Does the State Have a Right Over Religion?

20 May 2026

This is Part 5 of a series on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.

In this article:

• Natural and Civil Right
• Political Right Over Religious Doctrine
• The Scope of Political Authority
• Conflicts Over Religious Rights
• Augustinian Political Theory Among Christian Nationalists
• Adventists on the Separation of Church and State

There is a pervasive tendency in Adventist and American discourse to suppose that a primary reason for separating church and state is to protect the rights of religious minorities. From this standpoint, religion lays a higher claim to people’s lives than the state, since whereas the purpose of the state is to ensure people’s welfare in this life, the purpose of religion is to enable them to obtain salvation in the next life. Thus, to prevent the state from encroaching on what matters most, its influence over people’s religious beliefs ought to be kept to a minimum.

In my view, this reason for separating church and state is lopsided. It tells us why we ought to separate the state from religion, but not why we should separate religion from the state. In practice, many proponents of religious liberty see no problem with allowing their religious views to influence their political activities. Believing it is their duty to promote their moral values, they consider it acceptable to exert a religious influence over politics, provided that others do not influence the state to encroach on their own beliefs. Inevitably, this produces a situation in which the political arena is simply a battleground for competing religious views, rather than a public venue for determining what is conducive to the security and welfare of a nation’s citizens.

The notion that religion has a higher right than the state and deserves to be protected from encroachment by it (but not the state from religion) is a corollary of the idea that the sole purpose of human existence is to achieve a moral end whose value is extrinsic to our existence, which I criticized in Part 4 of this series. Logically, if human life only has value insofar as people obey God’s law, then the state has no higher obligation than to guarantee that people obey God’s law. Even if we delineate between the responsibilities of political and religious authorities, we are led to believe that the former always ought to defer to the latter on matters of moral significance.

By contrast, if achieving an extrinsic moral end is not the whole purpose of human existence, then there is no reason to suppose that the state ought to defer to religious authorities at all. Instead, since the practical purpose of religion is to induce people to moral action so that there can be social harmony, the state has a responsibility to protect religion only insofar as it accomplishes this important function. The state should permit religion to exercise the amount of freedom necessary to creatively and innovatively persuade people to act justly, but it should not be controlled by religious interests, since it serves the higher purpose of enabling people to live authentic, meaningful lives, by guaranteeing that they live in a safe, harmonious, and just society.

In the previous part of this series, I discussed Benedict de Spinoza’s distinction between faith and philosophy, noting that while the purpose of faith is to induce people to act morally, the purpose of philosophy is to enable people to obtain happiness by cultivating personal virtue and an intellectual love of God. In the last six chapters of his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argues that whereas the purpose of religion is to promote faith, the purpose of the state is to guarantee people’s freedom to philosophize, or to pursue a virtuous, happy life, unencumbered by the superfluous demands of competing religious dogmas. The state’s ability to perform this function depends only on a universally respectable conception of morality, such as the tenets of universal faith outlined by Spinoza in Chapter 14 of his treatise.

In this article, after summarizing Chapters 16, 19, and 20 of Spinoza’s book, I will examine the relevance of his political views to our contemporary disputes over religious rights. I will especially focus on the controversy over religious freedoms in the United States, not only because I live here, but also because the U.S. occupies a central role in traditional Adventist eschatology. I will show how Spinoza directly refutes the Augustinian-Calvinist conception of the relationship between church and state, which remains just as influential in American politics as it was in the Dutch Republic of Spinoza’s time.

Moreover, despite conservative Adventists’ professed opposition to the doctrine of original sin, and their fears of imminent persecution due to their Sabbath observance, I will suggest that they are by no means immune to the influence of Augustinian political theory. Thus, if Adventists are to faithfully and impartially support religious freedom for all, they ought to seriously consider Spinoza’s critique of Augustinian theopolitics.

