The Distinction of Powers: How Church and State Divide Us
Brian Mitchell
In a lengthy survey of American intellectual life, published in the summer 1992 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Bell of Harvard offered a curiously dichotomized view of the battle now raging in this country. Through one eye, he sees a political contest between four main groups identified as Liberals, Communitarians, Neoconservatives, and Libertarians. The differences between them are largely philosophical and center upon the object of government control: Liberals would regulate the economy but not morals; Neoconservatives would regulate morals (through “social tutelage,” says neocon Bell), but not the economy; Communitarians would regulate everything; Libertarians, nothing.
Through the other eye, Bell sees a bitter Kulturkampf between “cultural nihilists” (Marxists, feminists, and multiculturalists) and social conservatives (the defenders of “traditional values”). Between these extremes, Bell positions “melioristic liberals” who will defend Western culture but not the “old ideologies” of the social conservatives. Bell seems to regard these three forces as fundamentally apolitical, affecting less the nature of government than the nature of society. Thus, it appears that the political battle between liberals and conservatives and the cultural battle between nihilists and traditionalists are separate quarrels.
But are they? If Bell is right, then one could be both a cultural nihilist and a libertarian, against traditional morality but in favor of limited government. Social conservatives could not claim the high ground as the true friends of freedom for, in Bell’s scheme, there is no necessary relation between conservative social values and limited government. They might be rightly called tyrants for their use of law to enforce traditional morality.
If we are unwilling to accept this, we must produce some other explanation, but how else may we explain things? We habitually describe things in terms of left and right, but it has become increasingly clear that left and right cannot account for the growing diversity of social and political perspectives. Our list of labels has grown to include liberal, conservative, libertarian, communitarian, socialist, individualist, progressive, neoconservative, neoliberal, paleoconservative, paleolibertarian, and now “progressive conservative,” and we cannot relate one label to another in any reliable schematic fashion that adds to our understanding of all.
Bell doesn’t even try and instead settles for a dichotomized conflict, which he suggests is based upon an “arbitrary yet perhaps useful distinction between a culture and a society” Bell defines culture as “the regnant attitudes and traditions that are the wellsprings of belief” and society as the “common attitudes and interests that define a people.” If this sounds like a distinction without a difference, what he really means is this:
In some nations—Islamic, for example—there is a congruence between the two because of the unifying force of religion. In modern Western nations there is usually a division between the realms.
Here Bell comes close to a truth, though not close enough. There is a difference between Islamic and Western nations, and a fundamental division within Western nations is at the root of it, but this division is not between culture and society.
I offer another way of making sense of our political world, based upon a new application of an old understanding of a simpler, clearer division within the Western world. This application is far more practically useful than both Bell’s dichotomy and the conventional left/right spectrum in understanding all of the various social and political perspectives represented today. Against Bell’s dichotomy, it also has the advantage of being based not on a nice distinction between culture and society, but on a much plainer distinction between the social and the political.
The social and the political are distinguished in Western societies by the manner in which they exercise control. Society is governed by two forces, coercion (the physical force) and persuasion (the moral force). In the West, the rightful employment of coercion is generally reserved for political powers, the civil and military authorities at their various levels. Persuasion, on the other hand, is generally left to the social powers, consisting of the many voluntary associations that influence individual behavior (church, family, community, etc.). There are exceptions to this rule (parents may spank their children and governments occasionally propagandize their citizens), but the rule still stands, in contrast to societies in which the same powers employ both forces. Primitive tribes, to begin with, recognize no distinction between the social and the political. The tribe functions as an extended family, organized in a strictly hierarchical fashion. There are no “political leaders” to be distinguished from “social leaders,” only various levels of chieftains, one over another, right down to father and son, master and slave. Everyone has his place in the pyramid, and every social subgroup is a subordinate part of the whole.
Some societies have maintained a unified, hierarchical, and essentially tribal structure on a grand scale, among them the pre-Columbian Incas and the ancient “hydraulic” civilizations of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, and Hwang Ho valleys. Islamic societies, as Bell observes, also follow this form. In a revolutionary Islamic republic, there is no civil law independent of the Shari’ah, the supreme law of Islam, and no separation of church and state; indeed, there is no Islamic “church” at all and no “state” in the Western sense. There is but one authority, one power, one all-encompassing sociopolitical order. In this sense, Islamic societies are far more tribal than political. They are “tribes with flags,” in the words of one Mid-east observer. The formation of Islamic states in this century was brought about by the imposition of Western political concepts foreign to Islam, which Islamic fundamentalists have lately fought hard to repudiate.
