Coercion and Religion
Recently I explored Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument for why church and state should remain legally separated, even as they work together to help human beings lead happy lives.
Civil society needs religion, because religion cultivates our awareness of the most powerful incentive to abide by civil law: that if citizens murder, steal, or lie under oath, they will suffer eternal punishment. Without eternal incentives, democracy will devolve into anarchy, and then people will accept a dictator to restore order. But religion cannot raise our minds to eternity except by appeal to universal, timeless truths. Therefore it serves its mission (and temporal society) best when it stays as far as possible from particular political alliances—de jure or de facto—with a state or political party. Such compacts would conflate religion’s interests with the political interests of only a relatively few people; religion would no longer appeal to everyone else, and its purpose would be thwarted.
Yet if the state’s duty is to defend the natural law, and if religion presumes—and prescribes—the healthy functioning of human nature (according to its law), is the state not part of religion?
Religion does concern man’s immaterial soul, which transcends earthly life. But as Aquinas pointed out, the soul is hard-wired, as it were, to need the body: body and soul together form a single nature. When man considers the immaterial aspects of things (their organization, purpose, usefulness, etc.), he must have them physically before him, or have a representation of them in his imagination. We discern the timeless laws of science by observing the physical world in time; we learn the immaterial concepts of numbers by counting material things; we learn the transcendent organizing principles of human society—morality—by observing how societies work in reality. Those born blind cannot know fully what color is; those with brain damage cannot actually understand as much as others can; and those who do not grow up in the stable home of their parents have a much harder time learning what virtue is.
Likewise, those who live in a state of social anarchy will find it harder to be religious. It is difficult in any situation to get men, weighed down by their inveterately materialistic outlook, to consider their destiny after this life. Some may do so when their earthly life is threatened by civil strife. But insecurity also breeds temptations to compete selfishly with others for survival; many people then turn in on themselves, rather than outward with heaven’s universal perspective. Even if people do become more religious during civil disorder, they will suffer from having fewer opportunities to develop their humanity.
Religion therefore needs the state to preserve order in the world. That is why ancient Christians, living under the Roman Empire, were taught: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor … or to governors,” who “punish those who do wrong and … praise those who do right.” For the same reason, early medieval popes called on the Carolingian kings to protect religious communities against marauding barbarians. Religion also needs the state to protect its own internal order. Believers will be less faithful to God’s law—whether natural or supernatural—if their ministers and other co-religionists violate the natural law and escape the punishment that is properly executed by civil authority.
The close connection between religion and public morality explains why secular liberals and progressives, as they have tried to remove religion from public life, have also removed the law’s power to protect the lives of pre-born infants from abortion, to ban pornography, and even to protect a parent’s right to decide how to treat his child’s gender dysphoria. Marxists, for their part, see little difference between the ideas of natural and supernatural law: they oppose both as oppressive “mystifications” of social conditions.
Are integralists therefore correct? Does restoring the coercion of morality by civil law require reinstituting the coercion of religion by that same law? If abiding by the natural law is a condition for getting to heaven, as Tocqueville admits, and if it is the state’s mission and duty to defend that law, the state seems to be necessarily an organ of the religious community. After all, until not so long ago, almost all Western states enforced religion, and many non-Western states still do. Even if in Tocqueville’s time religion flourished in America amid religious disestablishment, that could have been an accident. The long-term consequence of separating civil and ecclesiastical government seems rather to be the moral anarchy of the contemporary West.
Nature and Grace
Such arguments, however, are complicated by an important point: although ordinarily the soul needs the body—and therefore human society—to reach God, that need is relative.
Acts of religion, by which man submits himself to God, have outward manifestations—rituals, postures, etc. But submission to God, who is pure spirit, is properly an interior act, emanating from and forming man’s highest, most Godlike and interior faculties—his mind and will. These spiritual powers are precisely what distinguish his rational, immaterial soul from the material souls of animals. And although the soul’s design presumes its body, the soul in key respects is other than the body. Otherwise, we could not get outside our own material existence to understand the principles of other things; we could not resist our passions (and therefore could not be charged with sin); and we would have no transcendent conscience to accuse us of sin or praise us for virtue.
The soul’s independence of the body in these ways means that sound material conditions, and therefore temporal governments, are not absolutely necessary to religion or human life generally. We should strive to achieve political peace and freedom as the ordinary conditions of the person’s development (as Paul of Tarsus said) because man naturally learns virtue by choosing it in society with other men. He who seriously injures his fellow man in his body or property does an injustice that deserves civil punishment. But the wrongdoer does not cut the victim off from God; God’s supernatural action—grace—can reach us even in the most oppressive circumstances. Indeed, a wrong may occasion grace’s increase in the injured party, if he bears the wrong patiently; although nevertheless, woe to the wrongdoer.
