Civil Religion vs. Biblical Christianity

Several centuries ago, Saint Augustine wrote a monumental work on the difference between what he called the City of God and the City of Man. Augustine makes the case that though Christians on earth live in a saeculum senescens, a passing world of men, societies, and empires that will not last. Though we live in the city of man, we are aliens in the land, and our true citizenship is in the City of God.

Many modern evangelicals have forgotten this distinction, as one of my friends Will Inboden points out in the latest issue of Modern Reformation. Since the founding of the American republic, Christians in the US, especially evangelical Protestants, have subscribed to a politico-theological faith that Will calls "civil religion." In this civil religion, there is a tendency to see America as having a special role in redemptive history, and Americans as God's chosen people in the world today. Much is made of America's "Christian heritage," and is reestablishment is the aim of their cultural and especially political energy--paradoxically so, as this aim is often at odds with their eschatology. Faithfulness to Christ is often--sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly--equated with supporting a particular political agenda, like abolishing abortion, preventing gay marriage, or even a specific tax policy.

Christians need to think more biblically on the distinction between faith and politics, between the City of God and the City of Man, between the sacred and the secular. We are God's chosen people as followers of Christ and citizens of the heavenly kingdom, not as Americans. God's people are called out of every tribe, tongue, race, and people of the earth, and the visible, institutional expression of his dealing with men is the Church, not any particular nation-state.

This understanding will have a significan impact on our politics. Once Christians understand that God is not a Republican (or a Democrat), that political leaders are not also spiritual leaders, and that political ends of any kind are tangential to the Christian life, their politics and their lives will be transformed. Political positions can then be based on prudent, wise understanding of social and governmental realities. They can then have a politics informed by and shaped by Scripture, not the dictates of civil religion and poorly grounded religious philosophy. Most importantly, by abandoning civil religion, today's Christians will gain a new appreciation for the role of the Church in the Christian life and direct their energies to its ministry, worship, ordinances, discipline, and doctrine.