Worshipping the State is not inevitable; trashing the State is not inevitable. Rather, with moral clarity, moral conviction, and moral courage, Christians can—and should—seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, including public righteousness,  rendering to Caesar those things—and only those things—which are his.

We have no king but Caesar^[1]

Especially those of Caesar’s household^[2]

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s^[3]

God the Creator is a God of purpose, design, and order. His Creation is structured and ordered^[4] and He requires the collective conduct of those worshipping Him to be done “decently and in order.”^[5] What about society in general beyond the ecclesiastical realm? Here’s a hint: After liberating His enslaved people, God gave them law to structure and order society.^[6] Liberty evidently requires order and structure, not radical autonomy with unfettered “freedom,”^[7] or anarchy. This raises the question: What is the role of the State? If Caesar is the only king, should Caesar be functionally imbued with God-like attributes reaching, regulating, and even redeeming every crevice of society?  Alternatively, if Caesar is not the only king, should Christians just ignore or even despise the State? How should we view the State and its role today? Is it Savior, Suspect, or Servant? Lies that live distort the answers to these questions. Let’s get to the gist.

The State as Savior?

No pious Christian would ever crassly confess that the State is Savior; only Christ is savior, Yet, our conduct can often betray our confession. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a disaster, any disaster: Hurricane, tornado, wildfire, floods, pandemic, et al – anytime these occur, the knee jerk reaction functionally looks to the State to remedy the situation. And, even when not facing an emergent situation – education, health care, housing, poverty, inflation, social media, et al, the “first call” for solving societal issues seems to be the State, and in reality, its taxpayers.

Increasingly, the gut reaction of many citizens looks to the State to fix things. This reaction, however, is based on a lie for several reasons. First, the nature of the State is coercive; it bears the power of the sword.^[8] Put in more concrete terms: What do we really want officials with guns and bazookas to do? Accordingly, whatever the State touches will be subject to coercion; its only operative mode is inherently coercive. If this power is not defined and confined, it will, over time, reduce citizens to being subjects, restricting or eliminating liberty to innovate and otherwise flourish. When this occurs, the cultural mandate is stunted, undermining one of man’s purposes.^[9] Dictatorships may profit select individuals, but rarely, if ever, do they prosper a people as a whole: compare North Korea with South Korea.

Second, the State can never possess sufficient power and knowledge to salvifically regulate a nation into prosperity, let alone righteousness. To think otherwise embraces a utopian delusion and lives a lie. A State may gain or acquire significant power, but that power—no matter how significant—can never rival the Gospel’s power to rescue, heal, and save. It alone is the “power of God for salvation to everyone.”^[10]

And, even setting aside the State’s lack of power for generating eternal consequences, the State lacks both efficient and sufficient knowledge to make viable temporal differences concerning human action and economics.^[11] Managed economies are always mediocre economies doomed with persistent shortages, wide inflationary swings, and higher unemployment. The fundamental lie here is that it mis-orders the nature of productivity: Production must precede Consumption, not vice versa which all Keynesian managed solutions impose.^[12]

When the State is viewed as Savior and deploys its coercive power to impose price controls, rent control, crony capitalistic deals, tariffs, wage regulation, taxes, etc., based on this lie, economies—and human flourishing—diminishes. As we shall see, the State cannot save even temporally because it was never designed nor purposed to save. Yet, recognizing this truth often leads to another enslaving lie: maybe the State should be viewed not through utopian glasses as Savior, but through a cynical lens, as a necessary evil. Christians are told to reject and avoid the State since “politics is dirty,” always viewing the State with suspicion, cynicism, and skepticism.

The State as Suspect?

Maybe this quip only appeals to legal and political nerds, but it illustrates a point:

Did you hear about the Libertarian’s proposal to revise the 1^stAmendment?
Here’s the new language: “Congress shall make no law PERIOD!”

The idea here is that the State should do next to nothing; in fact some Libertarians actually believe in nearly zero State action.^[13] The assumption is that the State lacks competency or even moral illegitimacy for protecting and structuring ordered liberty. Libertarians instead believe that the unfettered market best orders society and solves its coordination problems. Libertarians are half right.

First, as the next section will show, the Biblical truth is that the State is both legitimate and limited – so far so good. However, while Scripture presupposes the morality of liberty-based markets,^[14] it is the virtuous market that Scripture embraces. Saying “markets are good” is not to say “all markets are good.” Unconstrainted markets such as those that Libertarians promote, operate to feed sinful man’s appetites. In other words, there always will be markets, that is, demand, for bad things that compromise or undermine human flourishing and ordered liberty: drugs, gambling, sex trafficking, child pornography, contract murder, fencing stolen property, stealing or forging art masterpieces^[15], medically mutilating and disfiguring children presenting with gender dysphoria^[16], et al. Relying solely on markets absent a moral compass ultimately leads to systematizing moral weakness and corruption.

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