A Guide to Political Theology: Its Key Concepts and Perspectives

Editor’s note: The articles in our political theology series are the opinions of the authors, not those of Logos. We are publishing a breadth of voices to reflect varying perspectives within the church.

Political theology refers to

a discipline of theology dedicated to applying the resources of Christian theology to the interests or questions of politics, i.e., how society is organized.

This includes exploring questions such as the origin, responsibility, and domain of government, the appropriate means of government (e.g., law, lethal coercion), the moral foundations of civil law, the relationship between church institutions and the state, the responsibility of Christians to the state and society, and the material and social implications of the gospel of the kingdom.¹

More and more people of faith have developed an interest in political theology. The reason isn’t hard to grasp: They hope for theological guidance to help them navigate their political and public lives. What does Christian theology say about how I should vote, or what the government can or cannot do, or the rights of workers, or the status of immigrants? Issues such as these have become increasingly complex over time. Unsurprisingly, people look to Scripture and theology for help to discern the proper way forward.

The article aims to offer some historical context for Christian political theology and outline common approaches to it, providing readers helpful resources for deepening their understanding of these issues.

The fountainhead of political theology: Augustine’s City of God

Traditionally, St. Augustine’s City of God has served as a key text defining broader debates around political theology. Augustine wrote to refute a claim made by pagan philosophers and rulers in the late Roman Empire that the ascent of Christianity caused the decline of Rome. Augustine sought to rebut that claim, arguing that rather one could blame Rome’s decline on its traditional paganism.

Augustine explored the relationship between Christian faith and earthly power and goods. Over the course of his argument, he developed an account of Christianity’s relationship to the public square that is still without peer. Specifically, Augustine’s account centers around the idea of two cities which are governed by two loves:

Two loves, then, have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city, and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city. Thus the former glories in itself, and the latter glories in the Lord. The former seeks its glory from men, but the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of our conscience. The former lifts up its head in its own glory; the latter says to its God, My glory, and the one who lifts up my head (Ps 3:3).²

That being said, the City of God itself cannot be reduced to a single political theory. So while it remains an essential conversation partner for anyone interested in political theology, Augustine’s monumental work did not solve all the problems that political theology seeks to address. Debates and ambiguities persisted.

Medieval and early modern political theology

One of the central problems that occupied medieval and early modern Christians in the Western church concerned the specific relationship between church authority and the authority of what at the time was called “the magistrate.” The latter referred to local lords or kings: those authorities who enforced the rule of law in a given community. How does the authority of church and magistrate relate?

Roman Catholicism and the “two swords”

One of the dominant approaches to this problem came from Pope Gelasius in a letter, now known as Famuli vestrae pietatis, to a Byzantine emperor in 494. Briefly stated, Gelasius conceived of authority as two separate “swords,” one set above the spiritual order and another over the temporal. One sword was held by the Church and the other held by the Emperor. He understood the two swords to belong to two separate offices. But they also cannot be kept completely separate from one another.

For much of the remainder of the medieval era, one of the foremost political questions was which sword ruled the other. This conflict would show up most obviously in questions like: Who gets to appoint bishops in a specific political society? Another common problem concerned who had authority to judge a member of the clergy who had committed a crime.

The widely known twelfth-century conflict between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, involved a variety of disputes between the English crown and the Roman Church over these matters. The eventual outcome in that case was the murder of Becket and public repentance of King Henry. But while that story is especially well known today for its grisly ending, with the Archbishop of Canterbury literally murdered in a church at the king’s command, the problems and controversies central to it were rather common throughout the medieval world.

For Roman Catholic Christians, the general (though not uncontested) view was that, while kings and other lords wielded power that was different in nature than the power of the church, those rulers were themselves members of the church. They were therefore obliged to submit to the teachings of the church as they executed their office as magistrates. This is why, for example, Becket was able to oppose King Henry as he did and why the king was eventually forced to make a public display of penitence for his actions.