Natural and Civil Right

In Chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza introduces his conception of political right by distinguishing between natural and civil rights. By natural right, he states, “I mean the rules determining the nature of each individual thing by which we conceive it is determined naturally to exist and to behave in a certain way.” That is, inasmuch as a thing naturally occurs, it necessarily has the right to act as it does. This principle also applies to people: in the absence of a higher authority to prevent people from violating others’ rights, a person has the right to act however they want, even if their behaviors are harmful.¹

Spinoza notes, “From this it follows that the right, and the order of nature, under which all human beings are born and for the most part live, prohibits nothing but what no one desires or no one can do; it does not prohibit strife or hatred or anger or fraud or anything at all that appetite foments.” Natural law, he continues, is unconcerned with what is beneficial to human beings. Rather, he states, “When therefore we feel that anything in nature is ridiculous, absurd or bad, it is because we know things only in part. We wish everything to be directed in ways familiar to our reason, even though what reason declares to be bad, is not bad with respect to the order and laws of universal nature but only with respect to the laws of our own nature.”²

Nevertheless, although nature is not bad in itself, we are justified in seeking what is beneficial to ourselves, and we are justified in establishing laws for ourselves so that we can obtain what is beneficial. People “had to ensure that they would collectively have the right to all things that each individual had from nature and that this right would no longer be determined by the force and appetite of each individual but by the power and will of all of them together.” They therefore formed a covenant with each other, agreeing on certain civil rights that they would not violate and that they would defend as though they were their own.³ This covenant involved transferring all their individual powers to society as a whole, which would thereafter possess “the supreme natural right over all things, i.e., supreme power, which all must obey,” either willingly or under the threat of punishment.⁴

By transferring their individual natural rights to society as a whole, people formed a democracy. Spinoza defines a democracy as “a united gathering of people which collectively has the sovereign right to do all that it has the power to do.” Because the power of this community exceeds the power of any individual to resist it, Spinoza argues that “sovereign power is bound by no law and everyone is obliged to obey it in all things.”⁵ In return, the sovereign authority is “obliged to work for the common good and direct all things by the dictate of reason,” for unless it does this, it risks becoming illegitimate.⁶

It is important to emphasize that by “sovereign authority,” Spinoza means any form of government to which citizens collectively transfer their individual rights, regardless of whether the government is a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy. Spinoza, for his part, regards democracy as the most natural form of government, and the form that most effectively guarantees its citizens’ civil rights.

Spinoza insists that a person does not become a slave by transferring their natural rights to sovereign authorities. He rejects the conception of freedom implicit in this view, which regards freedom simply as the ability to act as one pleases: “Anyone who is guided by their own pleasure in this way and cannot see or do what is good for them, is him or herself very much a slave. The only [genuinely] free person is one who lives with his entire mind guided solely by reason.” It is not the obedience itself, but how one is induced to obey, that constitutes slavery. As he explains, “If the purpose of the action is not [one’s] own advantage but that of the ruler, then the agent is indeed a slave.” By contrast, provided that a state’s laws are “founded on sound reason” and are concerned with “the safety of the whole people, not that of the ruler,” then one’s obedience to the law makes them a subject rather than a slave. “A slave is someone who is obliged to obey commands from a master which look only to the advantage of the master,” while “a subject is one who does by command of the sovereign what is useful for the community and consequently also for himself.”⁷

Spinoza defines civil right as “the freedom of each person to conserve themselves in their own condition, which is determined by the edicts of the sovereign power and protected by its authority alone.”⁸ Insofar as a sovereign authority protects the conditions conducive to citizens’ self-conservation, it is good that we should obey it. On the other hand, if a sovereign authority does not guarantee these conditions, then citizens are justified in protesting the sovereign’s abuse or neglect of their responsibility.

Spinoza’s conception of right is not based on a notion of human dignity. Rather, for Spinoza, a “right” is a person’s power to achieve their interests. Just as in a hypothetical state of nature, people have no natural right apart from their power to protect themselves from others’ harmful actions, in a civil society, there is no earthly authority higher than the sovereign of a state to whom one can appeal in suing for their rights. There is therefore no right higher than that possessed by a sovereign.

This identification of right with rulership has an etymological basis: the Latin word for “right,” ius, which is the root word for “justice,” also means “decree.” The word right thus originally meant the power to make decrees. Although in our modern age, we conceive of rights in a more democratic sense as referring to those rights which all citizens ought to have because of the intrinsic dignity of human nature, Spinoza used this term to refer to the rights a person or group of people have the power to practically enforce.

