The Oldest Marriage: Sacred Power and the Sword

The entanglement of religion and political authority is as old as civilization itself. In the ancient world, there was no concept of a secular state; the gods and the city were one. Egyptian pharaohs were living deities. Mesopotamian kings ruled as stewards of divine will. The Greek polis organized civic life around its patron gods, and failure to honor them was not merely impiety but treason – as Socrates discovered when he was sentenced to death in part for introducing “new gods” to Athens.

Rome offers a particularly instructive case. Roman religion was less about personal belief and more about civic ritual – sacrifices, auguries, festivals – that maintained the pax deorum, the peace of the gods. Conquered peoples could keep their gods so long as they also honored Roman state religion. Jews received a special exemption as a religio licita. Early Christians, however, created a crisis precisely because they refused the civic rituals – they would not burn incense to the emperor’s genius – and their exclusivism was perceived not as a theological quibble but as a political threat to the social contract holding a diverse empire together. The persecutions were less about what Christians believed and more about what they refused to do.

The conversion of Constantine in 312 CE transformed this relationship in ways that still reverberate. He did not merely tolerate Christianity; he patronized it, built its churches, convened its councils, and inserted imperial authority into theological disputes. By the end of the fourth century, under Theodosius I, Christianity was the official state religion and pagan worship was banned. The marriage of church and state was consummated, and for the next millennium, European civilization would be defined by the partnership – and the rivalry – between spiritual and temporal authority.

The Protestant Reformation shattered the unity of Western Christendom and unleashed devastating religious warfare. The Thirty Years’ War killed an estimated eight million people in Central Europe. The French Wars of Religion saw Catholics and Huguenots slaughter each other for decades. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio – the ruler determines the religion of the state – which was less a triumph of tolerance than pragmatic exhaustion, a recognition that the attempt to impose religious uniformity by force had produced only ruin. It was from these ashes that the modern concept of the secular state would emerge, born not from atheism but from the desperate need to find a basis for civil order that did not depend on theological consensus.

The Enlightenment mounted a direct intellectual challenge to the fusion of religion and governance. Locke argued that the civil magistrate had no competence in matters of the soul. Jefferson and Madison, steeped in Enlightenment thought but also deeply influenced by the Baptist dissenter tradition that had suffered under Virginia’s Anglican establishment, crafted the American settlement: the First Amendment’s twin clauses prohibiting the establishment of religion and protecting its free exercise. For the first time in Western history, a major nation declared that the government would take no position on religious truth.

Yet the Founders’ choice did not produce a secular society in the European sense. Tocqueville observed in the 1830s that America was both the most religious and the most democratic nation on earth, attributing the former to the latter: religion thrived because it was not entangled with political power. Yet this formal separation coexisted with an informal Protestant cultural dominance that pervaded public life – the King James Bible in public schools, Protestant moral sensibilities shaping laws on marriage, alcohol, Sabbath observance, and sexual conduct. The informal Protestant establishment was so pervasive that it was invisible to those who benefited from it and oppressive to those who did not.

The twentieth century forced Americans to confront this tension. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), banning state-sponsored prayer and Bible readings in public schools, provoked outrage among religious conservatives who saw the decisions not as protecting religious minorities but as aggression against the nation’s Christian heritage. These decisions planted the seeds of the culture wars that would define American politics for the next half-century. The rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s – Falwell’s Moral Majority, Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family – made evangelical Christians a central Republican constituency, and questions of prayer, abortion, homosexuality, and “family values” became central to American political combat.

The early twenty-first century has intensified the debate through two contradictory trends. The religiously unaffiliated “nones” now constitute roughly 30 percent of the American population, and the association of organized religion with conservative politics has driven many progressives away from faith entirely. Yet among those who remain religiously committed, Christian nationalism – the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation with a special covenant with God – has become an increasingly organized political force. The result is a deepening polarization: a growing secular population that views any religious influence on governance as a threat to liberty, and a committed religious minority that views secularization as an existential threat to the nation’s moral foundations.

Every civilization has struggled with the relationship between sacred authority and political authority, and none has found a permanent solution. Religion has inspired extraordinary good – hospitals, universities, abolitionism, the civil rights movement – and extraordinary harm – inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, the justification of slavery. The same faith that moved Martin Luther King Jr. to demand justice moved slaveholders to demand obedience. The same Bible that inspired the Quakers’ pacifism inspired the Puritans’ theocracy. The question is not whether religion matters – it obviously does, profoundly – but how a diverse society can honor the deepest convictions of its citizens without allowing any one set of convictions to become the law of the land.

That question has never been more urgent. To hear why, we need to listen to five Americans who disagree about almost everything – except that the stakes could not be higher.