Rendering Not
The Claims of the Savior State We Must Refuse
The modern “secular” state is neither the bearer of an authority deriving from God nor society’s modest servant in matters that require coordinated action. It is no longer a democratic enterprise, or properly republican. It disregards the constitution and does not tend its own borders. It has devolved into a constellation of bureaucratic agencies and public-private partnerships, organized by a permanent managerial elite as a means of manipulating society to predetermined ends, many of them inimical to the welfare of the people and the interests of the nation. Increasingly, it is devoted to coercion and censorship in order to achieve its ends.
This state still speaks of freedom, but in its refusal to acknowledge God or the law of God it has been carrying forward the Marxist project of eradicating freedom. It wishes to strip the citizen of every competing loyalty, especially to church and family. The resulting “liberty” accomplishes two things of interest to the state. It puts the individual in the state’s debt, teaching him to be dependent on the state. Moreover, it deprives him of the protection offered by those pre-political, buffering institutions.
The liberated individual stands naked and alone before the regime, vulnerable to its every whim. The “chains” of family and church broken, he finds himself chained to the state itself, which makes unprecedented claims upon him—not only on his means, by multiple levels of taxation, but also on his thoughts, words, and actions. He is not more free, but less, for the state now presses its claims unrestrained by any authority but its own.
Demanding the “Whole of Society” Approach
The last four years have opened many eyes to this sorry situation. They have demonstrated that “the savior state,” as I called it in 2010, is busy rendering itself indispensable by inventing new threats to the citizen, from which, working in tandem with unelected global agencies, it will deliver him. We have entered, for example, the era of the perpetual pandemic, which after much preparation (and several failed attempts) was successfully inaugurated in 2020.
Now, the spotlight has for the moment swung away from that, lest it reveal the true extent of the devastation left behind by the grotesque policies and mandates that were imposed globally. It has moved back to climate change, as a still greater threat. The latter—besides its trademarked Science—has exactly this in common with the former: that the individual is said to be helpless in the face of it and must simply do as he is told.
And what is he being told? He is being told that he must adopt the state’s “whole of society” approach and the OneHealth vision that places every living creature, and the planet itself, under the coordinated power of those same agencies. He is being told that it is time to sacrifice his cherished autonomy on the altar of the common good, the priesthood of which he cannot question or comprehend. He is a child again, subject to arbitrary rules he doesn’t understand and punished for crimes he didn’t know were crimes.
Breathing fresh air, for example, or refusing an injection. Or greeting a person according to sex rather than “gender” and defending the young from chemical or surgical castration. Or contributing to the rise of our still relatively low CO2 levels—an essential atmospheric component without which we would all die for want of so much as a cricket to eat, the cricket itself having nothing to eat. Or selfishly having too many children and not dying soon enough. Or praying in public, or even privately about public matters. Or refusing to carry one of the electronic devices by which the data-miners conduct their constant surveillance. Increasingly, merely criticizing the manner in which the regime governs is criminalized as an intolerable violation of the “whole of society” approach.
The Right Path Out of Failure
Where are the covenant people, that royal priesthood and holy nation established by the living God? It was they who first taught the liberties that are being lost. It was they who confronted Caesar at the cost of their lives, filling the catacombs with their dead. It was they who insisted that there must be limits on state power, that the lordship of Caesar must not be acknowledged in any way that denied the lordship of Jesus Christ.
In “The Audacity of the State” (Touchstone, January/February 2010) I insisted that the church transcends and relativizes even the family, never mind the state; that the Christian religion is not an individualistic religion, but rather a covenantal, ecclesial religion. I reminded readers that the church has a unique responsibility which corresponds to its unique nature—that the libertas ecclesiae derives directly from the divine mandate delivered to it by Jesus.
The church’s liberty is not a function of rights attached to the image-bearing person. It is not a species of religious freedom more generally. It is not a privilege granted by the state. Ecclesial freedom is a freedom that derives directly from God and his Christ, a freedom that cannot be over-ruled by man.
Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University in Montreal. His recent books include Ascension Theology, Desiring a Better Country, Theological Negotiations, and 1 & 2 Thessalonians in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.
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