Magisterial Protestants and two kingdoms theology

The view of those known as “Magisterial Protestants”—what we now know as the Lutherans, Reformed (or Calvinists), and Anglicans—differed from Rome’s, but not necessarily in the way that modern readers might expect. The chief problem that concerned the Magisterial Protestants was how to properly constrain the authority of the church.

The church’s authority, they believed, extended only so far as what is “expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (WCF 1.6). Therefore, they rejected not only the idea that the church needed to insert itself between God and the individual believer as an arbiter of truth, but also the idea that the church was competent to tell magistrates how to govern aside from calls to promote true religion. Rather than thinking chiefly about the Pope’s relationship to temporal authority, Protestants instead thought about the relationship between the church, Scripture, and temporal authority.

These figures affirmed a doctrine now sometimes known as the two kingdoms. Two kingdoms theology holds to a temporal kingdom, governed by law and made up of various public institutions, and a spiritual kingdom in which individual sinners stand before a holy God.

This notion of the spiritual kingdom served to rebut the Roman idea that the church necessarily mediated between God and individuals. Instead, the Reformers insisted that each of us must stand before God and, moreover, that through prayer and Scripture each of us has direct access to God. On the other hand, the temporal kingdom saw to the life of local communities, insuring peoples lived justly and according to God’s law.

While the Reformers still expected the magistrate to advance “true religion,” this distinction presupposed a division of labor, one might say, between “magisterial” public authority and “ministerial” public authority. Ministers could call the magistrate to protect and advance the cause of true religion, but they could not tell him what the tax rate ought to be. Meanwhile, the magistrate was responsible to protect the purity of the church, but was not able, for example, to appoint pastors or—in some cases—enforce church discipline.³

Anabaptists and radical political theology

Finally, a third group called the Anabaptists or “radical Protestants” arrived at an entirely different approach.

For the Radical Protestants, the heart of Christian practice was simple obedience to the plain moral teachings of Scripture, usually defined by the Sermon on the Mount. Their insistence on plain sense hermeneutics, however, was immensely disruptive to the public life of Christian Europe.

Most Radicals, for example, refused to take vows because of Jesus’s command to let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no (Matt 5:33–37; see also Jas 5:12). This rendered them unable to hold public roles that required oaths as part of assuming the office.

Additionally, due to their understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, many Radicals were pacifists, which further placed them outside the mainstream of European Christendom since they refused to serve in the military.

Finally, the Radicals universally rejected infant baptism, arguing instead that baptism was a practice reserved only for those able to actually choose to be baptized and to adopt the yoke of Christ. This meant that the Radicals also started their own churches and usually refused to participate in the established churches of their local regions and governments.

Practically speaking, the heart of the Radical tradition was the insistence that true political community only existed within the church since all communities outside of the church were governed by norms and practices contrary to biblical teaching. One might still participate in such communities as an inevitability or necessary evil, but all communities outside the church were inherently compromised and lacked the essential characteristics of authentic community.

As a result, their critics sometimes attacked them as anarchists since their separatist political theology precluded them from serving in government and would, therefore, lead to the abolition of government should a sufficient number of Christians adopt them. Additionally, many European Christians were concerned about the potential threat of the Ottoman Empire invading Europe and imposing Islam on the regions it conquered. These concerns further weakened support for the Radicals.

The loss of institutional unity and the seeds of secularism

Three addition dynamics in the early era modern raised further questions for political theology:

First, could Christian nations who adopted different theologies coexist peaceably or were wars of religion inevitable as long as Christendom remained divided? Such differences led to the Wars of Religion in seventeenth-century Europe, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Second, in an era with the printing press and relatively high degrees of literacy, questions of authority became immensely complex. No longer could one simply assert, “The Bible is authoritative!” in Protestant nations or even, “Church teaching is authoritative!” in Catholic ones. When Christian citizens of a nation did not agree on what the Bible said about a given issue, they had to develop other arguments which would not involve debates over the meaning of Scripture. This problem produced the early origins of the idea of a “secular” government or public square, even when an entire nation was basically Christian.