Political Right Over Religious Doctrine

Given that there is no earthly authority higher than the sovereign which people are compelled to obey, Spinoza argues, “Should the sovereign refuse to obey God in his revealed law, he may do so, but at his own peril and his own loss… . For the civil law derives solely from his own decree, while natural right derives from the laws of nature, and the laws of nature are not accommodated to religion, which is concerned solely with the human good, but to the order of universal nature, that is, to the eternal decree of God, which is unknown to us.” Consequently, if a sovereign commands us to violate the law that God has revealed to us, we have a responsibility to obey God only if the revelation is incontrovertible—for instance if the means of revelation is the natural light of reason. Spinoza states, “if no one were obliged by law to obey the sovereign power in matters that he thinks belong to religion, then the law of the state would depend upon the different judgments and passions of each individual person. For no one would be obligated by the law if he considered it to be directed against his faith and superstition, and on this pretext everyone would be able to claim license to do anything.”⁹

Spinoza concludes that “the supreme right of deciding about religion belongs to the sovereign power, whatever decision he may make, since it falls to him alone to preserve the rights of the state and to protect them both by divine and by natural law.” As I mentioned in Part 4 of this series, Spinoza defines the divine law as “the law which looks only to the supreme good, that is, to the true knowledge and love of God,” while he defines the natural law as that which happens by natural necessity, including anything that happens by the necessity of human nature. Thus a sovereign has the right to decide on religious matters both through an appeal to the supreme good—what is ideally right—and by exercising their physical power to enforce their rulings.

Spinoza would perhaps concede that if one does not believe a sovereign is following God’s will, they have a natural right to engage in civil disobedience. However, the success of civil disobedience depends either on the success of one’s appeal to the sovereign’s sense of justice or on their power to resist the sovereign’s enforcement of an unjust law. If an act of civil disobedience is unsuccessful, the sovereign authority retains its de facto right of rule, even over matters of religious observance. One could even say that insofar as everything that happens proceeds by necessity from God’s nature, a sovereign’s de facto right is a “divine right.”

However, this does not mean that we ought to endorse a conservative view of political authority. As I have discussed in previous parts of this series, even if the world proceeds by necessity from God’s nature, we nonetheless retain the moral responsibility of changing the world for the better if we find that it is not beneficial to ourselves. Spinoza, an advocate of the freedom to philosophize without infringement by religious authorities, was a political liberal. His main concern in analyzing the power that sovereign authorities possess over religious matters was to dispel the myth that religion is apolitical in practice and to suggest that it is only by a firm commitment to defending one’s freedom from established religious authorities that religious liberty can be affirmed.

The Scope of Political Authority

The Theological-Political Treatise culminates in two arguments. First, in Chapter 19, Spinoza argues that political authorities have a natural right over matters of public religious observance. Second, in Chapter 20, he argues that in a free state, citizens have a natural right to think and speak freely. These conclusions establish not only the extent and limits of sovereign power but also the political expediency of distinguishing between the domains of philosophy and theology.

Spinoza’s theological and political arguments are directed against his Calvinist contemporaries, who drew on the political theories of St. Augustine to argue that the state has a responsibility to enforce Christian orthodoxy and suppress heretics. In his book The City of God, Augustine distinguished between two “cities” or kinds of society that have coexisted throughout history. One is the city of God, in which “man’s only wisdom is the devotion which rightly worships the true God, and looks for its reward in the fellowship of the saints.”¹⁰ This city corresponds to the Church,¹¹ and is characterized “by love of God carried as far as contempt of self.” It “finds its highest glory in God,” so that “both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience.”¹²

By contrast, Augustine argues, “the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God.” It seeks its glory from men and is guided by a lust for domination and subjugation. “Consequently,” Augustine states, “in the earthly city its wise men who live by men’s standards have pursued the goods of the body or of their mind, or both,” rather than the wisdom that comes from reading the canonical scriptures.¹³

For Augustine, the tension between these two cities can only be mitigated by the accession of a Christian ruler, who would “put their power at the service of God’s majesty, to extend his worship far and wide.”¹⁴ A Christian king, Augustine argues, would use their power to suppress heretics and schismatics, whose actions and beliefs not only violate the Church’s teachings concerning sin and wickedness but threaten the security of the state.

Spinoza criticizes Augustine’s political theory by reinterpreting the notions of God’s law and kingdom. He states, “A person fulfills the law of God by practicing justice and charity at God’s command, from which it follows that a kingdom of God is a kingdom in which justice and charity have the force of law and command.” To an extent, this conception of the kingdom of God resembles the Augustinian view, which maintains that the sovereign authorities ought to exercise their power in enforcing the divine law. However, Spinoza makes clear that he only conceives the divine law as consisting of charity and justice. As for how one comes to know the divine law, he adds, “I cannot see that it makes any difference here whether God teaches and commands the true practice of justice and charity by the natural light of reason or by revelation.”¹⁵ It is not justifiable for a state to suppress heretics simply because they have unorthodox beliefs or because they seek wisdom by studying the goods of the body and mind, which Augustine condemns as a characteristic of those in the earthly city. Rather, a person should only be deemed a criminal if they commit an injustice against someone else.

