy to represent interests as citizens see fit. In the corporatist model, the state initiates the process of interest aggregation through gathering and classifying interests, creating peak organizations through which various societal interests are filtered. The corporatist model is most common in European states whereas the pluralist model is the more typically North American approach, although almost all states allow some mixture of pluralist and corporatist models.Footnote ⁴² The application of these models to religion suggests under pluralism that religion shapes interests, which then are represented to the state through domestic civil society; under corporatism, interests are defined by preexisting religious groups recognized by the state.

Clearly, Cavanaugh's fear that the state has colonized society comes closer to the corporatist approach. In Scandinavian states, labor unions, cultural societies, and indeed churches have been granted special relationship to the state for consideration in discussions surrounding their interests. The state recognizes, funds, and helps to legitimize and empower such groups. The corporatist model has had an enormous impact in Germany over the years. During the 1930s, the Nazis famously sought to bring the Protestant and Catholic Churches into a patriotic union under the Nazi banner, while a small but heroic Confessing Church movement defied the union. Corporatism has not always been so egregiously used to penetrate civil society. But it does create a mechanism by which the state may seek to manage religious practice, among other forms of social organization. Today, Germany maintains the role of the state in directly taxing citizens so as to fund state-recognized churches. A movement critical of the state role has arisen in the Free Church. The permeation of the church under state auspices in these cases may well constitute a mistaken surrender of the church.

In pluralist systems, by contrast, the church remains a free institution and is less likely to be colonized by the state. In Canada and the United States, churches survive on the private donations of churchgoers, and though the state may regulate the zoning of church locations and the registration of weddings, or require proper accounting procedures of the church, the level of financial and regulatory control is far less significant. Instances in which the state follows a more corporatist philosophy in these states have typically been controversial in the extreme, as in the case of American funding of faith-based social services. What Cavanaugh envisions appears to be pluralism in its extreme—perhaps a pluralism that only applies to the church. However, no matter how he envisions the representation of interests within or among states, it seems rather unnecessary to rule out the very useful place of organized religious discourse in a civil society, whether corporatist or pluralist in its foundations.

Theopolitical Concerns: the Political Significance of Church

Beyond his assessment of state and society, a third consideration is Cavanaugh's particular take on political theology. It is rather unclear where Cavanaugh's critique of the state should lead believers. His conclusions are generally euphemistic in that he requests Christians to rediscover the ways in which the temporal and spiritual authority of God may be promoted. In one place, he suggests that Christians accept more deeply the discipline of the church, a discipline that “will more often resemble martyrdom than military victory.”Footnote ⁴³ But religious institutions of this sort cannot be promoted as mere interests, given that he negates the church's role as intermediary. Instead, Cavanaugh chooses to emphasize the exalted nature of the church as God's provision for world order. He disavows modern notions of citizenship as a sort of idolatry, for “citizenship has displaced discipleship as the church's public key.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But given the existence of the modern state as an organizing principle, even a flawed one, this perspective limits the ability of the church to provide ministry and service to the present political order.

Here Cavanaugh, like Hauerwas, overstates the ability of the church as a socially and ethically constructed polity. Even given a commitment to the Christian faith, his exalted understanding of the church does not anticipate the venality of temporal authorities within the church or the potential for sin among its members. Faced with criticisms of the church's role in torture during the Inquisition, Cavanaugh admits that it is “one of the many sins of the Church for which Catholics should do penance,” but he is rather dismissive of the possibility that these errors may be repeated.Footnote ⁴⁵ A church that accepts the discipline of external accountability need not be one that sacrifices its claim to universal truth and the authority of the almighty.

No matter one's perspective on the veracity of the Christian faith, Cavanaugh's faith in the church as the body of Christ does not fully acknowledge the diversity of spiritual and existential experiences of its members. There is here potential for monism. The church affirms its unity through a creed, but the insistence that this is a unitive fiction stronger than that of the modern nation-state stretches the traditional notion of the church as Christ's body, potentially justifying acts that seek to impose conformity. As one theologian has noted, “Cavanaugh's account seems to suggest a partial misconstrual of our possession of shared humanity as implying unity rather than community. Is our created and redeemed destiny not better depicted as a relational communion among individually distinct persons, rather than as participatory union?”Footnote ⁴⁶ If this is true, the church is ultimately the sum total of the actions of individuals that lead and participate in it, either consistent or inconsistent with the Christian worldview.

Cavanaugh, instead, reposes in the church all the authority of God to discipline the believer. Individuals do not find their authority in relationship to God but in relationship to the church; in one place, Cavanaugh argues that “religious symbols are … embedded in bodily practices of power and discipline whose regulation belong to the authoritative structure of the Church, or at least did until modern times.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The individual's role is subsumed within the power of a collective unit, the church, rather than in one's own convictions or relationship to the Almighty. Christian theology holds that the church is the “body of Christ,” but does this imply a homogenization of interests, or the necessary construction of a divine polity emerging from it?

