This idea, sometimes called integralism, advocates for a form of government in which there are two rulers: one over the temporal realm, and one over the spiritual realm. However, in these two overlapping spheres of power, the temporal realm must be subordinated to the spiritual realm.  Yet, as Gabriel S. Sanchez explains, this doesn’t mean that the clerics of the church were simply handed over the full apparatus of the state.

Our rights-based system of government has been championed as the golden ring of political philosophy, and it has been wildly successful. But its success, as Patrick Deneen observed, is simultaneously its failure.

One reason why our rights-based system has failed is that it continually leads to the creation of new rights never before imagined by our constitution’s framers. So, the rights to life, speech, assembly, privacy, and property lead right on to rights to have an abortion, publish pornography, rioting, choosing your gender, and so on. In this way, it’s easy to see how nearly every letter of the alphabet can be added to the already long and clumsy list of rights known as LGBTQ.

Perhaps what is needed is what Adrian Vermeule calls, “common-good constitutionalism” to replace our rights-based system.

Politicians have long talked about the common-good, but the term is often misunderstood. A common good is not simply a shared good. A shared good is diminished when more than one person partakes of it.

The typical example to illustrate the difference between a shared good and a common good is the difference between a cake and a painting. When several people eat a cake, the cake is necessarily diminished. No one gets the pleasure of eating the whole cake. So a cake is not a common good. It’s a shared good. However, when several people view a painting the pleasure they receive is not diminished because they can all enjoy the whole of it. Thus, a painting is a common good (see Crean and Fimister here).

It’s also important to distinguish between private and public goods. A private good is defined as a good that can only be fully possessed by one person and is diminished when shared. Public goods are goods which refer to material things that can be put to use for all members of a given society. For instance, interstates, school systems, the internet, and so on. All of these can be properly classified as public goods (See Crean and Fimister).

What’s more, common goods are not truly good if they are severed from the ultimate good of God himself. The modern belief that society can share common goods apart from their relation to the ultimate good is the fantasy of the secularist (see Waldstein here).

Too often people think our political problems can be fixed by simply tinkering with the way in which our government functions. They fail to see that the level of corruption in our government is not merely a matter of function. It’s a matter of form.

Of course, no form of government on this earth is entirely free from corruption. Although, as Aquinas recognized, corruption in a Monarchy is more easily contained than corruption in other forms of government simply because of the numbers of people involved in governing.

The question that remains, then, is what form of government is best suited to promote and protect the common good?

Political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas talked about four main forms of government such as monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. It is surprising to many living today that in the minds of these three great thinkers (and many others) democracy was the least capable of promoting and protecting the common good. Indeed, it is clear that each of these men thought that some form of monarchy or mixed government was superior to democracy.

Roman Catholic social teaching during the High Middle Ages promoted the idea, not of monarchy (the rule of one), but of diarchy (the rule of two). This idea, sometimes called integralism, advocates for a form of government in which there are two rulers: one over the temporal realm, and one over the spiritual realm. However, in these two overlapping spheres of power, the temporal realm must be subordinated to the spiritual realm.

Yet, as Gabriel S. Sanchez explains, this doesn’t mean that the clerics of the church were simply handed over the full apparatus of the state. Rather, it means that the church exercises indirect temporal authority in the affairs of the state while keeping the spiritual realm safe from the state’s encroachment.

This is why it’s important to realize that the state’s recent overreach in the affairs of the church may not be solely a matter of the way our government functions. It may actually be a matter of its form. With this in mind, perhaps it’s time to return to a form of government that looks more like integralism or Christendom.

After all, Christendom doesn’t have to be construed exclusively as a Roman Catholic and Papal project. As Mark Tooley suggests, “Christendom is primarily a spiritual, political and cultural reality characterized by Gospel affirmation of human dignity rooted in each person as divine image bearer.” And it is not wholly unreasonable to believe that a Protestant form of government resembling Christendom may be more conducive to promoting the common good than our present rights-based system.

Jesus said to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars. But as one prominent blogger reminds us, “One of the things that does not belong to Caesar is the right to define what belongs to Caesar.”

It seems to me that the church has altogether ceded too much power to Caesar—things that are not properly or exclusively his. He has now encroached on the realm of the church, and for the most part the church has been his enabler.

Sadly, the common good has become the common casualty. More rights, as it turns out, actually means fewer goods.

Jim Fitzgerald is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and a missionary with Equipping Pastors International.