Theocracy? Thearchy!

One accusation made against professing Christians who choose to get involved in politics -- and one that's not entirely without merit -- is that they want to set up a "theocracy".  Presumably this means that the Christians in question want to reshape the government to enforce their own particular brand of morality and religious belief.


Again, it doesn't really take a great deal of paranoia to come to that conclusion.  A lot of those professing Christians who choose to get involved in politics will tell you that their goal is precisely that:  a national government in which the power of the state compels individuals and the culture as a whole to conform to their understanding of biblical morality.

The problem with that view is that it isn't itself one that's particularly rooted in Christianity.  The idea of a religious state -- or of a state religion -- is pretty much universal, and the marriage of biblical principles to political power is pretty much the definition of medieval Roman Catholicism.  Since the beginning of our fair republic many have tried to identify it with biblical Israel or the Kingdom of God itself.  Much of modern American evangelicalism is obsessed with the idea of a mythical United States in which all men were righteous, all leaders anointed, and all laws just, holy, and perfectly obeyed.

Most of modern American evangelicalism is terribly misled.  No nation has ever been holy; only one was ever intended to be, and the Old Testament is chock-full of examples of how that worked out.  The New Testament doesn't even deal with nations as such.

Make no mistake, the Bible does talk about the rule of God over all nations, both in its "undercover" aspect today and in the open and undeniable Kingdom to come.  But that's the point:  it's the rule of God, not of religious people or of Christians or even of the Church Universal.  The future of America and the world isn't a theocracy, where Christians ensure that God's law is applied and enforced.  It's thearchy:  the direct rule of one King over one world in which all acknowledge his perfect reign and no one has to be coerced, because all are in complete and sublime communion with him.

So no, my secular friends ... Christianity doesn't mean a religious state where all are held to a certain standard of morality.  It means conversion, one soul at a time, into a kingdom under a perfect and absolute King.  How's that for scary?