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

by William T. Cavanaugh

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 a 1985 article entitled "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," Tilly suggests the analogy of the protection racket for the formation of the Western state. 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 state-makers to approximate a monopoly on violence within a given geographical territory. In order to pursue that monopoly, elites found it was necessary to secure access to capital from the local population, which was accomplished in turn either by the direct threat of violence or the guarantee of protection from other kinds of violence. The variations in the states produced are explicable in terms of variations in the difficulty of collecting taxes, the cost of military technology used, the force available to competitors, and so on. In sum, Tilly suggests that "a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing customers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government."22

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one's life on its behalf.... [I]t is like being asked to die for the telephone company.85

For Augustine, neither city is a space with clearly defined boundaries, but both are sets of practices or dramatic performances, one tragic, the other comic, broadly

speaking. The task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption, to build the city of God, beside which the earthly city appears to be not a city at all.

The pilgrim church is itself a liminal reality,

occupying the border between heaven and earth.

when a direct, unmediated relationship is posited between America and a transcendent reality, either God or freedom, there is a danger that the state will be divinized.

Without the irritant of the body of Christ, the body politic is free once again to divinize the political authority, to transfer the sovereignty of God to the sovereign state.

faith in the United States and in "secular" Western values can take on the status of a religious conviction,

Not only does American democracy not exclude religious speech, but it is not destructive of virtue.

Hauerwas argues, however, that such a system lacks

the resources necessary to produce virtuous people. "Liberalism thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; a social order that is designed to work on the presumption that people are self-interested tends to produce that kind of people"

The church is to be "a body constituted by disciplines that create the capacity to resist the disciplines of the body associated with the modern nation-state."

`America' is by its own definition a jealous and proprietary secular god that wants to exclude and/or subordinate all other attachments" (p. 338). Any attempt to resist and disperse the antidemocratic tendencies of the nation-state will thus also need to disperse the imagination of one whole national community.

Hers was an anarchist and internationalist vision based on eucharistic communities that were both local and simultaneously taken up into the universal sweep of Christ's body.