We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian Rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.
This old English prayer nicely sums up the traditional Christian consensus on a praying man’s view of God and government. If our goal is to live what we pray, then it is helpful to reflect occasionally on those prayers.
The basic role of government is found in the prayer. It is to “truly and impartially administer justice.” The goal of government is not to make people good or virtuous, but to allow them the freedom to be good or virtuous. The state exists to allow a free man to be good and to punish those that would prevent him from doing so. This is in contrast to the error of some who believe the state exists to make men good.
This is grave error is one that many Christian people make and that can lead to too much power being given to the state. Governments are made up of men and so they cannot be expected to be any more virtuous than any other human institution. By dividing power between many institutions (family,church, business, social groups, government), one can hope for a system where if one area goes bad, the others can “check” it from doing evil. This elaborate and balanced system is one of the great gifts of living in the free West.
Some Christians act as if only government condemnation of an act makes it a known evil. They believe a thing to be wrong and immediately wish to criminalize it. It is wrong to lie to your mother about the cookies you stole from the cookie jar, but not even Stalin thought about making it against the law!
The goal of government is not to save me. My church teaches that human effort cannot fix what is deeply broken in the souls of men. It will require God’s grace to save people from their predicament. Making even partial sense of this great act is the work of theologians.
The government is there because we are broken. We need protection from each other or we would do without the money-eating state. If Christianity is true, then government can never be the solution . . . but it can allow for the liberty in which the solution (flowing from the family and the state) can come to be.
The news is not all bad, both the Bible and the Church recognize that broken people can do good things in this life.
If I am hungry and you feed me, I shan’t ask many questions about your theology. I owe some of the most sublime moments in my education to people who disagree with much of my religion and all of my politics. I owe those teachers a great debt . . . and as teachers they are better, greater, more like God than I am. Being theologically right does not make me more competent as a teacher or (by itself) better as a man.
Some people know the truth and live it. Some people reject the truth and still live it. In this life, there are very few people from whom I cannot learn. The implications for my vote this election is to look for a man that knows the limits of government and its nature. Will a man try to make the government the church? Will he try to impose on my family? Will he trespass the role of voluntary civil organizations (like the Boy Scouts)?
We pray that our rulers will be competent and even good examples but we should not confuse their job with that of the church or family. Government is not here to produce children, show us the way to Heaven, or even to make us happy.
Lately, presidential candidates have been asked, “What will you do to make me happy?” One wishes the answer from the candidate would be, “Nothing. Government exists to administer justice. You will have to find some other way to be happy.” It is bizarre form of childishness in our time that we look to the government to cheer us up . . . as if the United States should be turned into a giant theme park for our amusement with the government acting as park management.
The government provides liberty for men and women to be human . . . and oddly enough if we use an older definition of the word “happy” there is sense to be of a relationship between government and happiness.
Human happiness used to be understood (in the Declaration of Independence or Aristotle) as flourishing as a human. To be happy was to exercise all the gifts of mankind, especially the intellect. To do this one had to learn to be virtuous. Traditionally government acts to provide the space and the chance for this to happen. It cannot think for us (!) or make us happy, but exists to give us the chance to achieve this blessed state for ourselves.
To be happy, you have to live in a just state, because massive injustice would prevent the free exercise of human virtues.
What is justice?
A just society is one where each person can find his place.
Equals are treated equally and only unequals are treated unequally. A just society judges appropriately between persons. From the point of view of the government what is immediately relevant in judgment is the humanity of a person.
Government fails most when it ignores essential human equality. The barbarism of abortion is the failure to do this with unborn children. The mentally handicapped person and the genius are equally so both must be treated with the same basic human rights before the bar of civil justice.
On the other hand, since the mentally handicapped person is not equal to most persons in terms of his understanding of what is happening to him in court, he can (and should) receive more help in this regard than the world-class genius. Where he is “not equal” he can be treated differently to protect his human dignity.
The best introduction to this view is in Republic and the best early American expression will be found in the political writings of Abraham Lincoln.
Government must be very careful in the categories it uses. It is better to err on the side of equal treatment than to discriminate, even to “help.”
Racism is always wrong, because race is not a meaningful category. Except in very rare circumstances (such as casting a play and one must be careful even then), it is impossible to imagine how certain external characteristics should lead to a loss of civil rights.
When Southern states not only allowed this unjust discrimination, but enforced it, they were wicked and should have lost the support of the Christian citizen. They had become (to a very great extent) illegitimate states. It was a very just act when the federal government intervened to stop this misuse of government power. Whatever the merits of “states rights,” these Southern states had ceased to be just for so long and with so little hope of internal change that they had lost legitimacy as political regimes. They needed to be changed by some agency with the power to do so. Thank God our federal government could and did act.
A just society is also one where the minimum “stuff” we need to live a good life is made available to those who wish them. Government is too big and blunt an instrument to provide what we need in order to be happy. It would also deliver too much power to one part of the culture over the rest.
The government should not try to provide the means, but is there to make sure that people are not kept from those necessary means to the good life by other parts of society. When business and society unite (for example) to keep a group of people from the good life, then the government will have to intervene.
The state cannot allow for certain crimes (for example robbery, fraud, or assault), because they strip the individual of the ability to flourish. The government acts as a court of appeal when other parts of society fail to provide the space for flourishing.
What does it mean to administer justice “truly and impartially?”
When one thinks of an impartial judge, too many people tend to think of a bland, colorless person (like some judicial Beaker from the old Muppet Show). He will come into court with a mind empty of all opinion, take in the data from both sides, and then opine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, we should picture a good judge or a good government leader as one who has a deep wisdom regarding the limits of government and its necessary role. He has thought deeply about justice and how to administer true (and not just apparent) justice.
