The Loyal Rebels

When faced with accusations of civil disorder and state corruption, Christians can be tempted to despair over our response. The cry for justice and the call to obey the state present a seeming contradiction for believers. Some want to revolt against the powers that be while others want to support the lawful authorities. It's a tricky thing, for sure, but we have reason to hope that the testimony of the Bible has not failed us here.

The beauty and the difficulty of the classical Christian view of the state is its complex realism. The endemic corruptness of humanity demands an agent of force to curtail the worst of our natures. Without security we cannot have even the limited human flourishing possible in a post-Fall world. However, as the state, like Soylent Green, is made of people, this same corrupted human nature adheres to those humans comprising the state.

We hear that we are not to put our trust in princes, yet we also hear that we are to pray for the peace of a Babylon, a state which was hardly the acme of enlightened rule. Paul can describe the state as the minister of God and Peter can call on Christians to submit to the government, all in the context of a Roman system that makes American cops look like a bunch of fuzzy kittens. Yet, that's kind of hard to say, isn't it? Saying, "You don't have it so bad as others," works about as well in this context as it does telling someone that their physical pain or loss of their liberty isn't as bad as so and so over there has it.

Christianity offers contingent support to the state because it recognizes what the state truly is, a stopgap measure for the post-Fall, pre-glorification world that was never intended as the final guarantor of justice. In this way Augustine of Hippo was able to offer robust support of state authority even as he railed against all governments as nothing more than bandits whose territory increased enough to be called a kingdom. Christianity offers neither an absolute support for the state nor suggests that our support for the state is conditioned on our political preferences.

Both the "Back the Badge" and the "No Justice, No Peace" crowds fail in the same way as they each assume there can be such a thing as an non-corrupt state. The first assumes that God's ordination of the state entails the inevitability of justice from such a pure source while the second believes that any sign of injustice means God has not ordained this state. Both underestimate the extensiveness of the Fall. Both absolutize the state in a way not found in the Bible.

While many think this is a problem, I don't think this is Christianity's great weak point but one of its great strengths. The Bible offers example after example of the need for a corrupted people to have a state to hem them in. Yet, it offers example after example of corrupted rulers making a mess of things. It offers, in the Fall, an explanation for the presence of injustice yet also, in the reality of a personal God who has created a good world and who is redeeming that world, it provides a hope for an expansion of justice in this world.

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, atheism offers no hope in the face of injustice and oppression. In a purely materialist universe human rights devolve into social conventions on the level saying "Excuse me," after belching, pleasantries with no enduring value. Christianity, on the other hand, offers someone to complain to. In his book, The Rebel, my favorite non-Christian writer, Albert Camus, said this, "The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. And so we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity."

Christianity provides the rationale for a state and the basis for strong opposition to that state.