“Politics,” argues theologian William T. Cavanaugh, “is a practice of the imagination.”
“How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about?” Cavanaugh wrote in his 2002 book, Theopolitical Imagination. “He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.”
According to Cavanaugh, the modern political imagination—to be clear, he really means the state—is a violent corruption of orthodox Christian theology. The time is now urgent, he says, to question the “theological legitimacy” of the state and to expose the “supposedly ‘secular’ political theory” that is in fact “theology in disguise.”
Whether or not we agree with Cavanaugh’s arguments about the corruption and heresy latent in the modern state, his overall claim that the modern state is not neutral but has a kind of theological history, a sacred foundation, is one that is increasingly shared by sharp-eyed scholars of international relations.
But does that history actually matter? I believe this is of significant practical importance today. The so-called secularization of theological concepts yields foundational Christian insight—in particular—into the main character of international relations, the state, and its relationships that constitute so much of the system.
Before we examine Cavanaugh’s argument, I’ll share a story.
Once upon a time, there were no states. There were empires, and city-states, and confederacies, and all manner of political and tribal arrangements, but they weren’t what we today technically call states.
Some of the reasons are somewhat philosophical; these politics were almost always mixed up in something we call religion: cults of empire or emperor such as Rome, established sects such as Zoroastrian Persia, polytheistic hierarchies such as ancient Egypt, mandates of heaven such as dynastic China, cosmic duties such as Vedic India, and so on.
But this mingling of governance and religion created a lot of conflict. It became especially bad in what we would come to call Europe after the Reformation. Schismatic religious sects fractured the catholic (and Catholic) unity of the respublica Christiana and set off a chain of devastating religious wars.
Those wars were eventually resolved in the Treaty of Westphalia, in which two enduring and fundamental elements of modern states came into being:
- 1. Secularity: The ruler determines the religion of the realm, meaning religion is no longer a pretext for international conflict. Nor are kings or princes required—per the respublica Christiana—to recognize the sovereignty of some greater power (religious ones fore among them). The goal is a harmony of domestic power, religious and political. Religion is not expunged but is made political, subject to the prior authoritative claims of the state.
- 2. Sovereignty: The king is sovereign in his domain; there are clear, territorial demarcations in which the ruler (the sovereign) had exclusive jurisdiction, including over any religious matters.
This new settlement resolved religious wars, separating religion from politics, putting religions under the sovereignty of the princes, and in that act making the modern state and producing a stable, enlightened, international system of peace.
This is a great story. It’s how most students are taught the beginning of international relations. It’s also largely false.
Political scientist Daniel Philpott argues it would be more correct to talk about Westphalia as a “revolution in sovereignty,” one that resulted “from prior revolutions in ideas about justice and political authority.” In this view, it is not the Westphalian state that solved wars of religion but the Reformation and wars of religion that made possible the Westphalian state.
“The rise of the modern state,” Cavanaugh argues, “did not usher in a more peaceful Europe, but the rise of the state did accompany a shift in what people were willing to kill and die for.” Westphalia, he says, marks a pivot point where it became honorable and praiseworthy to kill and die for the state but cowardly and pathological to kill and die for God.
The modern state’s astonishing centralization of power, combined—eventually—with industrial scale and legibility, would go on to enable the state to express its power in a historically unprecedented fashion. Its powers of legible imperialism would fuel not only its global export—colonialism—but also an organized violence and destruction in the 20th century the world had never before seen.
We would go from what I would call small-s states—cities, confederacies, empires—to capital-S States—the modern Westphalian organization.
Having, by its own Westphalian definition, cut itself off from its theological root, critics like Cavanaugh believe the state can only be blind to justice beyond its own national interest. The state, argue these critics, is little different from the cronyistic and corrupt corporation out to make a buck, only without the practical limitations or oversight of an ethics commissioner.
In this arrangement religion serves the state; it exists under and for it, if only in a material or political way. What it may or may not do in the interior life or for the eternal prospects of its citizens is mostly beyond the national interest of the modern state.
