Debates over common-good conservatism versus classical liberalism are back in the news, and this time, Evangelicals are weighing in. Since 2020, Evangelical Protestants have woken up to the essential interrelationship between politics and religion. The quietism of the Evangelicals’ fundamentalist forbears is long gone. Works of political theology, or church and state, or related subjects, are published regularly. Works praising Christian nationalism, or decrying Christian nationalism, or praising political Christianity of various sorts, or denigrating political Christianity of various sorts, flood Amazon. You cannot throw a rock without hitting one of these works. On the whole, this awakening is a net positive for conservative Christians. There’s not a world wherein Christianity and the political order have ever been meaningfully separated, so it is good to put the ignorant quietism of fundamentalism in the rearview mirror.
Getting rid of fundamentalism, however, is easier said than done. Evangelicals remain allergic to institutions, even the institution of the church. So Evangelical conversations about political theology are often driven by personalities and vibes rather than by a serious and sober-minded look at the principles involved, whether religious or political. Perhaps the most significant question for serious Protestants to ask is what the greatest potential divisions between respective tribes are. To a sizable degree, Anglicans and Presbyterians often think they are debating political theology, but what they’re really debating is the application, or the degree of socio-cultural expectation, for what is actually a shared political theology.
My own experience is limited to the Anglican and Reformed communions. Given their historic association and often shared political and theological history in the British Isles and in North America, it is worth treating them together. There are two questions on which Anglicans and Reformed divide, one primary and one secondary. The primary question is a formalistic one: Is the church or the state the primary organizing institution for transcendent human politics? The secondary question is: How much, or how little, socioecclesial or political expectation does each group have regarding its political theology? I posit there are at present two major groups in Protestant life, each privileging church and state to different degrees, which in turn means they treat what gets called political theology differently.
I.
The first group I’ll call the Two Kingdoms types, not because they agree on every point, but because they see a relatively hard division between the spiritual and the temporal kingdoms. Using Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther as lodestars, these Reformed and Lutheran theologians and political thinkers see natural law as a guide to their political actions, and they see the Bible as their guide to their ecclesiastical and sacramental lives. The point of the state is order, and the point of the church is the gospel, and there need not be too much overlap between the two. In the modern United States, disciples of Meredith Kline, natural-law theorist David VanDrunen, historically-minded Southern Presbyterians, self-identifying Christian nationalists like Stephen Wolfe, and Spirituality of the Church enthusiasts are representative examples that fit the Two Kingdoms bill.
While some Two Kingdoms devotees are more interested in Christian politics than others, they all see Christian politics as an essentially natural and civil proposition, and not an ecclesiastical or salvific one. Morality in the political realm is governed by nature and not the Bible. David VanDrunen proposes that “although ‘you shall not murder’ and many other moral imperatives are both known by natural law and revealed in Scripture, Scripture does not provide a common moral standard for Christians and non-Christians in the way that natural law does.”[1] For Two Kingdoms proponents, the Bible and the church are kept safely cloistered. For one group of two kingdoms disciples, this leads to the belief that the spiritual society of the church is pure, and therefore cannot be tainted by the political or even the merely natural. VanDrunen goes so far as to suggest that what humans understand as nature “will far transcend the present earthly reality; ‘nature’ itself will be drastically transformed.” This curious proposition sounds to the untrained ear like an evocation of the Roman Catholic proposition that grace entirely transforms nature. To their credit, these Two Kingdoms advocates are consistent in that they do not have inordinate expectations for civil or spiritual society.
More politically-minded Two Kingdoms advocates see a capacious place for the state to order society. To be certain, these Two Kingdoms proponents see magisterial authority as far more commodious than most Evangelicals have for the last century. Timon Cline quotes Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of the relative prerogatives of the magistrate and the church. Both magistrate and minister “nourish the godly, but diversly. The Magistrate advanceth them with honors, riches and dignities. The minister comforteth them with the promises of God & with the sacraments.” Cline hints that magisterial authority is not entirely removed from human spirituality when he says that “the magistrate works by outward means on the outward man, which does not itself disregard the inward man as such, nor is it agnostic toward inward means of the inward power of the ministers.” For Evangelical Protestants in the United States, this sounds like sneaking Erastianism. While that is probably not the aim of politically-minded American Two Kingdoms supporters, Protestant history undoubtedly displays a penchant towards Erastian practice, especially among magisterial Protestants. Yet for all the differences between these two tribes of Two Kingdoms followers, they agree on more than they differ. Both groups see nature as the essential ordering principle for political society, and both have modest expectations for what humans一Christian or not一can morally accomplish. It is their essential unity on man’s patent inability to bring heaven to earth that makes the disagreements between these groups so intense; politically minded Two Kingdoms advocates know man is a mess; hence, he needs strong, and even Christian government. Spiritually-minded Two Kingdoms advocates also know man is a mess, hence their fear of strong, and even Christian government.
