Working ourselves out of a job

I just finished up a Jan. term course on the Reformation and early Calvinism. Learned that social historians are less inclined to view Calvinism as an intellectual or theological movement centered on double predestination, and more inclined to view Calvinism as a new regime of social control.

Philip Benedict's Christ's Churches Purely Reformed doesn't end with a treatment of how the Synod of Dort and the Westminister Confession codified (or some might say ossified) the ideas of Calvin, Zwingli, Bullinger etc.. It ends with a discussion of Calvinist piety (home devotions and catechisms), ministry (lay elders who oversaw their congregant's doctrine and morals), and discipline (sessions, consistories and presbyteries working hand-in-hand with the civil magistrates to suppress everything from folk religion and usury to drunken brawling, domestic violence and premarital sex).

It was a harsh regime, to be sure. Everybody knows the story of the burning of Michael Servetus, but there are many other stories: the stocks, stools of repentance, forced humiliations of all kinds.

But there were also successes. In Geneva they drove illegitimate births and prenuptial conceptions down to rates of 0.12%  and 1% respectively. They pressed husbands to stop beating their wives so much that laymen complained about the feminism of the Civinist regime (feminism being my term not theirs). They redirected funds for masses for the dead toward the living poor.

"We don't do this anymore. Why not?" I asked my professor.

He replied that the state gradually took on more and more of the disciplinary responsibility. After the 30 Years War there was a widespread revulsion at coercing religious conformity, and secular rulers began mandating a small measure of religious tolerance. Then governments began to construct poor houses and oversee economic policy, especially because the economy came to be seen as a national security issue (budding nation-states like France, Spain, the Netherlands and England were all vying to crush each other by enriching themselves).

In the 19th century all that was left for the session to police was drunkenness and sexual immorality, either of which could deny you a communion token, the price of admission to the Lord's Table. Then Prohibition took the alcohol problem out of the church's hands, leaving...

"So that's why we fight over sex so much!" I exclaimed. "We have nothing left to fight over." Exactly, my professor replied. 

I suppose one might find this disciplinary marginalization a depressing story of the church's increasing irrelevance. Or one might view this story as one of the idolatrous nation-state usurping ecclesiastical prerogatives and commanding the people's ultimate loyalty.

Another way of looking at it is to say that the Church has been amazingly successful at Christianizing the state, at least with respect to the second table of the law. Pre-modern states only existed to tax people to pay for their wars. They warred with each other because conquering land and enslaving peoples was the only economic development strategy anybody could come up with.

Things are better today. Not perfect. States still go to war, and with weaponry that's frighteningly powerful. But if we've taught the state how to feed the hungry, intervene in the family to protect vulnerable women and children, and prosecute fraud, maybe in a century or so we'll be able to teach it to reduce violence from open warfare to something more like police work.

In the meantime there are those niggling questions like, Where did I come from? Where am I going? What's the point of all this? An answer like, "Up from the primordial ooze and back into the void" is not wrong, but incomplete. Insufficient. Existence itself is enough warrant for the continuing relevance of the church, even if we've effectively outsourced the keeping of commandments 5 through 10.

Plus, there's always sex.

Comments

[NJL]

I think it maybe has less to do with a revulsion to coercive religious conformity than a simple impossibility of it. Calvinism was basically on this track all along. Calvin's Geneva experiment was remarkable because it set up church and state as two institutions with distinct spheres of power, whereas in Catholicism they overlapped (and subsequently clashed), and in Lutheranism the church more or less was subservient to the state. In Geneva the state had the responsibility over keeping order, and the church had the responsibility of maintaining religious and moral conformity. While this is all well and good when you are an isolated mountain town that can simply expel all non-conformists, when you are a major center of international trade like the Netherlands (or late colonial New England), you have to tolerate Catholics, Jews, Anabaptists or whoever else makes the economic system work. So the church's power can only apply over a smaller portion of the population, and consequently the state must take over tasks of conformity still seen as necessary. But if the state can't base its rules on unanimous religious principles (at least to the same degree as the church), then its rules will necessarily be more permissive. Meanwhile, when the church no longer has authority over the whole population, religious choice becomes a possibility, and some will choose to ignore the "authority" of the church. Consequently, the church must moderate its moral stance in order to maintain its influence on anyone.

Not that this is a bad thing. I don't think the church should have ever had anything but persuasive authority. I don't think this means the church has outsourced commandments 5 through 10. I think its role is vital. The state can only deal within a legal framework, which means it is always being manipulated by those who can get through loopholes or change the laws. But the church can appeal to the conscience.