More Musings on the Church and State Relationship

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. John 15:19

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. John 17:14-15

…who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age… Galatians 1:4

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. James 4:4

The above verses are not just theological abstractions for me. I currently worship in a Reformed congregation, but my theological and historical affinities lean toward the Anti-Nicene Fathers and the Anabaptist tradition, with a strong dose of anthropological demythologization. That combination produces a constant, low-grade existential crisis whenever I am asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance or enter a voting booth.

The Pledge is especially hard. I love my country. Yet in its thirty-one words, God is mentioned in one phrase—“under God”—two words - a mere 6.4% of the whole. And even then, “one nation” comes first. We Americans like to cry “God and Country,” but the order betrays the truth: country takes precedence.

From Eden to the prophets, and from the Gospels to Revelation, Scripture consistently warns about the machinery of power: coercion, debt, bondage, and slavery. These are not side effects of state formation—they are part of the design. Chapters three and four of Genesis share the same understanding anthropologists now tell us - intensive agriculture requires more time and labor than foraging and is a precursor to the City-State. Ancient states like Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Rome operated primarily on single crop agriculture and forced labor: debt bondsmen, slaves, and war captives. Crowded cities bred disease, famine, and higher mortality than rural life. To sustain themselves, ancient states raided neighboring peoples for slaves and welcomed slave traders into their markets (Revelation 18:11 - 14).

Today, machines have replaced much of our physical toil, but capitalism has institutionalized debt as the primary tool of enslavement (...and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors...). Matthew 4 and Luke 4 make the same point in theological terms: all the kingdoms (i.e. Principalities and Powers) of this world are under Satan’s dominion.

In my early thirties I managed a large wastewater treatment facility. One day my director told me flatly: “The people under your management are simply tools to achieve [the institution’s] objectives.” That is an institutional perspective, not a relational one. And the bigger the institution, the more it sees people as replaceable parts. Later, studying the “Constantine Shift,” I saw how the state did the same with the church—co-opting it, remaking it in its own image, and bending it towards becoming a tool of extraction and exploitation.

This is why I falter before the Pledge. Why I avoid party affiliation. Why political conversations make me cringe. I am not an anarchist; I believe in the rule of law. I am not apolitical; “politics” is at its core a relational word, and relationships should come before institutions. I am neither Republican nor Democrat; both are beholden to the Principalities and Powers. Even if a party arose that aligned with my convictions, it’s institutional nature would place it under the same powers. Even as a teenager I recognized the truth in the words of a Moody Blue’s song, “Revolution never won, it’s just another form of gun, to do again what they have done with all our brother’s youngest sons”. Our tendency is to overthrow the existing political system only to remake it in a similar image with us as the new leaders exploiting those who once exploited us. What is needed is a new vision, a new way.

Two of James C. Scott’s book titles sum up what I believe to be the warp and woof of Jesus’ ministry: 'Against the Grain' and 'The Art of Not Being Governed'. The New Testament sketches a way of life outside the pale of the state. It is not based on domination, coercion, or exploitation. In the ancient world, freedmen aspired to become landed gentry, even if trade could make them richer. Owning land meant status—and slaves. To own or be owned meant appearing on the census and tax rolls—being visible to the state. The earliest Christians did the opposite: they sold their property to free (redeem) others, moving themselves and those they “redeemed” with the money from the sale of their own land out of the state’s line of sight. Today, escaping such visibility is almost impossible in the surveillance state.

For me, to “be in the world but not of it” is not a slogan—it is a daily dilemma. My love for my country is real. But it runs up against an allegiance to a kingdom that cannot be co-opted, bought, or counted. And that kingdom challenges me to live, think, and act in ways that the world—whether ancient empire or modern democracy—will never fully understand. To “be in the world, but not of the world” - thus my existential crisis.