Who Builds the Wall?

A Liberal Framework's Establishment of Baptists as the Religion of the USA and a Common Good Framework's Remedy

Logic confines the number of possibilities of how one conceives the relationship between the Church Catholic and the State:

(1) The Church and State each bear authority over hermetically sealed, independent realms of the Temporal and the Eternal.

(2) The State bears authority over the Temporal and the Eternal Realm of the Church.

(3) The Church bears authority over the Temporal realm of the State and its own Eternal Realm.

(4) The Temporal Realm of the States has independency but needs ordered to the Eternal Realm of the Church.

(Church-like Fellowships will automatically fall into sphere #2. As Brad Gregory shows in his important work, The Unintended Reformation argues, Protestantism gave rise to secularism through its resignation of all authority to the state. The modern state may grant “religious freedom,” but whether in the United States or the imploded Soviet Union, the state always defines the conditions and limitations of such freedoms.)

I use the Augustinian categories of “the temporal” and “the eternal realms.” One can speak as well about the “Common Good” and “the Good” or even “the nature” and “Supernatural.” They all work as rough equivalents.

The Law of Contradiction means that one inevitably must accept one arrangement or the other. Liberalism generates position #1 or position #2. These two positions ultimately, it seems to me, arrive at the same position. Both collapse the eternal into the temporal, and grant the state authority over the church — what Voegelin would call “gnosticism.” This will sociologically lead to an unstable secularism that has no justification other than a nihilism of a temporal realm. When one collapses the Eternal into the temporal, the secular logics of the temporal order will win out. The temporal order has nothing beyond itself to justify itself.

Protestantism ultimately hands authority to the temporal ruler.

The Common Good tradition thinks differently. I’d like to explore this difference in order to establish the theoretical superiority of a Common Good framework to a liberal to understand our situation in North Atlantic countries, especially within the United States.

I. We can trace the origins of the liberal modern nation-state to the Peace of Augsburg: “Cuius regio, eius religio (”whose realm, his religion”).

Deep shifts of political theology took place in North Atlantic societies in the early modern period. Perhaps one sees it first when King Ferdinand appointed the Head of the Office of the Inquisition — thus placing the church under the authority of state. Henry VIII denied the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome outside his diocese of Rome; Henry placed himself as the Head of the Church.

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) placed the ruler as the determiner of the theological confessions and liturgy of their people. The decree required those who refused to comply with the “religion” of the ruler to migrate to a land of their chosen confession. The agreement subordinated the church to the will of the ruler.

In older days people would name such a position as “Erastian.” We can define Erastian from the blog Monergism: “Erastianism is a theological and political doctrine that advocates for the supremacy of the state over the appointment of clergy, governance of church affairs, and church in ecclesiastical matters, particularly regarding this discipline. This view asserts that civil authorities should have ultimate control over religious matters, including the power to determine church practices and enforce church discipline” (emphasis from source). In an Erastian, the church almost functions as a department of state.

I would like to suggest that Erastianism represents the realia of life in the contemporary United States.

You can call it “Charitable Choice”

Or “Catholic Charities” under Joe Biden.

In 2006 Notre Dame law professor, M. Cathleeen Kaveny, described legal tendencies of churches that have accommodated to an Erastian political arrangement:

In the context of their dealings with the secular world, Erastians tend to emphasize creation and incarnation rather than the eschatological consummation of the divine plan. They tend to focus on the many corporal and spiritual works of mercy that need to be performed here and now, rather than devoting too much attention to the nature and function of the eschatological kingdom of God. Moreover, they are not leery about cooperation with all people of good will, whether or not they are believers, because they emphasize our common character as children of the God who created, redeems, and sustains us all. They are more open to the discernment of the requirements of natural law inductively rather than deductively; they take seriously not only the moral wisdom of the institutional Church, but also the moral wisdom of ordinary people whom they consider to be of good character, whatever their professed belief systems.

In other words, Erastian political theology naturalizes the Supernatural. It collapses the divine into the temporal order.

Sound familiar?

II. Liberal political theory, by definition creates an Erastian order.

A liberal framework presupposes the modern national state, even as it pushes in a universalist direction. It creates its own categories that it then produces as “natural.” It creates “religion” as distinct from “political.” It then requires that “religion” becomes governed and subordinated to the state. Remember Max Weber’s definition of the modern nation-state: “a political organization that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

I remember a conversation with a police officer after the police pursued a “person of interest” in and through the church courtyard. The police office told me that “the church is public property that we can access at any time. It’s the same as K-Mart.”

Obviously the event happened a few decades ago as K-Mart has gone the way of al flesh.

One, however, couldn’t have articulated the subordination of the church to the state in any plainer language. “The Church is Like K-Mart.”

The Cross becomes a “blue light” special.

III. The unpacking of the Erastian nature of the United States seems to raise a Constitutional issue.

Doesn’t the first amendment to the US Constitution require a “wall of separation” between “church” and “state”? If so, how can the state define physical, consecrated properties of the church as “like K-Mart”?

