An ecclesiocentric social and political theory recognizes the church as a polis—the true polis, pointing to the telos of human life.[1] The church ultimately submits only to divine authority, and God calls the church to embody and proclaim the truth of the gospel, along with its redemptive social and political implications. She invites all people to join her in recognizing and embracing the lordship of Christ. An ecclesiocentric theory recognizes ecclesiastical authority, rather than the civil authority, as the encompassing jurisdiction, the highest authority. What are the implications of ecclesiocentrism in a plural society—a society where deep differences with regard to ultimate questions and ethical norms, both among Christians and between Christians and non-Christians, continue to persist?

In this essay, adapted from my chapter in Hell Shall Not Prevail, I argue that an ecclesiocentric political theory provides a robust basis for religious tolerance and liberty, an alternative to both liberalisms and illiberalisms of fear—an ecclesiocentric liberalism, we might say. Ecclesiocentrism provides a firmer foundation for toleration and religious liberty than any attempt to, in political theorist Roxanne Euben’s words, “construct a just society without the transcendent foundations thought to have previously sustained it,” such as reason or revealed truth. Such attempts at antifoundationalist political theory flow from a liberalism of fear that is too shallow to provide a genuine basis for toleration and liberty. At the same time, an ecclesiocentric political theory need not require a return to religious persecution, an illiberalism of fear. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ecclesiocentrism and the ethic of Christian charity provide better foundations for respect of our neighbors, including religious toleration and liberty, than the liberalism of fear that undergirds a good deal of contemporary political thought. The ecclesiocentric basis of religious toleration and liberty is nothing less than the revealed truth of human nature, the drama of God’s redemptive work in Christ, and the command to love God and neighbor.

Antifoundationalism and the Limits of Fear

A major purported benefit of the tradition of liberal theory, including but not limited to something called “public reason” liberalism, is that it provides a basis for a stable political order in the context of pluralism with regard to what political philosopher John Rawls called “comprehensive philosophical doctrines,” especially religious pluralism. A preeminent, though much-critiqued twentieth-century philosopher of liberalism, Rawls roots the origins of liberalism in the search for a basis of religious toleration following the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the subsequent centuries. Rawls draws from fellow Harvard professor, political theorist Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear,” which “makes cruelty the first vice,” ahead of the other “ordinary vices” of hypocrisy, snobbery, and betrayal—and as opposed to “offenses against the divine order.” For Shklar, whose champions are Montaigne and Montesquieu, liberalism is not about promoting great virtues but about tamping down the fearsome vice of cruelty—a vice that religious exclusivism and fanaticism promote. In Ordinary Vices, she writes:

This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white.

Citizens of liberal societies must cultivate a form of courage and vigilance appropriate to a liberal order, a “liberal character” that promotes the self-control required for tolerance and respect for pluralism. The fear of religious persecution and interreligious strife that is central to this variety of liberalism often undergirds defenses of liberalism.

In Political Liberalism, Rawls purports to circumvent conflict over “the highest things,” providing a “freestanding” political conception of justice that proponents of many “comprehensive doctrines” can endorse. Rawls writes, “The most intractable struggles, political liberalism assumes, are confessedly for the sake of the highest things: for religion, for philosophical views of the world, and for different moral conceptions of the good.” He states that the only way to maintain agreement on a comprehensive doctrine is through oppressive coercion: “A continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power.” The freestanding political conception of justice based on an “overlapping consensus” that sits at the intersection of the various comprehensive doctrines provides the means for a democratic, and thus inevitably pluralistic, society to exist with fair terms of cooperation in a stable fashion.

As a number of writers and scholars—including proponents of modified forms of public reason liberalism—have argued, Rawls’s account of public reason overly constrains public discourse. Christians cannot be “reasonable” in the Rawlsian sense because they cannot accept the consequences of public reason if they prohibit advocacy for terms of cooperation that not all proponents of reasonable comprehensive doctrines share. That restriction would prevent Christians from promoting the personally—and social—redemptive implications of divine law and the gospel, including respect for the sanctity of human life and the truth that the ultimate end of human life is to know and love God. Christians must relentlessly propose—which is not to say demand at all costs—terms of cooperation that conform to these truths, regardless of whether proponents of other comprehensive doctrines endorse them. As John Paul II argues in Evangelium vitae, laws that do not properly respect life do not necessarily bind the conscience, regardless of their procedural propriety. The good is prior to the right.

