Dear Friends,
Tomorrow marks the 250th birthday of a remarkable and wildly successful experiment in civil government: the declaration on July 4th, 1776 that the British colonies of North America were seeking to form a government independent of the British crown. Thus followed a war, then a “union,” of sorts, between the colonies under the Articles of Confederation, and then ultimately a full union of the states with a representative Federal government under a written constitution.
Sometimes we do not fully appreciate how radical was this experiment. To be sure, it was not radical in the way the subsequent French Revolution was radical; that convulsion existed to utterly destroy the past, burn the “old world” to the ground and to create, as though ex nihilo, a whole new world based on autonomous Enlightenment reason. That was radical, truly revolutionary in every respect—and it was a political and humanitarian disaster. The American experiment was quite different. It sought not to invent new rights, but to reassert the rights they already believed they had, and to ground them in a higher and more secure authority. All men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights by their Creator. Rights are pre-political, not dependent on the shifting winds of political arrangements. This was not a rejection of the past, but an advancement on the past. We would retain our long-recognized pre-political rights—“life, liberty, property”—but not at the “by your leave” of a king. In this new experiment the State would be humbled and marginalized.
And that is the truly radical and revolutionary idea embedded in the American experiment. America represents the first realized, systematic attempt in history to constitutionally prevent the deification of political power. Put another way, it is the first viable civic polity to “de-deify” the State. The State is not God. Whereas before the State sought to be all-encompassing and all-authoritative—to “providentially” micro-manage the body politic toward some beneficent end, usually the enrichment of the few by the many, the ruling class by the ruled (Aristotle thought this was just “natural law”), here the State is limited in scope and shackled in power. Rights and liberties are taken out from the prerogative of kings (who were, remember, kings by divine right) and placed squarely in the prerogative of our Creator and granted directly, unmediated, unto all. The responsibility of the civil authorities is to “secure these rights,” not to grant them. There is in the American experiment, almost for the first time, the conceptualizing of a “space” between God and the State, the possibility of divergence between the will of the ruler and the will of God. They are no longer assumed to be one and the same.
It is true that the institutions of Church and State, Altar and Throne, had in the past been distinguished, particularly in the wake of St. Augustine’s City of God. But throughout the Medieval era Emperor and Pope were essentially wrestling over who would have supremacy over the entire domain of human life and society. Each wanted to be the supreme voice of God on earth; they were fighting over the same territory. Neither contemplated or at least fully appreciated that perhaps this was not to be their role. America essentially chastened both Church and State.
As for this perennial deification of the State, the history of the past century alone, with its mass delusions of communism, fascism, and national socialism ought to make it obvious that the temptation is ever-present to conflate or merge together civil powers with divine powers. In all of those arrangements, the State is conceived as totalitarian (“all encompassing”) and the individual is simply one cog in a collective wheel. But one could trace this back much further. From the Roman Imperial cult to Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon all the way back to the Tower of Babel itself, bodies politic have organized themselves in idolatrous fashion, fancying their kings or princes or Caesars or politburos or “Führers” as nothing less than gods walking on earth. This is precisely what German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (who inspired legions of would-be autocrats, including Karl Marx) said: “Es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Staat ist.” “The State is the march of God in the world.”
But the American experiment grounded the legitimacy of political power in the (admittedly complicated) consent of the governed rather than (the much simpler) divine mandate. By institutional design political power was restrained and diffused so as to avoid a concentration of power in any single individual or institution. Political rights were grounded in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” rather than the “say-so” of a ruler or magistrate; that is to say, they are transcendent.
There were, of course, historical precedents for many of these notions. The idea that there is a divine law above earthly law was developed and defended by Puritan Samuel Rutherford in his 1644 book, Lex Rex, drawing on an older Continental tradition of political resistance. Consent of the governed had been planted as far back as the Magna Carta in 1215, and was further developed by Reformed reflection on the concept of “covenant.” We have the Dutch Reformation to thank for decentralized government and religious toleration, the results of their revolt against hierarchical Spanish Catholic rule. These were all fruits of the Protestant Reformation—better, these were new seeds sown by the Reformation that at last found their full flower in the American Revolution. The Reformation’s insistence that the individual’s relationship to God is not mediated exclusively through the sacramental hierarchy of the Church eventually involved a corollary: neither is the citizen’s relationship to God mediated by a monarch. He is not “the great Prince,” or the “nation’s god.” The Reformation did not simply bring about theological or ecclesiastical reform; it eventually brought civil reform, a reordering of the place and priorities of both institutions: Church and State.