II.
The second major group I will term ecclesiocentrists. They see the church not as a spiritual society that exists alongside a temporal society, but as the necessary and timeless society where earth and heaven not only do, but must, meet. Peter Leithart writes, “Ecclesiocentrism is both a theoretical framework and a practical agenda for a Christian politics after liberalism. A church sanctuary is a microcosm, a world-model. The church is the new covenant sanctuary. Therefore, she portrays and anticipates the world as it ought to be, setting a pattern for the nations.” The church and the people of God are “the realization of human sociality. The church is an inherently political reality, a way of living together. In her union with Christ, she is the reality to which marriage points; as an outpost of the heavenly city, she is the fulfillment of all polities.” The church “is the only true political body, the sole holy nation.” Not all ecclesiocentrists use the same rhetorical framework, but they do share a relatively high expectation for the church to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. The Bible is not merely a book to order the church’s sacramental life; it is a text that orders all of life一cultural, civil, familial, political一towards Christ’s coming kingdom. Modern Ecclesiocentrists include Timothy Keller, Neo-Calvinists, and Kuyperians, ecclesiocentric Protestants like Peter Leithart, prominent Anglicans like N.T. Wright, Michael Bird, modern Anglicans generally, and the vast majority of modern Evangelicals in North America.
For ecclesiocentrists, the church is capable, through its moral influence and sacramental effect, to invade society. Liturgy is a hallmark of this invasion. The church has its marching orders, it has its battle plans, and it has as its general—its priest-king in Jesus Christ. The borders between sacred and secular so assiduously maintained by Two Kingdoms types are ripped up with prejudice by ecclesiocentrists. That is not to say they desire a Christian Caesar. If anything, ecclesiocentrists see the state as an institution that needs to be conquered by the church, or at least pacified and made moral by the ecclesial society.
In Jesus and the Powers, N.T. Wright and Michael Bird make the point that “even amid the upheaval of nations, God dispenses in history and through history his common grace to all. God’s goodness finds its way into our lives and homes despite the terror and trauma that ravages different regions of our world.”[2] The means God uses to give the world his sacramental grace is the church, but his common grace is furthered through the actions of Christians working in all spheres.
N. Gray Sutano and Croy Brock, leading scholars of Neo-Calvinist Herman Bavinck, propose that “Christianity doesn’t need a single culture or philosophical handmaiden but rather is pliable and intellectually versatile. It’s free to use any philosophy or culture it finds, it can reshape any philosophy or culture it encounters, and it isn’t married to any single intellectual or cultural milieu.” The church is something different; natural associations do not bind it. That is because the church itself is the true society of God. “Too often,” Sutano and Brock argue, “presentations of Christianity can look suspiciously like a call to a conversion to a particular nation’s culture or a philosophical system rather than a conversion to the universal claims of Christ.”
Given the church’s ability to supersede natural associations, ecclesiocentrists understandably put a premium on the church’s right action and declaration. The church is responsible for being the truest society in human existence. Therefore, it had best not make mistakes in theology or political philosophy. As with the Two Kingdoms devotees, the disagreements among ecclesiocentrists are intense precisely because of their shared expectations. The crackup of modern movement Evangelicalism is one example. The migration of former Acts 29 disciples into the orbit of Douglas Wilson and Moscow Idaho, and vice versa, and the fracture of groups like The Gospel Coalition along socio-political lines, illustrates how seriously ecclesiocentrists take the church’s voice on questions of society and politics.
In the case of both Two Kingdoms proponents and Ecclesiocentrists, they will find themselves in company that they may not expect regarding political theology. But a more accurate understanding of these divisions will be helpful in the long run and will mitigate reductionistic name-calling. Personalities and vibes, sensational and alluring as they are, don’t lead to understanding. But dispassionate appraisal of political theology will.
Miles Smith is Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College. He is the author of three books, and writes regularly at popular and scholarly outlets. He attends Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves on the Ecclesiastical Court of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word. He is a licensed lay catechist and lay reader.
[1] David VanDrunen, A Biblical Case for Natural Law (Acton Institute, 2006), ch. 4.
[2] N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Zondervan Reflective, 2024), ch. 1.