More fundamentally, the motivational assumption that, “[t]he most intractable struggles . . . are confessedly for the sake of the highest things,” grounded in the liberalism of fear, is questionable. Certainly, the highest things have motivated conflicts, wars, and persecutions—not only are the rise of Islam, the Crusades, and the Inquisition all examples, but so too are secular higher things, such as ending the alienation of the working class under capitalism or renewing the national spirit under fascism. But desire for lesser goods like conquest (Roman wars of expansion), personal fame (Julius Caesar’s seizure of power), and profit (the slave trade) have also motivated purveyors of war and persecution. Probably these motives are mixed even for many participants in conflicts that are ostensibly religious in nature.

Further, the very absence of higher or comprehensive commitments can promote rather than prevent oppression and violence. Recall Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous opening to his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize in 1983, giving an account of the social calamities of 20^th century Russia, stemming from the Bolshevik Revolution:

Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older            people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia:       ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our    revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal          testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort    of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate     as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men     have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’

If commitments to higher things can lead to fanaticism and oppression, the abandonment of divine guidance and moral absolutes clears the way for unspeakable atrocities and mass violence. 

In addition, people often pursue not only oppressive, but also noble and benevolent undertakings “for the sake of the highest things.” Indeed, the democratic public culture on which Rawls relies has historically stemmed from such activity referencing higher things. Think of the religious grounding for the abolition movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights activism, not to mention the basic moral and spiritual beliefs once presumed to undergird American political institutions. Consider the following quotation from none other than then-Senator Barack Obama:

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before   entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings           Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in             American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious          language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their        ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by           definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian           tradition.

The Senator is quite correct.

A Rawlsian form of public reason liberalism, excluding the promotion of higher things in the public square, ultimately amounts to a secular establishment, requiring public reason to be based only on one faith: atheism, or at least the set of beliefs that happen to be shared by all, even if that convergence amounts to what many in the polity, namely most believers in the reality of the divine and of divine guidance for human life, consider a denial of fundamental reality.

Ultimately, only some form of adherence to higher principle can provide a foundation for even the virtues required of participants in a liberal polity. Some liberal thinkers have openly acknowledged this aporia at the heart of antifoundationalist accounts of liberalism. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty constructs a theory for a “liberal ironist,” eschewing metaphysical or theological foundations for preferring some social arrangements over others. Rorty sees that the void in antifoundationalist liberalism relates to the very essence of Shklar’s liberalism of fear: “For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question ‘Why not be cruel?’—no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible.” Liberal antifoundationalists base their theories on the liberalism of fear, but the antifoundationalism they turn to can provide no principled basis for objecting to the very cruelty they fear. If excessive or misdirected religious zeal is to be feared, so too is a philosophy that can give no reason to shun cruelty and respect others nor provide sturdy guidance as to the meaning and boundaries of human dignity.

Ross Douthat recently commented to this effect on the antiseptic, apparently humane barbarism reflected in Canada’s embrace of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide:

The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that         people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really ‘free’ to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments—these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story.

Such can be the fruits of a foundationless liberalism, protecting only individual autonomy.

Toward an Ecclesiocentric Liberalism

The church proclaims the gospel. She desires all people to come to saving faith in Christ. Christians talk incessantly of Christ, showing from the scriptures that He is the way, the truth, and the life, inviting all who will listen to join His kingdom (Acts 18:28; John 14:6). With Paul, we hope all come to faith, from those in the heights of power to the depths of obscurity (Acts 26:29). Yet, an ecclesiocentric political theory need not rely on oppression to enforce conformity to the teachings of the church or affirmation of the doctrines she promulgates. The church’s basic posture toward non-Christians respects their liberty to submit, or not, to the gospel. The church invites; she does not compel. The examples in the New Testament of apostles and disciples spreading the gospel—the sermon at Pentecost, Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch, all of Paul’s ministry—model personal preaching, debate, and conversation, reasoning together. The apostles and their followers invite the hearers of the gospel to submit to it. Insistence on the freedom to articulate those teachings and doctrines and advocate for submission to them does not require agreement within the polity. Jesus’ command to love neighbors—and enemies too—provides a clear foundation for toleration of unbelievers (Matt 22:39; 5:44). Unlike the liberal ironist, Christians can answer the question, “Why not be cruel?”