Let’s review article 1 of the Bill of Rights:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

As is well known, you won’t find a wall there. No church either. No synagogue. No mosque. No temple. The Constitution held that states, not the federal Congress, held the right to establish “religion.”

Why then do we think that this requires “a wall of separation”?

The phrase comes from a letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. Jefferson wrote:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man
& his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship,
that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not
opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American
people which declared that their legislature should “make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
[Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive
authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even
those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of
another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious
exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective
sect.].”

Ironically Jefferson hereby theologically establishes the Baptist tradition as the “religion” of the United States: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God” or “Soul Competency” — what Harold Bloom defined as American Gnosticism.

Note the movement of Jefferson’s position. He first posits a realm outside the political in the newly created private conscience and calls it “religion.” He then defines the realm as “a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” Jefferson speaks here of “his God” rather than “God.” We anticipates Feuerbach by decades! God is a projection of the individual human self.

This radical Protestantism names the “established religion” of the United States. Jefferson had nothing to do with the composition of either the Constitution or the Federal Papers — he had shipped off to France as ambassador in 1784. He returned to the United States on November 23, 1789. The letter to the Danbury Baptist Association established the radical British dissenting tradition: “Baptists,” as the “religion” of the United States. The letter held no legal status. Later Supreme Court references to the letter established it as setting legal precedence in “religion” versus “the state” issues.

Any Catholic, orthodox Jew, or traditional Muslim would disagree with such a de-institutionalizing of two realms so that only the “state” exists sociologically. The Supreme Court formalized this establishment in Reynolds v. the United States (1879). Justice Hugo Black legally invoked Jefferson’s letter immediately following WWII: “In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state” (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947).

Now is not the time, nor am I the person to give a detailed history of frameworks for reading the First Amendment to the Constitution . I want only want to suggest that Jefferson and the later Supreme Court presupposed an Erastian, liberal framework. They, in violation of the First Amendment, created an “established” religion — Soul Competency, “a matter which lies solely between Man & his God. The state takes authority to define what is “religion” and its “free-exercise” by placing it within a purported autonomous individual.

The Constitution generates a difference between “Congress” and “religion” — a generic phenomenon void of any institutional basis. Reading the Constitution through a liberal framework establishes the liberal framework itself as defining Congress’s authority. The liberal framework privatizes “religion” as outside the Congressional oversight.

The three branches of the state have authority over all spatial dynamics and institutions within territorial boundaries. The liberal framework defines “the free-exercise” of “religion” as interior and private — a matter of belief (separated by reason). This becomes apparent legally in the “Peyote" case of Employment Division v. Smith (1990). This decision strongly differentiates between private beliefs, outside the Court’s domain, and behavior, that governed by the state. It fulfills the logic of the establishment of “religion” as a private, personal belief” outside any government interference — “soul competency” to speak in a Baptist idiom.

Technically speaking, the state could declare on the basis of this decision, the celebration of the Eucharist, a material, physical, social event, as illegal. Similar to the ingestion of peyote, the Eucharist entails the public ingesting of material realia. Catholics do not receive the Body and Blood of Christ as “a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” Catholics stand outside the established religion, the Erastian commitments required by a liberal framework in reading the Constitution of the United States — despite the Erastian tendencies of many bishops, clergy, and communicants in the United States.

Such legal language requires that the state constructs the “wall of separation” — just as a Baptist would state.

The state reduces the Church to a collective assembly of like-minded individuals to pursue what “lies solely between Man and his God.”

A liberal framework thus violates the Constitution in how it constructs and establishes such a “religion” and its “free-exercise.” A liberal framework to read the Constitution is not theologically innocent. It is Erastian to its core.

IV. A Common Good framework erases the state’s Baptist establishment. A Common Good framework permits the pursuit of the Common Good by natural law that is ordered, but which has no authority over, the eternal Good.

I have earlier mentioned the tremendous web site, The Josias. The Erastian position collapses the eternal Good into the temporal individual or common good. One can trace the classical Catholic position into the earliest Christian churches and their writings in the NT and the later apostolic writings. The position finds its first formal statement, perhaps, in Gelasius I, bishop of Rome in the late fifth century. It received classical articulation in his letter, Famuli Vestrae Pietatis.

Gelasius wrote to the Emperor in Constantinople:

“For there are two, O emperor Augustus, by which the world is principally ruled: the sacred authority of pontiffs and the royal power. Among which how much heavier is the burden of priests, such that they will have to render an account to the Lord at the time of judgment even for those very kings” (par. 2).