This is what is meant by secularity in the modern state. Religion is not expunged, far from it. But insofar as it exists discretely and apart from state power, it does so at the sufferance of and in support of the material sovereignty of the state. For religion to do otherwise would immediately raise it as a threat.
Only religion—apart from the state—has any meaningful institutional claim to the powers of life and death, to command violence and commerce. So even if the state does not dictate religious doctrine, as in what we would call pluralist democracies, it will still very much dictate limits to those doctrines and practices.
As Cavanaugh argues, most states may not claim religious doctrines of heavenly afterlives, but despite this, states have proved remarkably capable of centralizing economic, cultural, and political power; of monopolizing the powers of life and death; and of leaving to religion whatever otherworldly meaning it wants to supply to the aftereffects of its carnage.
These complaints may be somewhat overwrought. The state, after all, is a system; it is a political structure that human beings created, very much imperfectly, as all our systems are. It is a system that is good at some things, and it is bad at others.
It is, in other words, not so different from other tools of human design.
Please don’t hear what I’m not saying: The state is definitely not neutral. Its Westphalian structure and presumptions have very definite interests, fore among them the sovereign centralization of power and the monopolization of coercive force. This includes, it needs repeating, the moral justification for such centralization and monopolization. The state will not be indifferent to anything that threatens these.
But I am saying states are good at certain things, some of them advancing human flourishing. The modern Westphalian state system has capacity for tremendous good, tremendous social and political progress, on the one hand, and a monstrous capacity for terrible evil, on the other.
How do we approach this modern Leviathan of the state? There is probably no caging the Leviathan, but there are some structural hints that lend to its tendency for justice over injustice. Political scientist James C. Scott recommends four rules to follow:
- 1. Take small steps: “In an experimental approach to social change [using state power], presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move.”
- 2. Favor reversibility: “Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences. Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact.”
- 3. Plan on surprises: “Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen.”
- 4. Plan on human inventiveness: “Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design.”
These rules for taming Leviathans offer us a very modest foray into domestic political philosophy. Although Scott hedges before committing this far, I would say these rules show that the kind of state matters.
Democracies, especially constitutional ones, tend to control the modern state in very important ways. First, they take all that sovereign Westphalian power and separate it.
This is the genius of what Americans call checks and balances. The power of the sovereign state is separated by design into parts, which operate as balancing oversight against each other.
Second, the democratic component of this means that power cycles regularly among individuals. This also usually tempers hubris. It is hardly a foolproof imposition of the above admonitions but puts in place structural boundaries that create the best chances of following these rules.
The state is neither all-powerful nor all-encompassing. Even politics, precious and profound as it may be, is hardly the full picture of human life. In the beginning was the Word, not the state.
A beginning of a Christian engagement with international relations must therefore disagree, quite fundamentally, with both basic premises of the Westphalia international state system as we have discussed them: sovereignty and secularity.
First, we must reject sovereignty and instead embrace responsibility as the characteristic feature of the main actor of international relations.
The state is relative; it is a kind of polity, and it is not universal in time or space. We therefore need applied, comparative political history to both relativize and contextualize the state in international relations. The state as a political organization responds to Scripture’s commands of justice by ordering and structuring the loves of a polity, but its ways and means of doing so are neither inevitable nor neutral. It is, indeed, good at some things. But it is also very, very bad at others. It should never be blindly entrusted with the work of justice.
And finally, secularity is a bust. We need more curiosity and more sophistication in learning about other states and other societies. Love, not fear, is the fundamental driver of international relations.
Fear is real, and fear is present, but it is a theological and therefore also empirical error to describe it as the main or fundamental feature of anarchy. International relations is better conceived as competing commonwealths of love, rather than a clash of self-obvious material self-interest. World politics for the Christian is a clash not of civilizations but of idols, of competing, rival orders of love.
Robert J. Joustra is Professor of Politics and Spoelhof Chair at Calvin University. Adapted from Christ and Covenant in Global Politics by Robert J. Joustra. Copyright (c) 2026 by Robert J. Joustra. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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