What resulted from this de-deifying of the State? Put simply, the emancipation of divine image-bearers in every facet of social, communal, and civic life. Emancipation not from nature or from God’s moral law, but emancipation from illegitimate interference from the coercive power of the State. Mutually reinforcing ideas of commitment to individual equality before the law, representative government, private property rights, along with wide freedoms of economic exchange, speech, religion, and association opened up a civic “space” wherein newly unleashed human potential and dynamism brought about prosperity and improvement to the quality of life heretofore never imagined by the human race. That is quite a claim, but it is in fact uncontroversial. It is a simple fact that the world has never known a more powerful and prosperous nation than the United States of America.
America was the Land of Liberty, a free people. This freedom manifested itself both horizontally and vertically. Hierarchical, aristocratic societies had the tendency to “silo” or freeze people into their proper “stations” in life. Now, gone were the days when one was destined to marry among one’s own social class or to pursue the exact same profession as one’s father and grandfather and his father before him. One was free to pursue lateral movement throughout society. Put in economic terms, human capital—the talents and gifts and strengths of individual human beings—were now free to flow and to move to their most advantageous and prosperous use. And there was vertical mobility; “rags to riches” became a real and distinct possibility. No longer were people doomed to intergenerational, grinding poverty. It is as though the gears of social dynamism, lateral and vertical, forever gummed up or rusted over by aristocratic expectations and/or collective State tyranny, were now broken free.
The empires of old were built on hierarchical social stratification and were supported, like a pyramid scheme (the Egyptians even made it their brand logo!), on the backs of the lower classes. They were essentially slave societies. They lacked the internal economic dynamism to sustain their nations, so ever more conquest and tribute and taxes were the only alternative. And they usually crumbled from within; consumption without production will do that. Bricks without straw, indeed (Exodus 5). But America? A quarter of a millennium into its experiment, polarized and sclerotic and dysfunctional as it seems, a nation comprising a mere 4.34% of the global population represents 26% percent of global gross domestic product. A full quarter of the world’s wealth. This is not because America is more clever than the ancient Egyptians at extracting wealth from other people; it is because America produces wealth unlike any other nation in world history. And while there are many complex factors involved in a nation’s economic health, the fact that Americans are not ruled by the descendants of the sun god seems a significant one.
A revolution, indeed. The ramifications of this de-deified State are difficult to fully trace out. Americans suddenly had a unique ownership and agency. And not just economically. No longer is the betterment of society, whether by education or philanthropy or arts or what have you simply a matter of waiting for some local lord or baron or duke to act, or, worse, for a government bureaucrat to convene a committee to come up with proposals. Americans threw themselves into social interaction and cooperation. “Association”—one of the rights famously protected by the First Amendment—became a national pastime. Alexis deTocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association” (Vol 2., II.V). In fact, deTocqueville marveled at Americans and their “societies.”
The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.
This is the genius of America; this is its “soul,” the engine that drives the body politic: a free and virtuous people not hindered in its pursuits by a deified State—a government that acknowledges that it is not a stand-in for God’s providential ordering of all things social, cultural, or economic, nor a stand-in for the Church in matters of moral formation and discipline. A government restrained in scope and power respects the space for divine image bearers to flourish according to their gifts and abilities; and, more than that, space for people to band together in associations and to form institutions with great cultural power and reach.
Nevertheless, the temptation to deify the State, to conflate or merge together civil powers with divine powers, is perennial—so much so that we find the thorny problem addressed in a classic biblical text. Jesus famously says, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Christians have long battled a terrible distortion of Jesus’s words. Namely, the idea that Jesus is granting to Caesar—civil powers—a kind of autonomy from the will and authority of God. This has been, and is, what secularists wish Jesus to have meant. Leave religion out of it! They find here not just a separation between the church and the state, a description of differing “spheres” or levels of authority, but a separation of the civil realm from God, religion, and morality altogether. Secularists find in these words permission to treat the civil order as a matter of pure Deism: God is kicked upstairs and out of sight, and does not concern himself with the affairs of men.