Third, did one have the right to revolt against unjust political authority? And if so, how was it defined? French Protestants began to consider these questions in the aftermath of the St. Barthlomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Later, English separatists would take up the same questions as they opposed the English state church. These questions became central in the British revolution of 1688, as well as the American Revolution of the 1770s.

The emergence of each of these complex political questions arose from the loss of institutional unity in the Western church and created substantial challenges for political theology in the early modern era.

Political theology in the modern era

As political norms changed and new technologies emerged, political theology necessarily evolved in order to account for increased social complexity as well as newly emerging forms of public life.

“The social problem”: New conditions and new concerns

By the nineteenth century, a number of political, technological, and economic developments had taken place which fundamentally changed the shape of Christian political theology. At center were the twin late-eighteenth century revolutions in America and France, both of which combined to end Christendom and establish, for the first time, purely secular political systems and industrialization.

As the West industrialized and urbanized, society had become far more complex. In earlier eras, a given society consisted basically of three classes of people: those who fought (political rulers), those who prayed (church leaders), and those who worked (everyone else—and most of them were peasant serfs whose livelihood and social standing was tied to their lord’s). But with industrialism and urbanization, people became far more mobile, wealth grew, and new classes of self-made propertied men (not just nobles) arose. New types of social organizations emerged.

Factories also meant that one could employ huge numbers of people. But what were their rights as workers? What rights did business owners have regarding their employees? And how did the church’s authority operate in a world of growing pluralism in which nations showed both a growing number of churches alongside a growing number of religiously unaffiliated people? Finally, how did the church address the reality of political parties and revolutionary political movements that sought to create utopias in this world and that were, sometimes, quite hostile to Christian faith?

As a result, the problem facing Christians concerned with the shape of common life now encompassed far more issues and questions. It was no longer sufficient to define the relationship between “ministerial” and “magisterial” authority.

For this reason, many European thinkers, including both Pope Leo XIII and the Dutch Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, began to explore, at roughly the same time, what came to be known as “the social problem.” The social problem was a shorthand for all of those newly arrived complicating factors influencing public life in European Christendom and in North America.

Catholic social teaching

The earliest key treatment of this “social problem” within the Roman Church came from Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 published a document called Rerum Novarum. Rerum Novarum sought to articulate a form of public life in which the rights of workers to earn a just wage and be treated fairly were balanced alongside the rights of property owners to make a profit and create wealth. It condemned the excesses of both a laissez-faire free market capitalism of the sort seen in many factories of the day and also the excesses of Marxist political philosophy.

Pope Leo would draft several more encyclicals related to such questions, but the next key developments would come from future popes, a task which has continued down to the present day. The subsequent teachings from the various popes all explain and clarify further aspects of what is now known as “Catholic social teaching” or “Catholic social doctrine.”⁴

• Quadragessimo Anno, published in 1931 by Pius XI, further developed Leo’s thoughts on worker rights and made clear the church’s teachings on the right of workers to earn a “family wage” from their employment. A family wage referred to a wage sufficient to allow one worker to support an entire household, including a spouse and their children.
• Pacem in Terris, published by Pope St. John XXIII in 1963, described the nature of nation–states as they relate to the global community and the broader problem of peace between peoples.
• Blessed Pope Paul VI published Populorum Progressio in 1967, which explained the Catholic Church’s teachings on the idea of “progress.”

Pope St. John Paul II (1920–2005) likely did more to define and spread Catholic social teaching than any pope since Leo, writing a number of encyclicals which provided direction and guidance on issues of public life.

• Laborem Exercens continued the work of Leo XIII and Pius XI in their writings on economics and worker rights.
• Sollicitudo Rei Socialis gave a general statement of the Church’s approach to issues of social concern.
• The Church’s teachings on abortion and life were expressed in vivid terms in Evangelium Vitae, and Dignitatis Personae presented Catholic teaching on the issue of human dignity.

