From the Christian standpoint, there is no absolute power or authority for Parliament congress, civil governments, or monarchs. All authority is delegated, limited, and under God in the various God-ordained spheres of life. In light of this, and because of the legitimate sword power given to the state, Kuyper rightly warns, “we must ever watch against the danger which lurks, for our personal liberty, in the power of the state.”[7] Professing Christians today have largely lost that vigilance which Kuyper enjoins. 

One of the most remarkable features of the late-modern era has been the strange coalescence of an incessant call for ‘total emancipation’ from the shackles of alleged oppression with an explicit totalitarian drift in political life. This perplexing and apparently contradictory element of life in the West manifests itself in a constant clamouring amongst the citizenry for complete self-determination, equality and self-expression in the name of ‘justice,’ whilst looking to the state as the appropriate organ to legislate into existence the rights, entitlements and freedoms being demanded. The reformed philosopher Jan Dengerink is to the point:

To [central government] is ascribed a clear supremacy over all other basically non-political groups. . . . This clearly shows its out-workings in the socio-political activities of various Western democracies, with all of the structural and spiritual leveling that follows from it . . . the result is always a heavy-handed bureaucracy, which in practice reduces the individual citizen to a nullity, one in which the technocrats and social planners get the final say . . .[1]

Statism Everywhere

In short, the majority of people have become statist in their thinking, implicitly or explicitly. The central meaning of statism is important to note. The presence of an ‘-ism’ should immediately alert the careful thinker to the possibility that there has been an exaggeration of a created and God-ordained structure (in this case the state) into something well beyond its intended function. Fundamentally, statism is a political system in which the sphere of civil government exerts substantial, centralized control over much of society, including the economy and various other spheres.

The dominance of statism today means that few people question anymore progressive, redistributive taxation (including inheritance taxes), national minimum wage laws, market interventionism, the suspension of civil liberties by unelected bureaucrats in the name of public health, state control and funding of medicine, education, charity and welfare, as well as a large share of the media such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The United States’ National Public Radio (NPR), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In Britain, the National Health Service alone is one of the world’s largest employers.[2] The public sector has become so vast that most people have grown accustomed to the state’s omnipresence.

The Church Swallowed up by the State

In this brave new world, the church herself is increasingly treated as little more than another social club with no more significance in culture than a cinema or sports team. Yet in the West we seem increasingly ready to allow the state to license, control, and regulate the churches. We seem ready to allow our churches to be locked them down indefinitely and at will if ‘public health’ functionaries of the state require it, and we cease pastoral counseling in biblical truth for those struggling with their sexuality.

This ‘omni-competent’ vision of the state has become so ubiquitous that many evangelical Christians have lost their cultural memory of God-given, pre-political institutions, rights, and responsibilities that are to be protected but are not created, controlled, or governed by the state. As a consequence, believers have floundered in their response to unprecedented and illegal lockdowns of the church, the growing collapse of civil liberties, the total control of education, expanded abortion, euthanasia, no-fault divorce law, the redefinition of marriage and family, homosexuality and transgender issues, largely because a scriptural world and life view norming our understanding of these questions and the role of the state with respect to them has collapsed. Instead, we have a liberal democratic and statist worldview drilled into us by the various organs of cultural life, where Jesus and a hope of heaven is spread on top as a sort of spiritual condiment giving religious flavor to secularism via the ministry of the churches.

What has become increasingly clear in recent decades is that we are entering an era of (a likely protracted) struggle for the freedom of the church in the West, not just with the state and its bureaucracy, but with various church movements themselves, some of whose leaders are emerging as committed apologists for statism! There has never been a shortage of cultural leaders ready to support and advise falling down before the image of the absolutist state when the music plays (see Daniel 3).

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