Grace presumes nature as its normal foundation; but strictly speaking, grace is above nature—it transcends it. Grace intervenes in nature and raises it up by extraordinary, supernatural means—miracles—whether they be visible bodily healings, or invisible power in the soul to help it resist temptations to do evil. These interventions by definition go beyond nature, operating by supernatural laws that cannot be reduced to the laws of nature. Hence the government of grace, the church, is separate from the state, the government of nature.
Compelling by Truth and Love
Some religious integralists might reply that the superiority of grace to nature requires that the church directly guide the state in principle, regardless of Tocqueville’s claim that involving religion in politics undermines religion’s power. After all, in one important respect grace seems necessary for nature: even though man can’t not know the natural law, his knowledge is shaky without grace’s help. On average, all cultures agree about basic moral norms against murder, theft, or adultery. But most cultures deviate from the natural law here and there: they might condone human sacrifice or infanticide, for example. Divine intervention seems necessary at least to clarify what the law is so that statesmen can uphold it correctly.
But this argument ignores an important truth: although religious authorities might be most knowledgeable in the general principles of natural law, they are ill-suited to directing the application of those principles in civil society.
Making laws requires intimate knowledge of the specific circumstances of the society that those laws rule. If religious leaders are being faithful to their calling to direct men to the next world, they will have little time to spend on worldly, political matters, and therefore they will lack the expertise to organize them well. Laymen, on the other hand, raise families, work, and socialize in the world by necessity: secular activities are “the very web of their existence,” as the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council said. Laymen are therefore natural experts in the life of the world, and “it is their special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs.” (On the other hand, laymen lack the clergy’s competence to govern in strictly religious questions.)
For such reasons, in recent times many religious leaders have limited their political role to proclaiming the principles of the natural law to statesmen and citizens; they have avoided taking specific policy positions. But their preaching still has real power—not the external coercion of the sword but the power of the truth, which works on man’s conscience interiorly, even compellingly. Truth’s power is amplified when truth is preached in charity, which compels by attraction. Jesus compelled the centurion to belief by dying blamelessly on the Cross as he forgave his persecutors. The early Christians similarly won new believers by their example: “See how they love one another!” their non-Christian neighbors exclaimed. Love can also compel men by shaming them into repentance, “heaping coals of fire on their head.” Love was the only sort of “compulsion” available to Christianity for the first three centuries of its existence, and it effected the conversion of the Roman Empire, one of the most dramatic religious revolutions in history.
The Rod and the Staff
Sometimes the defense of the truth—and of the good of the religious community—does demand that religious leaders use more external, almost coercive means against sin. These, however, are not the sword of the magistrate but the “rod” of the shepherd, as Pope Benedict XVI put it, which operates only within internal church government: removing ministers from office for bad conduct; removing teachers from religious schools for teaching contrary to the religion’s beliefs; limiting public sinners’ ability to participate in religious rituals; or even (in extreme, hopefully rare cases) expelling public sinners from the religious community. Even then, sinners are not forced to repent, although the hope is that the punishment will goad the sinner to change (and protect the rest of the community from scandal).
If such sins also involve grave violations of the natural law, it behooves religious communities, as it would any citizen, to report such criminals to the state for civil punishment, which may include removing the wrongdoer from civil society by imprisonment. Such punishments are just in themselves, and we hope they might lead criminals to conversion (although not even civil law can make the criminal mend his ways). But if the sin is essentially of matters beyond the natural law (dietary laws, ritual laws, etc.), strictly religious punishments and the pains of conscience are the proper—and most effective—penalties in this life. As for final punishments in the next life, God alone enforces those.
In our times, when respect for the natural law seems weak, perhaps clergy do need to exercise “the rod” more, but not in the way integralists suggest. Religious leaders might need to do more to stir up people’s consciences so they live justly; their neglect of that duty might be more responsible for religion’s recent decline than the state’s withdrawal from supernatural affairs. Religious leaders might need to penalize more publicly those members of their flocks, especially statesmen, who publicly advance abortion, the redefinition of marriage, and other grave violations of natural law. Not to do so might discourage lay faithful who are trying to lead holy lives. The laity might get impatient and be tempted to rebel against their ministers; they might also start calling for greater state intervention in society to rectify such injustices, advancing an expansion of government that could threaten the liberty of religion (and of all citizens).
But it is also—and more—important that religious leaders use what Pope Benedict called the “staff” of the shepherd—leading by example. Personal witness will give religious leaders’ public defenses of truth more credibility. And if both clergy and laity live better by their religious principles, they will assist God’s power over men’s hearts by the attractive example of their love. If you and I gave our lives entirely to our Creator, and let him use us as his instruments, he would bring about the gentle rule of his truth on earth, faster and better than any earthly power could.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.