More recently, Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022) published multiple encyclicals on the topics of love and truth and wrote extensively on ecological topics. Pope Francis (1936–) has extended Benedict’s work on ecology in Laudato Si while also taking up the question of nations and nationalism in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti.

Kuyperianism and Neo-Calvinism

Amongst Protestants the key figures addressing “the social problem” were English “liberals” such as William Gladstone as well as the Dutch Calvinists. The latter group, known as Neo-Calvinists, included the author and theorist Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer, the politician and educator Abraham Kuyper, and the theologian Herman Bavinck.

Intriguingly, the Neo-Calvinist approach to these problems overlaps to a significant degree with Roman approaches. The Dutch were similarly alarmed by both the excesses of the laissez-faire capitalism and the Marxist revolutionary approach. Kuyper, for example, was deeply involved in organized labor and wrote extensively on economics.

Bavinck, meanwhile, attempted to incorporate nineteenth-century thought into a pervasively orthodox account of theology and ethics, which could then anchor a broader project of Christian renewal in response to the social problem. In addition to his theoretical work, Bavinck also wrote about the Christian family, arguing for its centrality to any Christian political account and offering a sketch of what healthy Christian households ought to look like.

Further Protestant projects

Whereas the Roman Church has an authoritative teaching office built into its institutional life that is passed on from one leader to another, no such office exists for Protestants. The work tends to stand more on its own rather than existing within a broader tradition of thought passed on from one generation to the next through the same institutions. As a result, one cannot easily trace the same sort of continuity amongst Protestant social teaching as one can for Rome.

Nonetheless, plenty of Protestant ethicists and theologians have taken up the social problem:

• Figures like Reinhold Niebuhr sought to develop a framework to preserve moral life and virtue within twentieth-century liberalism.
• Others, such as Paul Ramsey, worked specifically on the problem of Christian ethics. His work related to questions of political theology without being proper political theology itself.
• Finally, in the late-twentieth century the field of Protestant ethics and political theology would be defined by Stanley Hauerwas, representing the Radical tradition, and Oliver O’Donovan and Gil Mailaender, representing the Magisterial school.

Contemporary Protestant political theology: 3 primary paradigms

By the time we arrived in the twenieth century, a number of distinctive theo-political theories had emerged. In what follows, we’ll consider three dominant paradigms amongst American Protestants.

We should note, the groups described below are not defined by their position on specific policy questions but by how they imagine the relationship between Christian faith and political authority. Christians who agree on the following positions can, nonetheless, disagree on matters of specific policy.

Establishmentarianism

In establishmentarian, political theology is that in which the nation–state has an established church to which members of the state belong. This state church typically enjoys a preferential status relative to other religious bodies and receives taxes to support its ministry. It sometimes receives automatic appointments to government, such as the bishops of the Church of England serving in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords. Establishmentarian systems also sometimes require that certain public offices be held by members of the established church.

The most widely recognized form of establishmentarianism is something like the single national church in England or the Scandinavian countries. However, softer forms of establishment also exist.

For example, at the time that the United State’s Establishment Clause was written, it was still not unheard of for its individual states to have state churches. The Establishment Clause was only originally understood to ban federal recognition of a church. But states were free to do as they wished. In fact, the New England states kept state churches until the early nineteenth century, with the last one abolished in 1833. However, in the years since, the United States Supreme Court has extended the logic of the Establishment Clause to cover states as well as the federal government (see the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education). So to establish a state church today would be deemed unconstitutional.

Another form of soft establishment argues for state recognition of the Christian religion without requiring recognition of a specific church. For example, the constitution of the Southern African nation of Zambia declares it a “Christian nation,” but it does not have a recognized state church. One also finds this view amongst many Christian Nationalists, most explicitly in the work of Moscow, Idaho’s Douglas Wilson, who calls for religious establishment but not a formal ecclesial establishment.