For Spinoza, the concepts of justice and injustice are only meaningful within the civil state. Spinoza defines justice as the “intention to assign to each person what belongs to them in accordance with civil law.” Justice is the same as equity since it involves defending each person’s rights equally, “not begrudging the rich or despising the poor.”¹⁶ Because justice is only possible under the jurisdiction of civil law, it is impossible to conceive of justice or injustice in a state of nature. Only when people establish a civil law by transferring their powers to a sovereign authority is it possible to enforce the rule that people are entitled to what belongs to them. Moreover, since God’s law is concerned primarily with justice, it is only effective insofar as the state enforces just laws.

Spinoza thus concludes “that religion, whether revealed by the natural light of reason or by prophetic light, receives the force of a commandment solely from the decree of those who have authority to govern, and that God has no special kingdom over men except through those who hold power.” Moreover, sovereign authorities are not merely the enforcers of God’s law, but the interpreters of it, since “divine teachings, whether revealed by natural or by prophetic light, necessarily acquire the force of a decree not directly from God, but from those who exercise the right of governing and issue edicts or by their mediation. Hence, we can only conceive of God ruling over men and directing human affairs in accordance with justice and equity as effected by their mediation.”¹⁷ Spinoza rejects the Augustinian notion that the city of God is distinct from the earthly city. These “cities” are the same, since the divine law is only effective insofar as political authorities enforce them.

Because the purpose of a state is to guarantee its citizens’ welfare, Spinoza argues, “the people’s safety is the supreme law to which all other laws both human and divine must be accommodated.” The sovereign of a state is solely responsible for determining “what is necessary for the security of the whole people and of the state” and for promulgating any laws necessary for security, including laws that “lay down how a person should behave with piety towards their neighbor, that is, to determine how one is obliged to obey God.” Only the sovereign of a state is in a position to determine what is in the common interest of its citizens and therefore to decide what constitutes piety.¹⁸

Consequently, sacred matters—those concerned with piety—remain under sovereign jurisdiction. “No one has the right and power without [the sovereign’s] authority or consent, to administer sacred matters or choose ministers, or decide and establish the foundations and doctrines of a church, nor may they [without that consent] give judgments about morality and observance of piety, or excommunicate or receive anyone into the church, or care for the poor.” In other words, religious institutions can only exercise these functions because the government permits them to do so.

Despite the extensive natural right that sovereign authorities have over religious matters, Spinoza argues that they are not empowered to prevent people from exercising their moral reasoning. Although a sovereign might violently suppress heretics, it is unreasonable that it should do so. “Indeed,” Spinoza claims, “rulers cannot do such things without great risk to their whole government, and hence we can also deny that they have absolute power to do these and similar things and consequently that they possess any complete right to do them.” Likewise, because people tend to speak their minds, a government cannot suppress free speech without becoming excessively violent and undermining its legitimacy.¹⁹

The purpose of a state, Spinoza argues, is to secure people’s freedom from fear, not to reduce them to automata. When people, in the state of nature, consent to transfer their power to a sovereign, they only transfer their power of action, not their freedom of thought and speech. If they have dissenting opinions, they can voice them while remaining obedient to the law. Only if “they make use of this freedom to accuse the magistrate of wrongdoing and render him odious to the common people or make a seditious attempt to abolish the law against the magistrate’s will” can they rightly be labeled an agitator or rebel.²⁰

Even if a sovereign does coerce people to accept certain doctrines, it does so at its own peril, because those who have integrity and virtue will be unable to sincerely believe in them. Spinoza acknowledges there will always be people who prefer to follow their own opinions, even if they have no integrity. Nevertheless, a sovereign that attempts to control its citizens cannot ultimately succeed in preventing these people from disobeying. On the contrary, it only harms those who are honest. Moreover, if a sovereign were to side with a religious faction by enforcing its particular doctrines, it would undermine its own authority. “Those who believe doctrines condemned by law to be true will be unable to obey while those who reject them as false will celebrate edicts condemning them as their own special privileges and glory in them so that the sovereign will be powerless to abolish such edicts afterwards even should he wish to.”²¹