The man who has this understanding, assumed in our Constitution, might be a good leader. He might lack my Trinitarian theology, but he will have my view of his job. He can have my vote if he also demonstrates the competence for the task of governing.
Justice is a deep concern this side of heaven. I pray “thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” but earlier prayed for “daily bread” acknowledging that utopia is not yet. Some people do not have even the bare means (food) for human flourishing.
A person’s view of justice is a deep and vital characteristic of his soul. I could not vote for a man or woman who believed that the rich were more entitled to justice than the poor. I could not vote for a man who believed that the weak had fewer rights than the strong. While I believe that a proper view of justice springs from a Jewish-Christian world-view, it does so at such a deep cultural level that in the West many people who abhor traditional Christianity (such as atheists) will be cultural Judeo-Christians in this regard. If a man is a man of the West (in terms of his notion of justice), then he will be able to perform the task I wish him to perform . . . to truly and impartially administer justice.
Sadly, this election we must stress this to Christians as they examine candidates. The limited things I want a president to do widens the field . . . I can vote for an atheist that accepts the Western Judeo-Christian tradition of justice if he will limit himself to the Constitution of 1789 and to the true and impartial administration of that just document.
This is most true of non-traditional religious such as Mitt Romney.
There are few things, I think, more politically dangerous at the present moment than arguing that some religious views are just too wrong for a man to be president without qualifying this. Wrong (or even “whacko”) religious ideas need to impact the person’s view of government and justice to matter.
If a man’s religion teaches him that unborn babies are not human, then that view is relevant. If a religion has the weird notion that due to reincarnation some people are born with less rights under the law, then that view is relevant to my vote.
But to simply cast out any person who has a view I think “weird” is sad, limiting, and dangerous.
It is sad because it lacks the humility that should cause us to be as charitable as possible in our view of our neighbor. It is limiting because it narrows our field of candidates too much in this present age. It is dangerous because it threatens to over expand the role of the Church or because it (perversely) implies that the government should be involved in so many things that I can only trust a man who agrees with me on nearly everything.
If the job of government is merely to administer justice and a candidate keeps himself to that, then his ideas about justice are the ones that count. I could (in so far as he is governor) care less about what he wears on his head, around his neck, or on his person as an act of religious devotion.
As a governor, I only care about his theological views if they impact his ability to do his job as a minister of justice! As a man, I care a great deal if he is seriously wrong about theology. I witness to the man, but vote for the president.
This is the way reasonable people behave all the time. We don’t care for the way our plumber handles his church life and we might talk to him as a man about it, but it does not impact our view of his skill as plumber. Now our rulers are much more important to us, they also serve as role models in ways plumbers usually do not (!), but still we must limit our demands on our rulers as rulers or we risk giving our rulers an elevated image of who they are to be.
Not all regimes in the Christian world have made distinctions in the way the United States chose to do. The Queen of England (traditionally) has a role in both church and state. The Emperor of Byzantium and the Tsar of Russia both had a quasi-priestly function. Whatever the merits of those systems, they are not the American system (for which I am on the whole very thankful).
There is much to be said for the British constitution as it worked around 1900. This very prayer I am using for these reflections appeared in the prayer book of the Established Church. But it is vital to note that it appeared along with prayers for the Queen as head of state and church. The American prayer book has no prayers for a Queen as head of church and of state. We pray that our head of government administer justice, but we do not honor him as our titular spiritual head.
My British friends make some interesting arguments in favor of their unwritten constitution (which I must reflect on later), but it is not the constitution under which I will vote for President of the United States.
The President of the United States is not the Queen of England or Emperor of Byzantium, after all, standing as God’s vice-regent in an expansive state. The President is there to uphold the Constitution of 1789 and execute the laws . . . to truly and partially administer justice.
To examine a man’s view of the Council of Chalcedon before voting for him is to give the government too much power and the job of ruler too much epistemological scope!
There is no evidence that Mormons dissent from traditional Judeo-Christian notions of justice and the role of government and powerful evidence that they share it. Mormons may not be traditional Christians (as I would define them), but they show no evidence of being outside the mainstream on this issue. . . and as a community have a long tradition of abiding by it.
To attack this deep, good aspect of Mormonism, because one dislikes things that (I would argue) are theologically very wrong with Mormonism is wrong and dangerous. It is dangerous because the same sort of attack will soon be leveled on any religious person running for office . . . “Well, that Southern Baptist was a good governor of Arkansas but look at his views of women in pastoral leadership!”
I am happy to evangelize my Mormon neighbor and argue with Mormon professors. I am happy to examine any candidates view of what it means to “truly and impartially administer justice.” I would not vote for an Orthodox Christian who got the Nicaean Creed right, but the Constitution of 1789 wrong. I could (though I don’t know if I will) vote for a Mormon who gets the Creed wrong, but justice right.
Such an attack also assumes that all ideas are equally relevant to all tasks. It assumes (I fear) a simple view of epistemology (theory of knowledge) where all a person’s ideas are held with equal conviction. I argue against this view beginning here.
Men hold their views with different force. Is Mitt Romney so on-fire about Mormon distinctive doctrines that he cannot be still about them to do his other work? If so, then we should help him see that his vocation is as full time religious worker, not president. There is no evidence that he has such a call and every evidence that he can hold to his distinctive doctrines while keeping them in their proper place in his web of beliefs.
I shall never support the Romney family for a restored Imperial throne in Byzantium (!) since the Emperor had a role in the Church, but they seem well suited to act as first family in the United States.
As I examine each candidate, whether it is Clinton, McCain, or Romney, I ask myself, “Will this person truly and impartially administer justice?” In Clinton’s case, I know she will not. She will continue to deny the right-to-life to unborn children. I have not yet decided about the rest, but I begin my quest in this manner.
Tomorrow: The Punishment of Wickedness and Vice