Additionally, one could arguably classify theonomy as a form of establishmentarianism. Theonomy (from theo, “God,” and nomos, “law”), simply stated, is a political theology that argues that the civic laws of a nation should derive from biblical law. This represents an implicit form of religious establishment simply due to its use of religious texts as the basis of national civic law.

Proponents of establishmentarian theories argue that, not only should individuals offer God worship, but public institutions, including governments, should recognize God’s authority and offer him worship as well. Following Augustine’s The City of God, justice demands that the state honor God, for justice consists in rendering to someone what they are due, and God is due worship. According to establishmentarians, therefore, the state must formally recognize the Christian God.

Critics of this view argue that state churches tend to produce a shallow cultural Christianity that lacks sincere belief and zeal—as can be seen in contemporary England or the Scandinavian nations, many of which still have Lutheran state churches. Some also argue from belief in religious freedom that it is unjust for the state to privilege one specific church or faith in its public life. Finally, others argue that Scripture lacks warrant for the idea that Christian congregations or ecclesial institutions should be affiliated with governments.

Civic religion

Like establishmentarians, Christian civic religionists affirm that God is owed worship, not only by individuals but by communities. Therefore, public institutions are right and good to self-consciously recognize themselves as Christian, evaluate their work and goals based on Christian ideas, and hold themselves accountable to Christian moral norms and practices.

However, civic religion supporters hold that it does not follow that a nation–state should have an established church or endorse a specific form of Christian belief. Rather, they understand public institutions as having distinct roles within a broader social project, all of which tend toward Christian ends but in unique and separate ways.

Kuyper’s doctrine of sphere sovereignty exemplifies one such approach. As such, Kuyper did not support an established church; indeed, he saw the Dutch state church as being one of the chief problems of Dutch society in his day. Kuyper wanted a “free” church, i.e., one free from top-down direction from the state, as the state is not fit to direct church life since that is not its job.

This view, then, faces complications as it defines the work of government. On the one hand, civic religionists argue that the government is not competent or authorized to address matters of religious life and theology. On the other hand, they recognize that a government’s understanding of its own purpose and laws must come from somewhere.

Put another way, civic religion proponents agree with establishmentarians that government cannot be purely neutral on matters of religion. The surprising diversity within this school of thought seems to indicates the complexities inherent to it.⁵

So where does this leave them? Princeton professor of religion Jeffrey Stout in his book, Democracy and Tradition, reflects likely its best approach. By its very nature, civic religion generally works best in liberal democratic systems: civic religion and liberal democracy tend to go hand in hand. According to Stout, democracy is not a political ideology, but a political method—one in which neighbors and fellow citizens make claims and try to persuade each other about what their common life should look like.

In such a system, according to Stout, religious believers can and should make arguments based on their religious beliefs. To tell religious believers that they can’t bring their religious convictions into public life is to tell them that liberal democracy isn’t really open to their full selves, which includes their faith.⁶

The civic religion school is one which accepts this approach to politics. It seeks to bring its religious convictions into public life (unlike civic libertarians) while also not seeking to dominate their neighbors through coercion (unlike establishmentarians). Thus, Stout advocates a pragmatic approach to how one makes claims in public life, how one justifies those claims, and the degree to which one attempts to impose those beliefs on others through political action.

Proponents of this view will argue that it is both realistic to our cultural moment and true to how institutions organically function when the Christian presence within them grows and expands. Critics might reply that this view commits a category error by suggesting institutions outside the church can be “Christian” or should be governed by Christian norms and that attempting to do so invites abuse and corruption.

Civic libertarianism

The civic libertarian theory holds that a just political system requires that the government be “viewpoint neutral” on matters of religious teaching, perhaps even on questions of ultimate meaning and purpose. Therefore, a strict separation needs to exist between religious institutions and public institutions. This also means that when people of faith participate in public life, they must abide by its viewpoint-neutral rules and refrain from making religious claims or arguments.

Some within this group, following the Radical tradition more closely, argue that Christians cannot participate or engage public institutions, given the religiously neutral design of the latter. To do so would require them to compartmentalize their life, such that they are ruled by one belief system in one part of their life and another system in another area of life.