Spinoza therefore concludes that sovereign authorities may grant the freedom of speech to their citizens without risking their authority or the security of the state. He states that when sovereign authorities try to strip people of these freedoms, “an example is made of honest men which is viewed rather as martyrdom [than justified punishment].” Moreover, “upright dealing and trust are undermined, flatterers and traitors are encouraged, and the foes [of those with dissenting views] triumph, since [the sectarians’] indignation has been surrendered to: they have turned the sovereign powers into adherents of their dogmas of which they are recognized as the interpreters. As a consequence, they dare usurp the authority and right of the high officers of the state and are not ashamed to boast that they have been directly appointed by God and that their own decrees are divine whereas those of the sovereign authorities are merely human ones and, accordingly, they then require that sovereigns should defer to these divine—that is to say their own—decrees.”²²

Conflicts Over Religious Rights

Because Spinoza does not straightforwardly affirm that there ought to be a separation between church and state, Adventists are likely to be uncomfortable with his arguments. His suggestion that churches do not have a natural right to appoint ministers, determine doctrines, and admit or excommunicate their members without the government’s consent seems to assign too much authority to the state over religious matters. Of course, it is important to remember what Spinoza means by the word “right.” In his view, a person cannot be said to have rights unless they are protected from violation by other people. Even if it is possible to speak of the rights a person ideally ought to possess, we cannot affirm that a person has these rights unless they can defend them. It is only because a state protects people’s rights to private religious observance that they may be said to have them, and although a government might risk being seen as illegitimate if it were to withdraw its protections for those rights, it nonetheless has the natural right to do so, insofar as it has more power to enforce its decisions.

Spinoza’s conception of natural right seems alien to American political discourse, which is rife with appeals to the rights individuals believe they ideally possess. Although democratic debate over rights is healthy, citizens often forget that they do not naturally possess their rights unless they can enforce them. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, both sides of the debate over mask mandates appealed to their respective views on what constituted their rights: those who supported mask mandates argued that they had a right not to be exposed to a deadly disease, while those who opposed mask mandates argued that they had a right to decide for themselves whether they would risk exposure. The problem with this American tendency to appeal to one’s ideal rights is that there are no authoritative principles by which we can decide which side of any given debate is correct. I do not believe that both sides of the debate over mask mandates were equally justified in their claims, but unless I can persuade my opponents that they are wrong, there is no way for me to enforce my claimed right not to be needlessly exposed to a dangerous virus. Ultimately, although I may believe it to be desirable to possess a certain right, I do not possess it unless the state punishes those who violate it.

Similarly, the reason why people have the right to religious liberty in the United States is because of the First Amendment, which stakes the federal government’s legitimacy on its refusal to enforce laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. Were it not for the possibility that people would regard the federal government as illegitimate if it were to disregard the First Amendment, there would be no guaranteed religious rights in the U.S. at the federal level. Rather, individual states could—and in some cases certainly would—pass laws establishing an official religion or suppressing its free exercise. Even with the First Amendment in place, American citizens only continue to have religious freedom insofar as federal judges faithfully interpret the Constitution. As recent Supreme Court rulings have shown, these guarantees could easily be ignored if the justices devised a sufficient reason to ignore them. And if the government enforces these rulings, the power of the government—particularly the power of the states—to regulate matters of religious authority will only be increased.

As we have seen, although Spinoza maintains that the state has a right over religious matters, he does not intend this to mean that governments should respect certain religious establishments over others. To the contrary, he promotes religious tolerance by arguing that when a state sides with particular religious authorities, it precariously stakes its legitimacy on theirs and thereby threatens the security of the state. There is an extent to which Spinoza maintains that there ought to be a separation between church and state, particularly in religiously pluralistic societies, and he is deeply concerned to clarify this extent.

His conclusion on this issue is based on the distinction he makes in the earlier chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise between moral and ceremonial laws. The purpose of a state is to secure what is just and beneficial for its citizens, while the purpose of religion is to induce people to obey the moral law, which ultimately commands people to behave charitably and justly towards their neighbors. There is considerable overlap between moral and political authority insofar as both depend on an underlying notion of justice. It is for this reason that Spinoza maintains that a society ought to accept certain universal tenets of faith, which contain “no dogmas capable of giving rise to controversy amongst honest people,” but which serve the purpose of persuading everyone that they ought to practice “justice and charity towards their neighbor.”²³ Unless everyone accepts that they have a responsibility to treat their neighbors charitably and justly, a just democratic society would be impossible.