Rather than being born of inter-religious and intra-Christian persecution and religious wars, the idea of religious toleration and liberty entered Western thought amidst the experience of the pre-Constantine Christian church. As Robert Wilken argues in Liberty in the Things of God, church fathers and writers in the first few centuries after Christ’s ascension were the first in Western history to develop a theory of religious liberty, a theory with a distinctly ecclesiocentric basis. Wilken’s work is a corrective to the narrative of religious toleration and liberty on which the liberalism of fear rests.

The church father Tertullian (AD c. 155–220) makes what may be the first explicit reference to “freedom of religion” in his Apology, critiquing the suppression of Christianity: 

Let one man worship God, another Jove; let this man raise suppliant hands to heaven, that man to the altar of Fides; let one (if you so suppose) count the clouds as he prays, another panels of the ceiling; let one dedicate his own soul to his god, another a goat’s. Look to it, whether this also may form part of the accusation of irreligion—to do away with freedom of religion, to forbid a man choice of deity, so that I may not worship whom I would, but am forced to worship whom I would not. No one, not even a man, will wish to receive reluctant worship.

Wilken also quotes Tertullian’s letter to Scapula, the Roman proconsul of Africa, Tertullian argues that alternative religious practices do not harm the believer and that genuine belief cannot be coerced, evincing the idea of a generalized principle of religious freedom: “It is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions; the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by choice not coercion that we should be led to religion.” The idea of religious freedom has distinctly Christian roots. 

Wilken argues that these roots are distinctly ecclesiocentric: “The phrase ‘freedom of religion’ enters the vocabulary of the West with reference to the privileges of a community, not to the beliefs of individuals.” While this may put the case a bit too strongly—we have just seen Tertullian relate religious freedom directly to the beliefs of individuals—Tertullian writes in defense of the church against persecution. In the Apology, he describes the church as a distinctive association, a body sharing a common way of life. Evoking Paul’s body imagery for the church, Tertullian characterizes the church as a “society (corpus) with a common religious feeling, unity of discipline, a common bond of hope.”

We can derive a principle of toleration from the pattern of covenantal and salvation history. As Paul writes, “when we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Since God is patient, we also should be patient (2 Pet 3:9). The Old and New Testaments are replete with passages urging respect and toleration for foreigners and aliens, and even suggesting that the people of God should identify with foreigners and aliens (Exod 22:21). Christ submitted as a suffering servant for the good of others. Likewise, the church. Members of the church are to have the same mind as that of Christ, a mind of self-sacrifice and love exhibited in His submission to the cross (Phil 2:5–11). There are clear scriptural grounds for a high degree of tolerance for dissent from true doctrine and worship in private.

While the church need not wield state power, the church invites the Christian or church-responsive magistrate to submit the polity to God and the teachings of His church. While current U.S. constitutional doctrine holds that any religious establishment must perforce also impose on religious free exercise, and while there is intersection between the two, there are forms of religious establishment that do not impose on religious free exercise. Americans often forget that national exemplars of liberalism and religious liberty such as Great Britain and Germany also maintain governmental religious establishments.

Further, the church could conceivably delineate the true doctrine and ask for the idolatries, false religions, and heresies to be suppressed or confined to a private realm. Yet there is a strong case for religious toleration and liberty even in a highly church-responsive polity. That case is grounded in the most foundational sources of the Christian faith, including the New Testament. In a Christianly inspired or responsive regime, charity and mercy should be considered supreme values, at least in terms of the church’s guidance toward the civil realm. Only if suppression of false religion can accurately be characterized as loving could the church commend it.

Let’s pause there—concern for the immortal souls of all members of the polity, believers and unbelievers, might suggest that repressing false teaching could be loving. Genuine promotion of a person’s good might require helping him or her accept the gospel for the good of his or her soul. Toleration of false teaching and worship in private does not necessarily require protection of public expression and proselytization of falsehood.

Yet the presence of false teaching in a society, while bringing the possibility of contagion, can also provide opportunities for clarifying and vivifying truth. Some writers have gone so far as to suggest that orthodoxy—or at least the recognition of orthodoxy—results from heresy; the need to respond to false teaching gives rise to vigorous portrayals of the truth. The church’s authority is weakened if it does not rest on clear and compelling presentation of truth, instead relying heavily on the civil magistrate’s suppression of falsehood. The church should not operate from a position of fear, but of confidence and love.

