Between God and Caesar: The Hard Problem of Separating Church and State

‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’ These words, handed down in the New Testament, have for two thousand years served as the starting point of a single hard problem that travels the world. The realm that obeys God, and the realm that obeys earthly power. Can the two be separated? And if so, where should the line be drawn? Humanity has yet to arrive at a complete answer to this question. Faith touches the deepest part of the human heart, while the state governs every corner of human life. Precisely because of this, when the two meet, they have at times generated great power and at times struck off fierce sparks. This series traces the history of that encounter and collision, with an eye on the whole world. The setting of Episode 1 is Europe’s long struggle, leading up to the birth of the idea of separating church and state.

The Age When the King Was God

Tracing back through human history, religion and politics were not originally separate. Rather, they were one. In the ancient Near East and Egypt, the king was often regarded as the deputy of the gods, and sometimes seen as a god himself. Praying for a good harvest, wishing for victory in war, calming disasters. Carrying out such rites and ruling over the people were held in one and the same hand. This is called the unity of worship and rule. The authority of the gods supported the king’s power, and the king’s power mirrored the divine order on earth. To the people of antiquity, this was an entirely natural picture of the world.

This arrangement held a real strength. When a ruler’s command overlapped with the will of the gods, people accepted, in the depths of their hearts, a reason to obey. Law became divine commandment, and rebellion became sin. Yet that same strength was inseparable from danger. If criticizing the ruler became the same as profaning God, then the path to correcting errors was blocked. Is faith a tool of power, or is it something that saves people beyond the reach of power? This tension would continue, changing form, from antiquity to the present day.

In time, a new faith spread across the Mediterranean world: Christianity. At first it was the religion of a persecuted minority, but in 313 the emperor Constantine recognized it, and the empire gradually took it in. Here were born two centers: the earthly power of the Roman emperor, and the religious authority of the church. Two heads on one body. It was precisely this strange dual structure that would prepare the later European idea of separating church and state.

Clerical and Royal Power, Two Swords

In medieval Europe, the authority of the church at times rose to surpass even kings and emperors. It was the church that held the salvation of souls, and the pope at its summit is said to have wielded strong influence even over earthly monarchs. Emperor and pope, royal power and clerical power. These two forces, while supporting each other, often fought fiercely over who stood above the other.

The event that symbolizes that tension is the Road to Canossa of 1077. The Holy Roman Emperor, who had clashed with the pope over the appointment of clergy, is said to have begged forgiveness before the snow-covered castle gate. The emperor, supposedly the strongest on earth, kneeling before the authority of faith. This scene told later ages just how great the church’s authority had been. As time went on, meanwhile, kings across the lands strengthened the independence of their own realms and sought to keep their distance from the rule of the church. The clash of the two swords swung back and forth for a long time, never fixing victory on one side.

This ceaseless competition had an unexpected by-product. Because power was not concentrated in one place but split into two that checked each other, neither could fully dominate the people. It was impossible to unify everything in the name of God, or to unite everything under the will of the king. Out of this unfinished division, a sense slowly took root that politics has its own logic and faith has its own realm. The later separation of church and state was not something designed all at once as an ideal by someone, but a wisdom found at the end of this long tug-of-war over power.

Coexistence Born from a Sea of Blood

The turning point came with the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In 1517, Martin Luther’s questioning of how the church ought to be became the spark that split the Christian world wide open. Catholic and Protestant. Believing in the same God yet sharply divided over how to believe, people came into conflict, and Europe soon plunged into a long age of religious wars. Differences of faith became entangled with struggles over territory and power, and gruesome battles were repeated across the lands. Conviction over divine truth, ironically, kept taking human lives.

Amid that misery, people reluctantly arrived at one practical wisdom. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 granted territorial princes the right to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism. At this stage, however, it was the prince who could choose his faith; the inhabitants are said to have had no choice but to follow their lord’s denomination, or to emigrate if dissatisfied. It was far from freedom of belief for all. Even so, in recognizing as a system that different denominations could stand side by side within the same framework, it was a small step toward coexistence.

An even greater turning point was the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. This treaty, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, a long religious war that had devastated Europe, also recognized the Calvinists who had been excluded at Augsburg, and coexistence among denominations spread further still. Above all, by recognizing the sovereignty of each state, Europe’s conflicts shifted from the form of religious war to the form of relations among sovereign states. Rather than deciding the rightness of faith by force of arms, people came to acknowledge each other’s existence. Only after vast quantities of blood had been shed did people begin, little by little, to choose the path of separating faith from the hand of the state.

Thus, as the modern era began, the separation of church and state and freedom of belief came to be spoken of in many countries as principles to be upheld. Yet how that line is drawn differs greatly from country to country. Some states sternly cut off the state from religion, while others quietly keep embracing a particular religion as part of their culture. Where to draw the line between God and Caesar. To that question there was no single correct answer. What Europe reached after two thousand years may not have been the answer itself, but a framework for continuing to search for the answer. And this ideal would come to be tested, in an unexpected form, on a new continent across the sea.