Other civic libertarians maintain that Christians can acceptably participate in public institutions, for example, as politicians, public school employees, public servants of other kinds. However, their behavior in those spaces, while influenced by their Christian beliefs and practices, must remain “viewpoint neutral” in some sense. For instance, a Christian politician, under this view, should not attempt to make the political institutions of his community somehow “Christian,” but should instead simply seek to ensure they are treating people fairly, are fulfilling their specific responsibilities to society, and so on. Christian belief will dictate that civic libertarians serving in public life be fair, honest, and hard-working, but the fruit of their work is not intended to be “religious” in nature or to advance narrowly Christian goals.

Alternative modern political theologies

While preceding theories of Christianity’s relationship to politics and public life have dominated viewpoints in Western and predominantly white contexts, theologians in the majority world, the Black church in American public life, and some Roman Catholic intellectuals have offered other accounts.

Liberation theologies

Though many will speak of “liberation theology” as if it is a single school of thought, this is somewhat misleading.

One form of liberation theology began to emerge in Central and South America in the late 1960s. Many governments in that part of the world at the time were right-wing military dictatorships. In response to those governments, Roman Catholic theologians in the region began considering ways in which the biblical motif of “liberation” should inform their approach to their particular political environment. Foremost amongst these theologians was Gustavo Gutierrez, who published his A Theology of Liberation in Spanish in 1971 and in English in 1973.

Gutierrez and other liberation theologians identified liberation from political and economic injustice as central themes in Christian thought and began to organize accordingly, often adopting Marxist forms of analysis of capital and political authority to supplement their thought. They worked with left-wing political groups to oppose the various military governments of their regions. In 1980 the Salvadorian government assassinated Oscar Romero, another figure in this movement, while conducting Mass in a Salvadorian church.

Because of the popularity of this branch of liberation theology in the Catholic world, the Roman church’s doctrinal authority, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued two documents on liberation theology in the mid-1980s.⁷ These documents, drafted under the authority of Pope John Paul II and written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI), condemned aspects of liberation theology that, in Ratzinger’s view, relied too heavily on Marxist thought, which he saw as fundamentally irreconcilable with Christian political theology. Ratzinger also condemned approaches to liberation theology which backgrounded or ignored the Bible’s more central focus on our liberation fromsin, emphasizing liberation from political injustice at its expense.

However, Ratzinger also noted that liberation from injustice was a key biblical motif and that his writings against aspects of liberation theology should not be taken as a wholesale condemnation of it. In these respects, Ratzinger’s work in these two documents stood in continuity with the long-standing teachings of Catholic social doctrine, which sought to define a pervasively Christian conception of public life that critiqued the excesses and errors of both Marxist systems of thought and capitalistic conceptions of work and freedom.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Black church has its own tradition of Black liberation theology, for which the late theologian James Cone is the primary voice. That said, the Black liberation theology tradition is quite broad. One can find accounts that are comparable to the heavily Marxist-influenced traditions that Ratzinger condemned, as well as accounts that are fully reconcilable with Ratzinger.

After all, liberation is a key motif throughout the Bible. The story of the exodus is both the Old Testament’s primary image of God’s redemptive work and a story of liberation from political injustice (amongst other things). Additionally, the Old Testament frequently teaches God’s care for the poor and warns of what can happen when God’s people neglect them. These themes recur in the New Testament throughout the Gospels, Acts, and many of the epistles, perhaps most notably James, where the author writes that “pure religion” consists of caring for widows and orphans (Jas 1:27).

For these reasons, it would be wrong to dismiss “liberation theology” in all its forms. Rather, we must do what Ratzinger did: Attend carefully to what is being said by specific proponents of liberation theology and assess it according to biblical texts and categories. Such care is especially important in light of more recent developments of liberation theology, such as queer theology and certain forms of feminist theology.