Nonetheless, a tension remains between what one might regard as moral in a religious context and what one might regard as moral in a political context. For instance, although Spinoza denies that Sabbath observance is a moral law, Adventist doctrine teaches that it is a moral law. Does this mean that Sabbath observance falls under the jurisdiction of the state since the state has a responsibility to enforce moral laws? Adventists would reject this suggestion.

Perhaps one could distinguish religious morality from political morality, in a way analogous to Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the earthly city. However, as Spinoza has shown, Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the earthly city is untenable. While the conception of good accepted by those in the “earthly city” is, under ideal circumstances, derived from the natural light of reason, which is accessible to everyone, the conception of good accepted by those in the “city of God” demands people’s deference to a scriptural revelation, which can only be accepted on the authority of those who interpret it. There is always an element of power involved in obeying religious authorities, and this element of power easily mutates into a desire for political power whenever conflicting notions of the good arise in a political context. In diagnosing the challenges of his own time, Spinoza anticipates a problem that frequently affects American (and Adventist) political discourse, namely the competition between claims about what constitutes morality. If the state is expected to decide between conflicting moral views, then whatever side it supports has a greater de facto religious right than its opponents.

Augustinian Political Theory Among Christian Nationalists

Christian nationalists in the United States recognize this, which is why they work tirelessly to appoint judges who will rule in favor of their moral doctrines on issues like reproductive and sexual rights. They aim to persuade the state to side with their beliefs over those of their opponents, to secure greater power for themselves, and to undermine others’ moral autonomy. To see this, one needs to look no further than articles published by the Institute of Religion and Democracy (IRD), a conservative Christian think tank that aims to “interpret America’s vocation in the world today” by promoting “the best of historic Christian political theology.”²⁴ In 2019, the IRD held a symposium in which it promoted “Augustinian liberalism,” based on Augustine’s political theory in the City of God. This doctrine is foundational to the IRD’s condemnation of Enlightenment individualism and progressive politics, which it regards as a threat to Christianity.

The essential points of Augustinian liberalism, as expressed by Paul D. Miller in an article published in the IRD’s journal Providence, may be summarized as follows. Augustinian liberalism is distinguished from the liberalism of the Enlightenment by its different conception of human nature. “Rather than defining us by our ability to reason,” as the Enlightenment did, Miller states that Augustine “defines us by our ability to love,” and more specifically by what we love.²⁵ As we noted above, in Augustine’s view, “the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God,” while the heavenly city was created “by love of God carried as far as contempt of self.” There are therefore two opposed kinds of person, each with a radically different conception of human nature. Those who belong to the city of God believe that human nature is defined by one’s love for God, while those who belong to the earthly city believe that human nature is defined by one’s self-love. These positions, and the people who hold them, are irreconcilable.

Because we are all corrupted by original sin, Augustine argues, “true justice is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ.” He rejects the Roman politician Scipio’s definition of a commonwealth as “‘an association united by a common sense of right and a community of interest,’” arguing that such a “commonwealth never existed, because there never was real justice in the community.” Rather, as Miller notes, Augustine instead defines a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” Although Miller argues that this definition is “humbler” than that of Scipio, I would argue that it is, in fact, more demanding—and certainly not liberal. Scipio’s definition of a people accounts for the possibility that although people might love different things, they can still identify common interests and common notions of their civil rights in forming a commonwealth. By contrast, Augustine cares little about the pursuit of common interests and rights and instead insists that people can only be unified by a common love, which in his view is only properly directed toward God.²⁶

As the scholar Herbert Deane notes, Augustine maintained that due to original sin, it is “absolutely impossible to establish on earth a society or state made up of saints or true Christians.”²⁷ Miller approvingly quotes Deane’s claim that “The Christian view that the principal function of the state is the repression and punishment of the wicked is at the opposite pole from the classical, and especially the Greek, conception that the purpose of the state is to promote the good life and to train and educate its citizens so that they become good and virtuous men.”²⁸ The purpose of the state, according to Augustine, is not “to make men truly good or virtuous. Rather, [the state] is interested in their outward actions, and it attempts, with some success, to restrain its citizens from performing harmful and criminal acts.”²⁹ Augustinian liberalism, in Miller’s view, follows Augustine in endorsing modesty toward the state’s ability to promote virtue among its citizens. “Augustinian liberalism is not merely anti-utopian,” Miller states. “It is anti-utopianism: the ideology of principled opposition to utopian politics.”³⁰