Most Western nations are still political societies, with a political system easily distinguishable from the rest of society and a political hierarchy representing just one way in which the society is organized. In a political society, families, churches, and markets do not exist as part of the political system. They exist on their own, for their own purposes, and with their own claim to authority. The political organization of the society exists for other purposes.
The Western concept of the political society, in which political power is limited and the social powers stand on their own, has deep roots in Western history. The West has long recognized the dissimilarity of civil law and natural or divine law, and despite the fondness of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes for the unlimited state, the West has tended instead toward limited government. Both the Greek polis and the Roman Republic were founded upon a preexisting social order—an aristocracy of influential families supported by a more or less formal system of patronage, by which virtually the entire populace was organized. The political order consisted of certain men vested with certain powers for certain purposes. It existed only to serve the common interests of the social order, which retained most of its customary rights (including many rights we now assign to the political powers). The growth of Roman imperial authority undermined many of the rights of the old social order, but even under the empire the West enjoyed a good deal of governmental laissez-faire in private and parochial matters.
Christianity’s contribution to this heritage included a renewed awareness of the limits of political authority, based in part on the otherworldly distinction between the Kingdom of this world and the Kingdom of God, but also in part on the very worldly presence of the Church of Christ. Even while acting like Islam as a “unifying force,” Christianity, unlike Islam, confirmed the distinction between political rule and social life, providing Western civilization with both a cosmological basis for the distinction and a powerful new social order to counterbalance the political order. The early Christian Church was unlike any preexisting pagan association in that it functioned as a virtual empire within an empire. It had leaders, laws, discipline, a purpose of its own, and a strong claim on the lives of its members. It claimed for itself the right to function free of government interference and made itself responsible for many matters of public welfare and morale, at the same time leaving the use of coercion to civil authorities alone. The Christian living in the early centuries could not but be aware that he served two masters, and that the one with the sword was not necessarily to be feared the most.
If, therefore, we must speak of a “political meaning of Christianity,” we must speak of something more than Glenn Tinder’s “prophetic stance,” for many cults can serve as society’s conscience. The distinctive political meaning of Christianity is that the Christian Church exists as a visible, active social order independent of the political order. The political order, in the presence of the Church, thus cannot claim complete mastery over the lives of its subjects. Contra Plato, the State is not the individual “writ large,” for the State concerns only part of the individual; the Church concerns him more. Contra Pericles, the man who takes no part in politics is not a useless person. Political activity is relegated to the status of a worldly necessity, like farming and trading, something society must do to survive in the fallen world, but not something that justifies society’s existence or expresses its highest purpose. The political order does not provide a reason for being for either the society or the individual. The individual does not live for the State.
An awareness of the diminished significance of the political order and of the distinction between the social and the political lingers today in Western consciousness. Personal freedom and dignity are still highly valued, and the blatantly statist assumptions of both communism and fascism have been largely repudiated. But the balance of power between the social order and the political order no longer exists. In the United States, where Christian belief is still relatively strong, the social order is fractured into countless churches and other social subgroups, with no clear voice of Christian authority and no coordination of religiously informed public action. The various churches are furthermore restrained from participating in many aspects of public life by a scrupulous adherence to the doctrine of the separation of Church and State, now widely regarded as an essential element of Western democracy. Everywhere the presumption is that governments should be secular and that religion should play no part in politics. Religious arguments concerning political issues are inadmissible in public debate. Religious leaders who instruct their followers on matters of faith that bear directly upon public policy may even be accused of transgressing the limits of acceptable civic behavior, if not of actually violating the United States Constitution.
The separation of Church and State, as commonly understood today, in effect places the Christian Church under house arrest; it is free to mind its own business, but not to participate in the full life of society. The State, for its part, is forced to ignore the Church, even to pretend at times that religion and religion’s God do not exist. In society’s political consciousness, the State is seen as the sole source of authority and only legitimate representative of the society as a whole; the Church is seen as just another subject minority. Absent all official recognition of the existence of an independent social order, the political order comes to be identified more closely with society itself. With this confusion of the political order and the society, the State is freed to enter more fully into the lives of its people.
In our day, the State acts increasingly as if it alone exists. The aggressive political order has already taken over many of the responsibilities formerly belonging solely to the independent social order, including the education of the young; the care of the elderly, infirm, and indigent; and the maintenance and improvement of public morals (lately redefined to fit the new morality of sexual licentiousness and civil rights). The separation of Church and State has disrupted cooperative contact between the social and political powers, but it has encouraged hostile contact and, in fact, left very little separation between the encroaching State and the retreating Church. The result has been a lamentable loss of real freedom, for the State’s services, after all, are backed by coercive force. The State does not often take “no thank you” for an answer nor suffer dissenters kindly.