Catholic integralism

Catholic integralism is a theory of religious and political authority that experienced brief popularity in mid-to-late 2010s among some in the Roman Church, though mostly academics along with some monks and priests (it is hard to identify a strong integralist movement amongst ordinary Catholic lay people). Pater Edmund Waldstein, a leading intellectual Catholic integralist, defined it this way:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.⁸

Catholic integralism differs from civic libertarianism in that it says political authority cannot be religiously neutral. It differs from establishmentarianism in that it says political authority must be subordinated to the Pope. It differs from liberation theology in that it says temporal liberation is subservient to spiritual liberation.

Integralists argue that liberal theories of political life (meaning something like classical or philosophical liberalism, not “liberal” as in left-wing ideology) leave public life in a kind of abyss where communal life lacks the structure and direction that can only be provided by religion—specifically, the religious authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church, on the other hand, offers needed moral direction and support through its sacramental life.

That being said, it is very hard to foresee a scenario in which this theory could ever be applied on a mass level in a large, modern nation—not only because of the numeric decline of Catholicism in the Western world, but also because the theory itself is so extreme. Under an integralist system, for example, the Roman Catholic Church can use coercive force to compel any baptized Christian to submit to the Roman Pope. In other words, integralism would empower the Roman Church to theoretically torture or even execute baptized Protestant Christians who refused to submit to its teachings. Integralism remains of interest as an exercise in traditional Roman Catholic political thought, but beyond that it is of minimal relevance.

Conclusion

Political theology is unsurprisingly a topic of great interest in the early twenty-first century West. For many, a pervasive sense of social decay and even collapse has set in. Ours is a time that seems particularly anxious and uniquely fractious. This naturally raises (again) questions about how to order human communities, including political institutions, in light of Christian revelation.

The good news is that we have extensive resources throughout church history to guide us here. The wisdom of Scripture, as well as our fathers and mothers in the faith, serve to lead us as we strive to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:36–40)—including in our politics.

Further reading on political theology, provided by Jake Meador

• Eds. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Companions to Religion).
• Eds. David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon. Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998.
• John R. Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, Princeton University Press, 2016.
• William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011)
• James H. Cone. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 2011.
• Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. University of Notre Dame Press. 1991.
• James Davison Hunter. Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. Yale University Press. 2024.
• John Milbank. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd Ed. Wiley-Blackwell. 2006.
• Richard John Neuhaus. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Wm. B. Eerdmans Co. 1988.
• Reinhold Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Westminster John Knox Press. 2013.
• Oliver O’Donovan. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Instructions on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation.’ Vatican Polyglot Press. 1984.
• R. R. Reno. Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society. Salem Books. 2016.
• D. C. Schindler. The Politics of the Real. New Polity Press. 2021.
• Jeffrey Stout. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press. 2003.
• John Witte. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge University Press. 2008.

From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought

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A Theology of Liberation, 15th Anniversary Edition: History, Politics, and Salvation

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1. Kirk E. Miller (editor, Digital Content Team), in correspondence with Jake Meador, October 31, 2024.
2. Saint Augustine, The City of God, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. William Babcock, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century 7 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012–2013), 136.
3. The issue of who enforced church discipline—political authorities or ecclesial authorities—divided the early Protestants.
4. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has compiled a helpful guide to all of the relevant church documents on social teaching.
5. For instance, one can reasonably argue that, despite their differences, a politically liberal Catholic like Pope St. John Paul II, a confessional Presbyterian like Tim Keller, and an evangelical Baptist like Jonathan Leeman all belong to this school because each rejects both establishmentarian and libertarian frameworks.
6. Such stifling will also create frustration and resentment in believers and can contribute to those believers adopting more radical, anti-democratic beliefs over time. Stout identified and warned about this danger as early as 2004.
7. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” (Vatican City, 1984). Accessed November 3, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html; and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (Vatican City, 1986). Accessed November 3, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19860322_freedom-liberation_en.html.
8. Edmund Waldstein, “Integralism in Three Sentences,” The Josias (blog), October 17, 2016. https://thejosias.com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/.