Did Everything Good in the State Come From the Church?

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americans tend to assume that we cannot have religious freedom without a separation of church and state. But Leithart shows that Constantine created true religious freedom almost a millennium and a half before the US Constitution and within a Christian empire. How did he do this?

First of all he didn't try to turn the church into an arm of the state. Constantine tried to reform his empire with the gospel of Christ, but he did not try to control the church. He respected the church as a distinct polis with its own sphere of authority. For instance, he called the council of Nicea but didn't attempt to determine its outcome. He tolerated paganism in the civil realm, but let the church carry on its own culture war with the empire's pagan past. Compare this to conservatives turning the Christian Coalition of the 1990s into a religious arm for the Republican party (See Stephan Carter's God's Name in Vain).

Now we might consider Constantine's Christian reforms of the Roman state dangerous, but without them, Leithart points out, the state would have continued to allow men to abandon their wives through divorce, treat their unwanted infants as disposable property, sell their children into slavery, and enjoy murder in the gladiatorial arenas as entertainment. Before Constantine, equality could not be assumed. That came from the Christian doctrine of creation, which taught that all people are made in the image of God.

Leithart shows that sacrifice to the Roman gods and the deified emperor was the central religious act in a very religious empire. Constantine broke with the pagan Roman past by not offering the customary sacrifices after his triumph at the Milvian Bridge in 312. He turned the back the demise of the empire by looking out for the disadvantaged. He gave tax breaks to poor parents who couldn't afford to raise their children. Constantine reformed the corrupt judicial system of Rome by turning justice for the those who couldn't afford representation over to ecclesiastical courts.

Constantine had his faults but he knew that the state needed the moral authority of the church in order to defend women, children, and the poor. We are now losing the ground he gained by promoting a secular understanding of the separation of church from the state. Without a transcendent basis for our laws everyone does what is right in their own eyes. There are no absolutes in Israel, and we are re-paganizing at an alarming rate with abortion, no-fault divorce, and commercial combinations that widen the gap between rich and poor.

Would to God that more Christians would, like Leithart, defend Constantine instead of Congress.


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