It appears that the West is slipping back into an essentially tribal or, we might say, socialist way of thinking in which the political order is seen as all-encompassing and all-important. In this view, the distinction that matters is not between Church and State, or between the social and the political, or between Bell’s society and culture: it is between public and private, with the word private restricted to the individual person and the word public covering just about everything else, and often serving as a telling synonym for governmental. Our “public schools” are wholly owned and operated by the government. Our “private enterprises” are subjected to limitless government regulation on account of their dealings with “the public.” Even our “private clubs,” if not judged sufficiently intimate, can be reclassified as public and thus brought under State control. We are no longer allowed much public life apart from the political order, and we can barely conceive of community action that is not political in nature. The people, acting together, act as the State; individuals act either with the State or alone.
Some Western nations still preserve traces of a different understanding of government. In Britain, a “public school” is not a government school but a private school in the American sense, because in theory the British government represents the Crown and not the people. In contrast, the American “government of the people” admits no distinction between the two. In taking the government upon themselves, the American people are taken over by their government. The social order is consumed by the political order. State and the society become one, at least theoretically.
This is even, as many Americans would have it, in reality as well as in theory. The ideology of Marxists, feminists, and homosexualists allows no independence of powers and no distinction between the social and the political. In their world, everything is political, everything is about coercive power, even our most private thoughts and actions. Already they have forced much of our private world into the public square, introducing into affairs once governed solely by the suasion of the social order, the coercion of the political order. Their more ambitious schemes are nothing less than totalitarian, for where there is no distinction between the social and the political, where the State and the society are one, there can be no inviolable limit to coercive State power and no independent authority competent to judge the State. Yet all too often these people are able to pass themselves off as the defenders of freedom, while smearing their opponents as oppressors. To tell the difference, we need an alternative both to Bell’s dichotomy and to the conventional left/right spectrum.
I
Our alternative can be found in the distinction between the social and the political, which enables us to revise our understanding of left and right according to the various combinations of attitudes one might take toward Church and State. For this purpose, we may use a simple graph consisting of two lines intersecting at right angles. The horizontal line, which we will call the S scale, represents our fractured social order—the voluntary associations of church, family, and community (defined by occupation, locale, social set, and other factors). The vertical line, or Ρ scale, represents the political order, consisting of civil and military authorities at all levels. These political powers govern by coercion, that is, physical force and ultimately violence or the threat of violence. In contrast, the social powers govern our behavior through suasion or “social pressure,” involving persuasive arguments, expressions of approval or disapproval, and ultimately exclusion or the threat of exclusion.
Along the S scale, the social powers are strongest at the right and weakest at the left. Along the Ρ scale, the political powers are strongest at the bottom and weakest at the top. When political powers are weak, a society may be said to be free—that is, if one defines freedom classically as the absence of coercion. There are many today who define freedom as the absence of all restraint, social as well as political. The emergence of “the New Freedom” in the writings of liberal intellectuals is an acknowledgement of this change in meaning. It is also evidence of a shift in the focus of “liberal” opposition. The liberals of today do not fear State power; they fear the power of church and family. Church and family, however, are the principal agents of the socialization of the young and thus the true source of civil peace. No amount of political coercion can keep selfish, hateful, and utterly immoral people in check: they will do whatever they can get away with.
We therefore have four alternatives shown in figure 1: freedom and peace or order (the upper right); freedom and discord (the upper left); tyranny and discord (the lower left); and tyranny and order (the lower right). The extremes of all of these values are impossible in this world. Absolute freedom and absolute peace can be found only in heaven; absolute tyranny and absolute discord we might expect in hell. The absolutes of freedom and disorder would be chaos, and the absolutes of tyranny and order would be a cosmos—a perfectly ordered system or machine, an anthill, a hive.
The West has been spared the extremes of tyranny and unrest by its awareness of the distinction of the social and the political. Even the most coercive Western regimes have not been able to establish monolithic Utopian societies that maximize both tyranny and order. On the contrary, the exercise of extreme coercion upon Western societies tends to disrupt the social order, thereby increasing social unrest. The social and political powers tend to average out each other in a way that might be shown along a circle centered upon the intersection of the Ρ and S scale. The most coercive Western societies would be found at the bottom of the circle...
