The City of God and the City of Man

I have heard some say that the defining achievement of the West has been
to resolve the contest between religion and politics by conceiving of the
state as an independent source of human authority, deriving its legitimacy
not from divine commands, but from the will of the citizens whom it
represents.

A case in point.
Consider the U.S. Declaration of Independence, where it is
stated that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed." Although the Founding Fathers of
America appealed "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our
intentions," they declared a new government "in the Name, and by the
Authority of the good People of these Colonies."

God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal
authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture.
Now comes the controversial part, with which I believe some people may
disagree. But alas, "let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

This disentanglement of politics from religion was made possible by
Christianity.
Ideas such as
Augustine's theory of the
two cities and the
medieval doctrine
of the two swords produced a Western conception of the
state as an independent, secular jurisdiction. This conception is the
necessary prerequisite of politics understood as a distinct human activity,
rather than as the perpetuation of some other sort of activity in another
guise (e.g., worship or warfare). Even those who do no agree about the
ultimate source of religious authority can mutually submit to the merely
temporal jurisdiction of the earthly state.

The achievement of establishing the independent sphere of politics is what
distinguishes the West from "the rest," and particularly from the Islamic
world. Only in Hindu civilization are religion and politics also so
distinctly separated. As href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684844419/104-6666105-6704726?vi=glance">Samuel
Huntington states succintly,

In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy,
God is Caesar's junior partner. The separation and recurring clashes
between church and state that typify Western civilization have existed in
no other civilization.

Unlike Christianity, which distinguishes the things of Caesar from those of
God, Islam recognizes neither "the state as an independent object of
loyalty" nor "secular ... jurisdiction as a genuine source of law," to
quote href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1882926811/qid=1046812871/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-6666105-6704726">Roger
Scruton; on the contrary, it conceives of the universal divine law as a
"fully comprehensible system of commands." It is thus unable to sustain
politics as a distinct form of activity. This refusal to recognize any
source of political authority independent of the divine command tends
either to undermine the state altogether (whenever it is charged with
having departed from an ideal of religious purity) or to usher in
totalitarianism (since a state charged with implementing divine decrees
must inevitably be concerned with our spiritual perfection).

Separation of Church and State

In our day, talk of the separation of church and state functions primarily
as an easy way out, a way of avoiding the more challenging task of
constructing a richer, more nuanced set of distinctions. For what
Christian thought has really done has not been to separate church and
state, but rather to distinguish between the City of God and the City of
Man, which is not exactly the same thing. Speaking of the "separation of
church and state" encourages the mistaken assumption that the state can
sustain itself, chugging along indeginitely without the needing to
maintain, or even recognize, the foundations upon which it rests.

If the vision of politics as a distinct, limited form of human activity
owes its existence to conceptual possibilities opened up by
Christianity--and I think it does--then the continued vitality of
Christianity cannot be a matter of political indifference. That is not to
say that the state itself must again be openly religious. It is to say,
though, that the categories in which these distinctions are discussed, e.g.
private and public, cultural and political, individual and social, require more thorough elaboration.

Christians in the West may not recognize it, but a vital and thoughtful faith helps to sustain the institutions they cherish. When faced with an enemy who is
uncompromisingly committed to the total destruction of what he perceives to
be the corrupt, decadent, 'godless West,' it is important to recognize and
defend the spiritual foundations of those beloved institutions.