He describes how temporal power must subordinate itself to the eternal authority of the church for the Final Good:

For you know, O most merciful son, that although by dignity you preside over the human race, nevertheless you devoutly bow your neck to the leaders of divine matters, and from them you await the causes of your salvation, and you recognize that, in partaking of the celestial sacraments, and being disposed to them (as is appropriate), you must be submitted to the order of religion rather than rule over it. Therefore you know that in these matters you depend on their judgement, not willing to force them to your will (para. 2)

The rule of the temporal world lies in temporal government: “by dignity your preside over the human race.” Gelasius does not contest the power of the emperor. He only states that the emperor must use this authority so that it is ordered to the eternal Beatitude or Good of his subjects: “inasmuch as it pertains to the order of public discipline, even the bishops themselves obey your laws, knowing that rule [imperium] has been bestowed to you from on high, lest they seem in mundane things to oppose the eminent sentence” (para. 2). The “Gelasian dyarchy” does not seek authority over the temporal common good of the emperor’s rule. But the emperor must order the temporal goods so that they open to the eternal Good of the Triune God.

Father Waldstein clarifies “Gelasian integralism” in a superb article, “Integralism and the Gelasian Dyarchy.” Not surprisingly, he finds the highest expression of this tradition in Thomas Aquinas: “Now man’s happiness is twofold, as was also stated above. One is proportionate to human nature, a happiness, to wit, which man can obtain by means of his natural principles. The other is a happiness surpassing man’s nature, and which man can obtain by the power of God alone, by a kind of participation of the Godhead, about which it is written that by Christ we are made “partakers of the Divine nature” (S. Th. IaIIae Q.62, A.1, c, quoted in Waldstein, Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy). The dual ends of humanity, temporal flourishing taken up and perfected in eternal flourishing, provides the backdrop for the “Gelasian dyarchy.”

A logic thus dictates the relationship between this two realms. Aquinas wrote, “There are two ways in which a higher power and a lower can be related. In one way, the lower power may be completely derived from the higher, and the whole power of the lower will then be founded upon the power of the higher; in which case we should obey the higher power before the lower simply and in all things . . .In another way, a higher and lower power can be such that each arises from some supreme power which arranges them in relation to each other as it wishes. In this case, the one will not be subject to the other save in respect of those things in which it has been subjected to the other by the supreme power; and only in such things are we to obey the higher power before the lower . . . Spiritual and secular power are both derived from the Divine power, and so secular power is subject to spiritual power insofar as this is ordered by God. . . . But in those things which pertain to the civil good, the secular power should be obeyed before the spiritual” (Sent. II, Dist. 44, Q. 3, A 4 quoted in Waldstein).

There genuinely are two powers—but both find their origin and perfection in the Triune God. This creates an order, as God is the One from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. As Waldstein himself writes, “The temporal power must be subordinate to the spiritual power, or else it will become mere violence, and yet it does not derive its authority from the spiritual power: it derives its authority from God through the natural law. Nature is not destroyed by grace, and yet nature must be subordinated to grace. . . . Each of the two powers is instituted by God, and each has a certain legitimate sphere. But the temporal power can only live properly if it is subordinated to the spiritual power, which is like its soul.”

V. Conclusion

The traditional Christian position, the “Gelasian dyarchy,” never denies that temporal authority, by exercising reason, has its own realm of authority — the realm of the Common Good. The “secular” authority, however, must use its authority for the Common Good as ordered to the eternal Good.

The traditional Christian position thus runs the opposite direction of the liberal, Erastian position. The Erastian position refuses to acknowledge any institution that stands outside its authority, let alone to which it must order itself. It creates “religion,” a private “matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” It naturalizes any sense of the supernatural by collapsing it into immanence.

The traditional Christian position is less imperialistic than the contemporary liberal Erastian position: “there are two, O emperor Augustus, by which the world is principally ruled.” It is not “religious” versus “secular.” It is the temporal authority , socially encoded in the state, ordered to the eternal authority, socially witnessed to by the church catholic, particularly as gathered into the mystical Body of Christ through the Sacramental Body of Christ.

The Gelasian “there are two” empirically describes reality — a reality denied by the liberal and Baptist reduction of all to religion as “soul competency.” It treats the church, the synagogue, the mosque as epiphenomenal — a material ruse that covers up the inner, personal reality.

The “Gelasian integralist” Common Good framework thus provides a position consistent with the First Amendment in a way that the “wall of separation” established a Baptist “religion” — in contradiction to the First Amendment.

It seems to me that we have a choice: (a) An Erastian position that subordinates the church to the state by naturalizing the Supernatural; or (2) recognizing the Gelasian dyarchy that orders the temporal, in its own distinct realm, to the eternal, as witnessed by the Church Catholic. The attempt to construct hermetically sealed positions ultimately fails, as the modern liberal state, claims authority to build the wall between the two.

Rather than a wall of separation, the better image for the Common Good tradition is biological: there are two cells and a cellular membrane orders the life of the two cells of state and church. The good of the temporal cell is taken up and perfected by its coordination to the conditions in the adjacent, eternal cell.

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Due to staff shortages, unattended to by management, my day job entailed 20% more hours this week than usual. Please forgive the large block quotes and the rushed end to this entry. I wanted to finish the post before more time transpired.

If you think this material is worthy, please like and restack it. I hope that we might use my work to spread and deepen the understanding of the Common Good tradition — and its opposition to the liberal tradition with all its limitations.