It is necessary to insist that this is a great distortion of Jesus’ words. He is, after all, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. The Christian proclamation is that he is the Second Adam and true God-Man seated at the right hand of the Father, and as such is the absolute and ultimate authority before which every knee of every lesser authority must bow (Phil.2:10). His authority extends to every square inch of all creation, and that includes civil realms. Even King David, “God’s King” par excellence, recognized this: “The LORD said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’” (Ps.110). David knew himself as a subject of his own offspring.
But secularism is not the only possible distortion of Jesus’ words. While separating civil authority from the kingdom of God is a recipe for idolatrous, messianic politics of the sort you find in secular progressivism, it is equally idolatrous to conflate, blur, or merge together civil authority with the kingdom of God, to lose all sight of any distinction or divergence between the two. Jesus very clearly does distinguish the things of Caesar and the things “of God.” In so doing he denies that Caesar has god-like authority, god-like possessions, and god-like prerogatives. Caesar’s power and domain is not coextensive with God’s kingdom. As he said to Pilate, “You would have no authority over me if it had not been given you from above” (John 19:11).
Both distortions of Jesus’s words produce the same practical result. If one separates Caesar from God then Caesar simply becomes a god unto himself. If one identifies the “things of” Caesar with the “things of” God then … Caesar simply becomes god unto himself. This political Deism (separation) and political Pantheism (identification) are two sides of the same coin. They are both forms of messianic politics—that is, they invest in civil powers divine prerogatives and soteric (salvific) significance. They attribute to Caesar what belongs to God. It is messianic because the civil ruler always—always—promises “deliverance,” whether it is deliverance from poverty or famine or war or persecution or economic competition or immigrants or Jews or—equally common in our own day—from pronouns you didn’t invent, and even from the ordinances of nature and creation itself like your biological sex. There is always a utopian paradise just around the corner that will liberate one from whatever bondage one feels. Eric Voegelin famously termed this “immanentizing the eschaton,” the promise to bring the new heavens and the new earth into the here-and-now. This is a vision of the State or civil powers as an agent of redemptive history.
I have mentioned ancient empires and I have mentioned the Gnostic “mass ideological movements” of the 20th century (as Voegelin termed them). But any survey of messianic politics will be incomplete unless it includes the 21st century. One might well remember the days of 2008 when Christians everywhere mocked Presidential candidate Barack Obama for his messianic campaign promises. He said that, if elected, he would literally make the oceans recede. He promised that, if elected, the lame would literally walk again (by way of uninhibited stem cell research). He would bend the “arc of history toward justice” and “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Many stood aghast at the spectacle of his followers almost literally worshiping him—people fainting, a major cable news anchor reporting “a thrill shooting up my leg” at his banal stump speeches, campaign spokespeople declaring him a “light-worker,” a semi-divine Gnostic emissary from another world. It was something to behold.
And a vast number of people, having one moment been appalled at the spectacle of messianic politics, almost instantly converted to their own form of it when the promises of deliverance—and the promiser—were to their taste. I scarcely need say whereof I speak. Rank political idolatry is running rampant in America, and it will do no good to pretend otherwise. The old maxim no longer holds: “Don’t get attached to politicians; they will disappoint you.” When one’s favored politician cannot fail or disappoint, but can only be failed and be disappointed (by others, unforeseen circumstances, etc.), one is invested in something more like a sun god than a mere man.
Messianic politics, the deification of the State, viewing the State as “God’s Vicar” on earth, is the very thing America resisted and by so doing liberated society to pursue its God-given individual and communal purposes with dynamism and energy and fruitfulness the likes of which the world had never seen. If America is going to survive and thrive for another 250 years she must recover her love of political freedom and the moral virtue and wherewithal to fruitfully exercise it.
Originally Published: https://brianmattson.substack.com/p/sun-gods-and-the-soul-of-america