Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

by William T. Cavanaugh

This book amounts to an argument that a third option is more plausible: the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation-state.

what we have seen in government bailouts is not so much the solution to the deeper problems behind the economic crisis as it is a deferral of the consequences to some later time. Governments have rescued the most reckless of the players in the swaps market with borrowed money after having steadfastly refused to regulate it.

Why use the language of salvation when discussing the state? I don't believe that the state can be understood without theology.

The story of the death of the sovereign God and his rebirth in the sovereign state is not a story of the progressive stripping of the sacred from some secular remainder. It is instead the transfer of care for the holy from church to state.

we want the state to absorb the risk involved in living a mortal human life. We want the state to defer the consequences of our actions to some undefined future. In other wo...

My purpose in this book is to help Christians and others to be realistic about what we can expect from the "powers and principalities" of our own age, and to urge them not to invest the entirety of their political presence in these powers.

the idea that Christianity belongs to some special, nonempirical realm of "religion," cordoned off from some other essentially distinct realm of human behavior called "politics," is an invention of the early modern era that facilitated the expansion of civil over ecclesiastical power.

A Christian should feel politically homeless in the current context, and should not regard the dreary choice between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, as the sum total of our political witness.

In this book I point to church practices that resist the colonization of the Christian imagination by a nation-state that wants to subordinate all other attachments to itself.

All too often, Christian social ethics begins from ahistorical and idealized assumptions about the state as protector and benefactor. They are ahistorical because they assume that the state has been with us since biblical times.

Charles Curran says, is "natural and necessary" and "based on creation."' It takes different forms - polis for Aristotle, regimen principum for Aquinas - but these different terms refer to the same essential reality: all historical forms of political community are conflated into the term "state."2 These accounts are also idealized because they assume that society is prior to the state and broader than the state.

a sinful world, particular states always fall short of the ideal. Nevertheless, the ideal is presented not merely as a standard for Christian political practice but as a statement of fact: the state in its essential form simply is that agency of society whose purpose it is to protect and promote the common good, even if particular states do not always live up to that responsibility. This conclusion is based on a series of assumptions of fact: that the state is natural and primordial; that society gives rise to the state and not vice versa; and that the state is one limited part of society. These assumptions of fact, however, are often made without any attempt to present historical evidence on their behalf.

First, unless one equivocates on the meaning of "state," the state is not natural, but a rather recent and artificial innovation in human political order. Second, the state gives rise to society, and not vice versa. Third, the state is not one limited part of society, but has in fact expanded and become fused with society. The primary burden of this chapter is negative: in arguing these three points, I will attempt to present the case against seeing the state as the promoter and protector of the common good.

The state and nation-state are Western inventions. They have been exported to the rest of the world wi...

The word "state" is sometimes used loosely to refer to the political form through which a stable group of people is organized. Nomadic groups are usually the only kind of political community excluded from this definition,...

more precise usage, however, "state" refers to a more limited development characteristic of modernity. The state emerged in Europe amidst...

this more precise sense, the state is a political form based on the distinctly modern concept of sovereignty, which maybe defined as "supreme authority within a territory." As formulated by Bodin, Hobbes, and other lesser figures of the early modern period, the state claims legitimate authority - as opposed to mere coercion - a supreme authority that n...

although political community in some form may be natural and ancient, the sovereign state as we know it is not.

the term status began to appear in a political context only in the late fourteenth century, and until the sixteenth century it was used either to refer to the state of the ruler himself (status principis or status regalis) or to the current condition of the realm (status regni). The emphasis was on a personalized kind of rule embodied in the prince. Only in the sixteenth century does there arise the concept of an abstract "state" that is independent of both ruler and ruled.

In the second place, to treat the sovereign state as just one more variation on the ancient "state" is to misrepresent the ...

the nation-state is the result of the fusion of the idea of the nation - a unitary system of shared cultural attributes - with the political apparatus of the state. Nations are most commonly united by some combination of shared ethnicity, language, or history, but nationality is not simply "natural" or "objective," since ethnicity, language, and history are all themselves the result of contingent historical construction.

nation-state first arose in the eighteenth century and became prevalent only in the nineteenth century and following.12

the ground was prepared for the modern state in the medieval period.

In general, the law became the principal tool of centralization and bureaucratization. By the fourteenth century, the governing apparatuses surrounding the king had "acquired their power largely by developing their judicial institutions and by protecting the property rights of the possessing classes" (p. 61).

Strayer's account leaves little room for the pursuit of the common good as a historical explanation for the rise of the state. According to Strayer, the development of regularized systems of revenue extraction and accounting, law courts, and assemblies were undertaken with reference to its advantages for particular parties, namely the royal household and the propertied classes, and without reference to anything like a common good.

The centralization of royal power involved a transfer of rights from local bodies that had previously been the primary referents of communal life. Legal right and the administration of justice was not created by royal power bu...

The state does not arise as the establishment of a uniform system of common good and justice on behalf of a society of people; rather, a society is brought into being by the centralization-of royal power.

The agent of this change is war.

Building a state depended on the ability of state-making elites to make war, and the ability to make war in turn depended on the ability to extract resources from the population, which in turn depended on an effective state bureaucracy to secure those resources from a recalcitrant population. As Tilly puts it, "War made the state, and the state made war" (p. 42).

in the period of European state-building, the greatest changes in fiscal burdens imposed on a population occurred because of war. At the same time, the most serious precipitant to violence, and the greatest spur to the growth of the state, was the attempt to collect taxes from an unwilling populace.

Close analyses of the history of taxation,18 policing,19 and food supply20 indicate that popular resistance to state-building was deep, broadly based, frequent, and violent. In England alone, the crown put down by force popular rebellions in 1489, 1497, 1536, 1547, 1549, and 1553, all responses to the centralizing efforts of the Tudors. Those asked to sur...

The claim that emerging states offered their citizens protection against violence ignores the fact that the state itself created the threat and then charged its citizens for reducing it. What separated state violence from other kinds of violence was the concept of legitimacy, but legitimacy was based on the ability of stat...

The conceptual leap that accompanies the advent of the state in the sixteenth century is the invention of sovereignty, a doctrine that asserts the incontestable right of the central power to make and enforce law for those people who fall within recognized territorial borders.

To say that the state "creates" society is not to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed before the state. Rather, the state "creates" society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.

Despite Hobbes's derivation of legitimacy from representation, therefore, it is the state that first gathers people into society with one another.