What’s more, though there is clearly an Old Testament source for suppression of blasphemy, heresy, and idolatry (Deut 17:2–7), the idea that the civil magistrate or a church official should execute a person for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament. The primary forms of discipline and punishment the New Testament identifies are rebuke for persistent sin (1 Tim 5:20) and withdrawal of association in extreme circumstances (1 Cor 5:9–13). When it comes to false teaching and “stupid, senseless controversies,” Paul instructs Timothy and Titus to avoid such things if possible, and to gently—or “sharply,” in some circumstances—rebuke and correct false teaching (2 Tim 2:23–26; Titus 1:13). The ultimate form of punishment seems to be withdrawal of fellowship.

No doubt, in a church-responsive polity, there would be limits to religious tolerance and liberty, just as there are in a liberal society. In a scenario where the church had the ear of the civil magistrate, the magistrate might impose stricter blasphemy laws and other restrictions on public expression than have come to be identified with liberal political order. Such laws need not conflict with religious toleration or liberty, as there is a distinction between protecting public expression of worship or arguments for false religion and blasphemy. Further, the communal sense of religious practices that religious liberty does not protect—the “just demands of public order,” as Dignitatis humanae puts it—will be shaped by a Christian sense of society and the common good, which will be reflected in law, just as a liberal society might determine, for example, that only two people can form a marriage and make other such determinations based on the background culture.

Let Us Reason Together

The Christian claim that “Jesus is Lord” and the apostle Peter’s dictum, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) suggest recognition of divine sovereignty above all human authority. The church as an institution holds “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and is endowed with an authority to bind and loose that likewise transcends and exceeds the authority of all other institutions (Matt 16:19). In the Great Commission, Christ instructed His followers to spread the word and teach the gospel and obedience to God. The apostle Paul modeled the discharge of the commission, proclaiming the gospel and inviting all to heed it, from those in the synagogues and agoras to those in the seat of civil power.

The Christian cannot reason about constitutional essentials—the extent of personal liberty, the family structure, the status of the church, the rights and duties of the members—without reference to the sovereign Lord and His bride, the church. Rather, the church and her members invite all people and nations to submit to divine authority, including in matters of constitutional structure and policy. She calls all nations to do justice. The Christian, thus, cannot submit to Rawls’ crabbed and sectarian understanding of public reason, grounded in a liberalism of fear that pursuit of the highest goods inevitably results in persecution and religious wars.

Yet, substantive ecclesiocentric foundations provide a sturdier basis for religious liberty than antifoundationalist forms of liberalism. These foundations militate against the alternative of an ecclesiocentric illiberalism of fear. If Shklar is wrong that the religious wars “forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties,” at least Christian charity rebukes the construction of the very sort of persecuting society the early church faced and in which the Christian case for religious liberty was born. Christian charity rebukes cruelty.

Peter Leithart summarizes the theological and ecclesiocentric bases for religious liberty: 

Liberty in the things of God has been founded on the dignity of human beings made in the image of God, on God’s desire to be worshiped in sincerity, on the church’s independence as a polity separate from the state, on general limits to civil authority. These arguments are theological, and most are specifically Christian; far from being a flaw, their overtly theological character is their chief virtue.

Though, as Leithart stresses, “religious liberty cannot be absolute,” along with the recovery of a thick ecclesiology and the boldness of the ecclesiocentric approach to politics should come a recovery of respect for religious toleration and liberty, based on the very manner of life the churches model and proclaim, in submission to a loving God.

Just as the churches formed Christians who were faithful even unto martyrs’ deaths centuries ago, perfect love may once again drive out fear. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the religious wars, and the Second Vatican Council, Christians have long shed the persecuting zeal and the illiberalism of fear; indeed, these experiences and developments have taught real lessons that we should not lose. Let us now escape the confines of the liberalism of fear. An ecclesiocentric liberalism, which may very well be compatible with a modified form of public reason liberalism, can succeed where liberalisms and illiberalisms of fear fail. Let us openly, publicly reason together.

Ben Peterson is an assistant professor of political science at Abilene Christian University and a member of Civitas, hosted at Theopolis Institute. 

[1] James R. Rogers develops this argument more broadly in his chapter, “Church as Polis, Church as Ethnos, Church as Oikos: Ecclesiocentric Political Theory,” in Rogers James R., and Peter J. Leithart (eds), note 1.