There are, of course, issues with Miller’s theory. One is the problem of identifying what constitutes wickedness. This is precisely the problem that Spinoza seeks to address when he argues that the citizens of a society need to agree on certain universal tenets of faith that are universally acceptable among people of all religious leanings. Unless this is the case, wickedness can be defined in such a way as to condemn those who do not share one’s own beliefs. Augustine regarded it as wicked that people should worship God incorrectly, and it is on this basis that he persecuted those whom he considered heretics.

Another problem is defining what constitutes “utopianism.” For Miller, even public education seems to reflect utopianism, since it involves an effort by the government to enable people to become good citizens, which he regards as fundamentally impossible due to the corruption of human nature by original sin. This shows that for Miller, there is in practice no distinction between good in a religious sense and good in a political sense: for him, people cannot be good in a political sense (i.e. good citizens) because they are not good in a religious sense (i.e. they are corrupted by original sin).³¹

If there remains any ambiguity concerning the IRD’s reasons for promoting Augustinian “liberalism,” this will be immediately dispelled by considering articles published on its blog Juicy Ecumenism by its contributor Rick Plasterer. Plasterer has argued in a series of articles that moral autonomy threatens religious freedom. In his view, the Enlightenment’s “psychologized” conception of “‘human flourishing’ … as ‘an inner sense of wellbeing’” stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Christian view, which “holds that one learns who one is and what one should do from ‘established external structures such as family, church, or nation.’” In particular, Plasterer blames the “Sexual Revolution” for making it impossible for Christians to criticize behaviors they consider sinful, such as homosexuality, without committing “an act of political violence” against a person’s psychological identity. The Sexual Revolution, he claims, considers Christianity to be an existential threat due to this violence, and therefore demands Christianity’s extermination.³²

This Sexual Revolution has, in Plasterer’s view, largely taken place by “judicial fiat” in the U.S. court system. He traces its beginnings in the American legal system to the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which declared a state law prohibiting contraception to be unconstitutional. According to Plasterer, with this court case, the Supreme Court invented a right to privacy that was not previously protected by the Constitution. Significantly, this case was cited as precedent by the Supreme Court in its decisions in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which legalized birth control for unmarried couples; Roe v. Wade (1974), which legalized abortion; Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which legalized homosexual relations; and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which legalized same-sex marriage. It should be noted that when Plasterer criticizes this series of cases as “animated by a moral spirit which is not merely non-Christian, but really anti-Christian,” he is not only targeting these decisions but also the right to privacy involved in them, a right established by the principle of substantive due process.³³

It is obvious that for Plasterer, who regards the “revolution by judicial fiat” as an existential threat to Christianity since it supposedly regards Christianity as an existential threat, Christians have no other than to lobby the Supreme Court to overturn these cases, as happened in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade. Plasterer and his colleagues at the IRD demonstrate what happens when Augustinian political theory is applied to contemporary social issues: by portraying nontraditional sexual practices as matters of vital moral concern to the state, they demand that the state should eliminate freedoms that it had previously protected for half a century, and for reasons that are matters of sectarian religious concern.

Adventists on the Separation of Church and State

Adventists are complicit in the growing influence of Christian nationalism because they find it suitable to their theological interests to endorse conservative political positions on issues like LGBT rights. The IRD, it should be noted, has close ties with the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), the organization that developed the headship doctrine.³⁴ This alliance is not a coincidence. The headship doctrine is derived from the Augustinian conception of original sin as originating with the violation of the sexual hierarchy that God established before the fall. Moreover, for Augustine in particular, original sin was transmitted from one generation to the next through sexual procreation. Consequently, although subsequent theologians have interpreted original sin as a transmission of legal responsibility rather than as a genetic condition, as in the case of the covenant theology which forms the basis of the headship doctrine, the doctrine of original sin nonetheless retains an implicit condemnation or suspicion of sexual activity. It is for this reason that the IRD and its allies like the CBMW find Augustinian political theory so conducive to their activism against sexual and reproductive rights and gender equality.

