A Call for Modest While We Await Our Verdict
A common argument one hears from triumphalist American Christians looking across the Atlantic at the Christian churches of the Old World is that state churches (religious establishment) were the cause, or one of the causes, of European religious decline. Why? Unlike America, European Christianity had no rivals that forced them to compete for converts. In an argument that has a bit of Madison, Tocqueville, and low church undertones, it was disestablished churches of America where vibrant faith was enlivened and passed on because they could not rely on the state or the culture to transmit the faith. Competition kept Americans on their toes and the flame of faith burning brightly.
Arguments against civic religion run along the same tracks. Civic religion produces an anemic counterfeit faith; a faith fitted to the mold of society rather than God. And when God is made anything less than the transcendent and redeeming God of the bible, we end up creating an idol fit for our own narrow parochial concerns.
There are different versions of this argument, but both conservatives and liberals in the America will mouth some version of this as a proof that yoking religion to government dilutes or perverts religion. Some version of this claim is standard for both a conservative evangelical as well as a progressive Episcopalian priest. They may not agree on much else, but on the dangers of established churches these two are in lock step. Establishment, the believe, secularized Europe and would expedite current religious decline in America. Market competition is what keeps faith energetic and sincere. Alternative causality for the phenomena in question is rarely entertained by this reasoning.
Our European co-religionists come in for a beating because they are the example of what we should not do. They yoke their churches to political power and to the specificities of culture. They align their particular church with national history. They water down true faith by making citizenship in the nation coequal with citizenship with the church. All of this suffocates true vibrant faith and hollows out the radical and transformative power of the gospel. We Americans still have a vibrant church and that is large measure due to our disestablished churches that retain independence from the cultural captivity of European Christianity.
I must admit this narrative makes me bristle. I bristle not only because I think its historically wrong but presents the current historically contingent political arrangement between church and state (disestablishment) as somehow the most biblically and morally correct arrangement. All alternatives are per se unbiblical and immoral. This way of thinking is referred to as teleological thinking: everything in the past has been working towards this set of institutional configurations. Rather than being a contingent set or arrangements that work or have worked, disestablishment becomes an eternal truth manifested in our time, like a revelation of God. Even if we don’t say it openly, we treat these configurations as a kind of holy inviolable structure.
Our recent history is rife with teleological thinking. Progressives tend to deploy this sort of thinking more often because they view history as a continual shedding of tradition and oppression for liberation and freedom. We are moving from darkness to light. Conservatives tend to have an appreciation for the wisdom of the past and believe history does not move simply from darkness to light. There is no clear movement because history is ambiguous. Every increase in power brings both good and evil, creation and destruction. The 20th century brought technological innovation and material abundance on a scale that was unimaginable. It also brought death, destruction, and despair as we have never witnessed.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of its Eastern European satellites, the West lived under the illusion that history had come to an end and that we, the west, had won. I visited Ukraine as a teenager and the sense of optimism was palpable. The world is flat, wrote Tom Friedman, and democracy and capitalism were the final form that societies were moving towards (Francis Fukuyama). That sense of the inevitable triumph of freedom and capitalism fueled incredibly irresponsible and destructive behavior by America. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fueled, in part, by this sort of millenarian impulse. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but the beliefs that the United States could radically reengineer the social, political, and religious DNA of countries that had existed for thousands of years was the height of hubris. And yet, large majorities of the American government and public bought into this project.
When it comes to church establishments, we have fallen under the same spell. We baptize our particular, liberal democratic version of church-state relations and believe it is superior to the medieval and early modern European model because we currently have higher percentage of church attendance and religion plays a more prominent role in American life. But if we zoom out on this argument, we begin to see how it actually explains very little.
For instance, the European model of political rulers partnering with churches stems back to the later Roman Empire when Constantine made Christianity a legal religion and then the favored religion. Under Theodosius the enforcement of Christianity became an imperial policy. Augustine of Hippo, for instance, in the early fifth century, led the charge against the dominant church in North Africa – the Donatists. His good friend and military tribune, Marcellinus, worked with Augustine to crush the Donatists by force of law and imperial coercion. And through all of this, the Christianity continued to spread throughout the empire.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the spread of Christianity throughout Europe happened slowly, moving from West to East, but always in some form of partnership between the regional ruler and the church, often monastic missionaries. The baptism of a king, prince, or chieftain and the ruling elite bound to him provided the impetus for the conversion of a people. The missionaries had to do the hard work of catechizing and converting, but rulers played a vital role in supporting their efforts through enacting political and social reforms and playing the role of benefactor for the church.
Some will argue that this wasn’t Christianity, but some fake cultural form of Christianity. To some extent this is true. Pagan religion was mixed with Christianity and what we now call Roman Catholicism lent itself more readily to this syncretism. Oftentimes rulers used Christianity for political purposes and cared very little about But, nonetheless, the process of Christianization was real if imperfect, so that by the late Middle Ages Europe could honestly say it was a Christian empire, the res publica Christiana.
If the thesis that Christianity only flourishes and grows when it is formally separated from governmental structures is true, then the history of the spread of Christianity in Europe is a giant rebuttal. The disestablishmentarians will have to come up with a better answer to explain the data. Christianity spread because of the help and support of political rulers, not in spite of it. Magisterial Protestants did not seek to overturn this order, but to reform it. And it was also the vigorous support of Christian monarchs and princes during the Reformation that played a crucial role in supporting the fledgling movement and the efforts of its leaders.
What American Christians should be asking is how Christianity in Europe existed for nearly two millennia rather than thumping our chests and proclaiming state churches an abject failure. Christianity has existed in Europe for close to 2000 years and in some form of establishment or explicit partnership with political rulers. American Christianity, in its current disestablished form, has existed for less than 250 years, and in some states much less. The Christianity that was transplanted to America–predominately English Protestantism– came from establishments. Until the early nineteenth century, states maintained explicit establishments, and vestiges of the same remained for some time thereafter. In other words, America was not exactly a disestablishmentarian blank slate. America’s early colonial establishments can be described as more liberal and, well, English than other continental models, but a true and thorough disestablishment is, in the scope of history, a very new experiment.
The verdict on disestablished Christianity is not in, though there is plenty to suggest that all is not well. Perhaps we will have cause for boasting when we hit 1000 years, but until then, a little modesty is in order.
Image: Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V on horseback under a canopy, a 1580 portrait by Jacopo Ligozzi. Wikimedia Commons.