Commonality of purpose in a mystical sense does not imply, nor should it, that all Christians are unified in their personalities, their style of worship, or even their preferences for getting things done: hence the existence of an array of local churches and denominations. From the Christian standpoint, such apparent disunity results from both the fallen nature of human beings and from the mere existence of God-given diversity among Christians. Similar critiques of organized and centralized religion may be distinguished in other religious traditions: disputes over leadership in Islam between Sunni and Shi'i and over transcendence between fundamentalists and Sufis; the absence of centralized authority or dogma in Hinduism or Buddhism; diverse schools and sects of Judaism. Within each tradition, one can justify a certain suspicion of attempts to create a temporal order based on the unity of the faith. Beyond that, it goes without saying that Cavanaugh's perspective does not really provide Christians with a platform for interacting with those who do not hold to their faith.

In this sense, Cavanaugh does not identify the artificiality of national churches that consistently engage in rivalries with upstart denominations supposed to be of foreign origin. Arguments for the universality of the church are less often invitations to ecumenical understanding and more often attempts to solidify orthodoxy contrary to the freedom of the Christian faith or to create apologetics for the unchallenged authority of one group or another. For example, established churches in Russia, the Middle East, and even parts of Europe have jealously guarded their prerogatives against modern reformist movements, sects, and cults, perceiving them, rightly or wrongly, as challenges to their inherited authority. The unity of the church may well be a proper doctrine of the Christian faith, but this need not translate into an unremitting need to homogenize or institutionally unify Christians under a temporal banner. Indeed, history is replete with examples in which this attempt to cement religious unity itself became a source of political tensions and violent sectarianism.

Here we arrive at an important point about Cavanaugh's ecclesiology that, in turn, ties into his critique of civil society. If the state was not formed for the common good, neither was the church, by its own admission. Humanity's chief purpose, according to the Westminster catechism, is to “glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” Roman Catholic doctrine gives the church a more central role as the City of God on Earth, but even so, the aim is spiritual beneficence rather than temporal. The primary reference to Jesus' use of the term church is in his response to Peter's declaration at Caesarea Philippi that “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). This referred to a spiritual gathering of disciples committed to the teachings of Jesus, not a set of institutional responses to present problems. By the same token, the church is not a political institution, though by all means its teachings will have direct political import. “My kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus himself stated under Pilate's questioning, “if my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting” (John 18:36).

The church was to become the standing witness of Jesus' spiritual kingdom in the world. The fact that this had political and institutional implications was evident in the perceived challenge to existing authorities, Pilate included. It would provide alternative principles for leadership, reverse relationships of enmity, and create new conceptions of mercy, grace, and justice. As such, it devised new patterns for political thinking, which have challenged and will challenge the nature of the modern nation-state. But it did not create an alternative temporal order. Attempts to do so have been woefully inadequate, not because of the failures of the church as a spiritual entity but because the institutional church is by definition something more than that spiritual church to which the scriptures refer.

Of course, Cavanaugh's exalted notion of the church does not follow from this Protestant tradition, but rather from an assumption of the church in some way as a continuation of the theocratic polity of the Jewish Old Testament. In one place, he argues that the use of the word ekklesia in ancient Greek for the church of the New Testament indicates its identification with the assembly of all Israel in the Old. “In calling itself an ekklesia, the church was identifying itself as fully public, refusing the available language for private associations (koinon or collegium).”Footnote ⁴⁸ The point Cavanaugh is making here is that the church is not a mediating influence between state and society, that it is properly an alternative locus of authority and tradition with a firmer grounding than the state itself. Insofar as it describes the spiritual gathering of the church universal, this is persuasive. It suggests that the Christian needs to filter the ideals of the state through a mind transformed by the power of Christ. But the ekklesia is not, nor should it be, conflated with the temporal institutions of the church, many of which have proven as tragically artificial and unfocused on the common good as the modern nation-state itself. One must remember that the wheat grows up with the tares.

This vision of the church as a continuation of the temporal community of Israel runs into the danger of creating a justification for theocratic rule not via the spiritual authority of the church universal but through its institutional and incompletely sanctified auspices. It is interesting to note that Cavanaugh disavows such theocracy, stating that the church is not a “polis,” nor is “the call for the Church to be ‘public’ … a call for the church to take up the sword once again.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By comparing the ekklesia of the New Testament Christians to that of the Old Testament, Cavanaugh does not seem to imply that the church is the representative of the nation. It is a public institution, certainly, but not constitutive of a polity as a whole—and hence, once again, may be a functioning part of civil society.

There is an element to which Cavanaugh is simply providing an apologetic for the continued supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church as a transnational religious order, even if it is a significantly reformed and chastened authority. His argument that the state is an artificial contrivance of the modern age dovetails conveniently with a contention that the separation of church and state was a mistake of the Reformation.

There seems to me a sort of circular reasoning here. Nation-states were formed to control the venal power of the church. These nation-states became artificial and venal contrivances themselves, and the church must come to the rescue. Is it not possible that the problem is institutionalized and unchecked power rather than the state per se?