The Mystery of the Social Order

One of the curiously interesting men of history was Napoleon. A deist, an opportunist, a man whose core ideas are sometimes hard to discern. Napoleon was often brilliant and sharply discerning as well. Unlike others of his day and since, he saw, as Robert C. Solomon noted, that religion was “the mystery of the social order.” He therefore held, “The people must have a religion and that religion must be in the hands of the government.” Napoleon moved to control the church, and the result was a failure.

Since then, men have tried both the control of religion as well as its obliteration, and such efforts have not been limited to fascists and Marxists. There is “good” reason for these efforts. The modern state sees itself as the maker of civilization and culture. As a result, it replaces religious law with state-created laws. It has moved into the sphere of education, often with total control, in order to replace the religion of the churches with the religion of the state. It has worked to redefine the family on the assumption that, by separating the family from the church and from its Biblical definition, it can remake society in non- Biblical terms. Because sexuality is in theological terms, God-determined and future-oriented thereby, sexuality has been divorced by law from God and morality and is subject to state law.

Religion historically has been the foundation of our social order because it has defined life, law, morality, and salvation. Now, logically, with the state’s claim after Hegel to be god walking on earth, all things are being redefined by the state. This redefinition begins with the abandonment of the idea of duty. According to our Lord, the greater the responsibility, the greater the duty: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Lk. 12:48). Our duty thus increases as our responsibilities do. Anti-Christian man, however, gives license to men in power to do as they please. In Roman faith and practice, men of power were above the law that bound “lesser men.” This theory of irresponsibility has come to undergird the ideas of rights and entitlements. Wherever rights are separated from duties, the result is an anarchistic freedom, the supposition that the individual can do as he or she pleases without any sense of obligation to God and to man. Such an anarchistic “right” is in effect a denial of the rights of others to their persons and properties, because the “sovereign” individual has a unilateral claim against all others.

What Napoleon called “the mystery of social order,” religion, was a mystery to him because he rejected Christianity and thus had no cohesive force to bring people together without coercion. A state cannot bind people by force, by fiat laws, nor by an enforced education. Both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, among others, have tried to unite peoples through statist actions. They used also hate for capitalists and for Jews as a supposed unifying force, with ugly results.

No religion has been more a cohesive bond than Biblical faith. Its power resides in every man’s faith, not in an imposed ecclesiastical or civil order. It does not focus the unifying power in a human order but a divine one. It is a “mystery” only to those who do not believe that a divine order exists, governs us all, and will judge us all.

The crisis of the modern state has developed because its own actions and its educational policies have created a cynical people. Cynicism has never bound a people. The first-century A.D. Roman writer, Petronius Gains Arbiter was pro-consul in Bithynia, and director of entertainment for Nero. His Satyricon began as a criticism of Roman degeneracy and ended as an example of it. High-minded sentiments gave way to homosexual caterwauling. Degenerate humor proved more important to Petronius than reform. Cynicism is now commonplace. At election time, men try to generate some excitement over their sorry candidates, but in too many cases the candidates are cause for more cynicism.

Napoleon held, “religion must be in the hands of government,” and, in most countries now, this is the premise of most political parties, although not so openly stated. It is, however, acted on wherever the state controls education. Education is the control of the next generation; it is the control of the future. By eliminating or downgrading religion in education, the state seeks to replace religion with itself, to replace God with man and man’s fulfillment without God. Napoleon said, “The people must have a religion,” and he was right, but too many since Napoleon, and in part beginning with him, have been determined that this religion must not be Christianity. They work accordingly for a separation of Christianity from education, law, and the state. This is, of course, a recipe for suicide, but, for too many, a universal ruin is better than a surrender to Jesus Christ.

Clearly, the problem of Christianity and the state is an important and currently unsettled matter. This is a very different question than the separation of church and state, an institutional matter and a necessity where the churches are plural in form. Every state has a religion, acknowledged or not. The English Spectator has referred to Britain as the least religious country in the world, but a state church exists there which is nominally Christian.

“The mystery of the social order” is no mystery at all. Contrary to a long line of thinkers from Aristotle on, man is not a political animal: he is a religious creature, made in God’s image, in knowledge, holiness, righteousness (or justice), and with dominion. In his fallen estate, man perverts the application of his image and attributes, but he cannot escape them, nor their religious meaning, nor the accounting God requires.