Of course, Adventists do not believe in the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. Nonetheless, the church’s insistence on perfect obedience to the Ten Commandments—and in particular the seventh commandment, which it interprets as prohibiting the sexual activities that conservative Christians typically consider sinful—serves the function of denigrating sexual activities that are matters of individual conscience. Adventists’ complicity in Christian nationalism is largely attributable to their alignment with evangelical Christianity on matters of gender and sexuality, and in general, to their confusion over what properly constitutes the moral law. As Spinoza argues, morality is a matter of public interest by the state and is only properly concerned with ensuring the justice and welfare of the community. However, Adventists, along with other conservative Christians, endorse a much broader view of morality, bringing under this heading doctrines that are not universally accepted by those who, in good faith, desire what is beneficial to society as a whole. Besides regarding sexuality as a moral matter, Adventists, in particular, regard Sabbath observance as a moral commandment, despite Paul’s suggestion to the contrary (as I discussed in Part 3 of this series).

This does not mean, of course, that because Adventists regard Sabbath observance as a moral issue, they necessarily expect that the state should enforce it. Adventists have been conditioned by the Sunday law doctrine to expect that they will eventually be persecuted for keeping the Sabbath, so they regard it as inconceivable that the state would ever side with them on this issue. I have little doubt, however, that in a hypothetical scenario in which the vast majority of Americans became Adventists, American identity would eventually become so deeply intertwined with Adventism that not keeping the Sabbath would be perceived as a sign of the moral decay of American society and that certain conservative Adventists would therefore promote the legal enforcement of Sabbath observance. The reason why I believe this would happen, although it is an unlikely scenario, is that many conservative Adventists already do this with the seventh commandment. They believe that homosexuality is a form of breaking the seventh commandment, and that because homosexuality threatens the “natural family,” gay marriage ought to be prohibited or strictly discouraged. The only reason conservative Adventists feel more comfortable promoting the legislation of the seventh commandment than the fourth commandment is a superstitious fear that the latter would be turned against them, whereas they are less afraid of the repercussions of depriving LGBT people of the right to marry or of depriving women of access to reproductive healthcare.

The Adventist church pretends to be apolitical only opportunistically, when doing so serves to support its self-image as a remnant movement that has been called to separate itself from the world. But many conservative church members have been conditioned by the need to find evidence of an impending Sunday law to embrace not only far-right conspiracy theories that find Jesuits, Freemasons, globalists, and Jews behind every sinister action, but also the disturbing political aims of the groups that promote them. They find it natural to agree with political parties and organizations that vilify the disadvantaged and marginalized because they have been convinced that these marginalized communities are behind the push toward immorality that will set the stage for the Sunday law. The cynical opportunism inherent in their political alignments can only be explained by the fact that they care more about power than about following Jesus’ injunction to love one’s neighbor. If they cared more about the latter, they would be able to easily discern the distinction between the essence of God’s law and those aspects of the law that are irrelevant to true faith.

Before conservative Adventists could even come to recognize what truly constitutes morality, they would need to obtain a correct understanding of God’s nature and the means of his self-revelation. They would need to see that God reveals himself in nature and that because we are a part of nature, our responsibility to God entails a responsibility to the world we inhabit. They would need to realize that God is revealed in all the diversity of human existence and that this means that we should accept others in love, even if their lives are significantly different from our own. They would realize that good and bad are subjective human valuations and that if they do not like the suffering in the world, they should inform themselves properly as to how they can eliminate it, and actively work towards the attainment of that goal, rather than blaming secret societies and the marginalized for the evils in the world. By avoiding the projection of anthropocentric motives onto God, they would avoid the sectarianism and superstition that results from imagining God to have similar passions and dispositions to ourselves.

Rather than focusing on how society ought to protect the church’s religious liberties, Adventists ought to focus instead on how the church can benefit society so that it can demonstrate practically that it has a right to belong to society. When the church adopts isolationist attitudes and doctrines that only serve to affirm its distinctness, it prevents itself from being able to identify with society, so that it can determine what is in society’s best interest. This is the effect that the doctrine of the remnant has had on the church. As I argued in a previous article,³⁵ unless the church recognizes that it is a part of society and that it has a responsibility to benefit society, it not only cannot demonstrate that it has a right to belong to society but more importantly, it cannot succeed in its apologetical task of showing how the Christian message can meet the needs of contemporary society. It will not even understand what those needs are.