The “Being of God as the Guard of the World”
“The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism.” -Edmund Burke, Speech on A Bill for the Relief of the Protestant Dissenters, March 17, 1773
In my previous column I examined ways in which the third and fourth of the Ten Commandments have been enforced in American law in the past. I also wrote about how it is more difficult to enforce the first commandment against having no other gods due to the way in which that command is primarily a matter of the heart and not necessarily of outward actions.
There are ways, however, in which having a false god (or no god at all) could become a matter of public concern. It is generally, in fact, only when a religious matter becomes a public matter that older theologians argue the state should intervene. For example, one might be an atheist and basically keep this to himself. Few would even know about such a thing, and I think few even among previous generations of Christian political thinkers would insist that such a man should be punished by law.
But when someone begins to publish and circulate such opinions, or to proselytize others in these views, older theologians argued that such actions have moved from the realm of personal sin into the realm of public order and law. John Calvin would often write about this distinction. For example, in the Institutes (4.20.3), he stated: “I approve of a civil administration that aims to prevent the true religion which is contained in God’s law from being openly and with public sacrilege violated and defiled with impunity.” The word “public” is key to understanding his thought: he did not expect agents of the state to perform inquisitions on individuals as to their personal beliefs if they kept these to themselves, but he at the same time believed that it was imperative for the state to prevent egregious public attacks on the church and on Christian teaching.
Today, matters couldn’t be any further away from Calvin’s view. A stance of “public atheism” seems self-evident to many people in America. Public atheism need not entail the state actively promoting atheist teaching. It is simply the idea that the state must be wholly neutral with regard to the truth or falsity of all gods and religions, including the true God. This means that no laws or governmental actions can be carried out that are even supportive of Christianity or the church. Governing officials may not, in fact, personally be atheists, but they are required to act like atheists in their public roles.
Older Protestant theologians would have been horrified by such a stance. To give just one example, Stephen Charnock (1628–80)—most well-known for his work The Attributes of God—argues in the introductory chapter of that work (all quotes are from Volume 1, pp. 115–7): “If atheism be folly, it is then pernicious to the world and to the atheist himself. Wisdom is the band of human societies, the glory of man. Folly is the disturber of families, cities, nations, the disgrace of human nature.”
For previous generations of Christian thinkers, atheism could never be understood merely as a matter of the soul. It inevitably had societal, even governmental, consequences. Atheism, Charnock continued, “would root out the foundations of government. It demolishes all order in nations. The being of God is the guard of the world. The sense of a God is the foundation of civil order; without this there is no tie upon the consciences of men.” Indeed, a “city of atheists would be a heap of confusion.” This being the case, Charnock insisted, atheism “is a thing impossible to be tolerated by any prince, without laying an ax to the root of government.” The reason this is the case is that “all good laws are founded upon the dictates of conscience and reason, upon common sentiments in human nature, which spring from a sense of God—so that if the foundation be demolished the whole superstructure must tumble down.”
Thus, “as where there is a faint sense of God,” Charnock wrote, “the heart is more strongly inclined to wickedness, so where there is no sense of God, the bars are removed, the floodgates set open for all wickedness to rush in upon mankind.”
In the end, then, “if there be no God, no respect is due to him; all the religion in the world is a trifle and an error, and thus the pillars of all human society and that which has made commonwealths to flourish are blown away.” In short, a nation of atheists would be a nation of men answerable to nothing but their own depraved desires. Such a nation would quickly plunge itself into anarchy, tyranny, and eventual destruction.
More recently, the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) made similar points in reference to the taking of oaths associated with political office and court cases. Due to the influence of forms of anabaptist thinking, many evangelicals assume that Jesus prohibited all oaths in his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:33–37). Oaths, however, are thoroughly biblical (Exod 22:8, 10, 11; Num 5:19; Rom 1:9; 2 Cor 1:23; Heb 6:17). Jesus was teaching against a kind of Pharisaical casuistry about oaths, which led one to use complicated formulas to evade the actual force of the oath being taken. Especially in everyday speech, Jesus taught his disciples that Christians should simply keep their word.
For Bavinck, it was not the case that oaths are merely allowable. He argued (rightly, I would say) that in certain circumstances, oaths are necessary. “Like war,” Bavinck wrote, “the oath presupposes sin, the lie, and human untrustworthiness. Betrayal on the one hand and suspicion on the other are father and mother of the oath” (all quotes are from Reformed Ethics, Volume 2, pp. 205–11). In other words, oaths are sometimes necessary because of the fallen condition of man. This is all the more the case when we are dealing with the civil magistrate: “the state and its system of justice,” Bavinck wrote, “need a safeguard that people will speak the truth.” Many will say that oaths do not guarantee truthful speech, because a man can simply lie. Bavinck was not naïve: “The oath does not deter scoundrels,” he maintained, “but it certainly restrains many ordinary people and those in between.” It is simply the case that, in general, people take a pledge to God seriously. There is ample proof of the benefit of such oaths in maintaining basic truthfulness and law-abidingness in societies that take seriously the implications of such oaths (and punish violations with sufficient severity).
Bavinck insisted that oaths with regard to political office, judicial deliberations, and the like were indispensable to a just and law-abiding nation. And like Charnock centuries before him, Bavinck recognized the catastrophic societal consequences of mandated public atheism. A “simple, moral, civil oath,” for example, “without calling on God is an absurdity” because “apart from God there is no longer truth, justice, or goodness. At that point, good and evil, justice and injustice, falsehood and truth are human products with no power above humanity itself.” In the end, “the oath is the cement of the state, or justice; it is the cornerstone of the edifice of the state.”
This understanding of the oath went hand-in-hand with Bavinck’s rejection of public atheism:
The defining characteristic of the modern state is sought in the conviction that it is not a creation ordinance instituted by God but arose purely from human nature and grew just like a plant. . . . In this way, people attain a godless state, as the highest manifestation and expression of the unity of the nation.
Several of the most pressing issues facing Christians in America today show us just how important it is to understand that there cannot be a formally godless or atheistic state. One in the news at the moment is Colorado’s HB 25-1312, which would, among other things, mandate that
when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control.
And subsequently: “A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.” In other words, in parental custody fights, a parent insisting on reality (that a child cannot change genders) would lose his or her child to a parent who affirms trans-delusions. Such a stance is the logical conclusion of pursuing a formally atheistic state: everyone does what is right in his own eyes.
In the end, however, as Bavinck put it, since all functions of the state “come from God . . . the state cannot be godless, for it then murders itself, attacks its own might and right.” But that need not be the case: if “it derives its authority from God, then it is also accountable to God, dependent on him, bound to him, and thus not godless.”
Imagine the difference such an understanding would make today.
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