Public administration’s effort to retain the values of Jesus while distancing itself from the theological premises underlying those values is an example in miniature of the relationship between government and religion in modern industrial republics, which have achieved aQ historically unprecedented degree of political integration by founding their authority on an abstract, theology-free moral code. Modern nations unite peoples of different races and creeds by declaring certain norms of behavior and attitude to be universally valid, regardless of a particular person’s, group’s, or nation’s customs, religious beliefs, or history. Among these norms are freedoms of speech, conscience, and worship, freedoms that require and therefore entail religious tolerance, limited government, and the priority of law over religiosity. Originating with the 18th-century democratic rev- olutions in America and France, political consolidation via this abstract morality has become a global phenomenon and is now considered to be one of the defining characteristics of modernity.
Nonetheless, this cultural separation of morality, religion, and law is not entirely unique to the modern era. It is actually a new variation on an old solution to an even older problem at the core of Western civili- zation. The problem is how to unite warring peoples into political units capable of mobilizing a common defense against foreign invaders. In world history, this problem in its most extreme form has been unique to
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the West because of the special character of Western cities. One of Weber’s most important and yet most neglected observations is that the European city of antiquity differed from cities elsewhere.4 The Occidental city, as he called it, was characterized by a martial culture focusing on military discipline and warfare. Each city had its own gods, took responsibility for its own defense, organized city politics and government around military units, and tied citizenship and preparation for citizenship to military training and service. The Oriental city, in contrast, was organized almost exclusively for trade and left military protection to imperial author- ities, which governed large geographical areas and were not identified exclusively with any one urban center.
The history of the West can be reconstructed as a long and painful effort to achieve, as it says on all U.S. coins, e pluribus unum: “from many, one.” Prior to separating morality and religion in the modern era, several other methods of political integration had been tried in the West, with varying degrees of success. Confederations of cities came first, notably among the allies of Sparta and Athens in the years leading up to the Peloponnesian War.5 While these alliances allowed the Greek cities to fend off two massive invasions by Persia, they were unstable and short- lived because of intercity rivalries and distrust. Well aware of these problems, Alexander the Great tried, instead, to recreate the blood ties of the martial city on an imperial scale. In an attempt to weave together a Macedonian, Greek, Persian, and Egyptian empire, he had his generals intermarry with local elites. But this biological approach, too, proved inadequate, as Alexander’s men quickly forgot their common heritage and began to identify with the peoples of their new lands.6
The first empire involving European city-states that was even marginally stable was established by Rome, which took a middle route between the loose confederations of the Greeks and the total fusion sought by Alex- ander. The Romans required their subject states to make financial payments to Rome, house Roman troops in their territories, and defer to Roman governors on issues of special concern to the empire, but in most other respects it allowed these states to operate as usual. They could continue to practice their local religions, keep their established forms of govern- ment, and follow their normal customs.7 Conceptually speaking, this quasi federalism was accomplished by separating law from religion and subor- dinating the latter to the former. The resulting empire lasted for several centuries, and even when it began to break apart, the fractures were not because of rebellions by conquered peoples, but a consequence of class divisions and elite rivalries within the ruling city.8
Christianity became the unifying religion of the empire partly by chance, and partly because it fit the empire’s legal framework. Jesus lived during the period when the empire, after having replaced its citizen-army
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with year-round professionals, had begun to experience civil wars, because the legions now gave their allegiance to individual generals rather than to the city or the military as a whole. As the military power behind the legal superstructure split apart and turned on itself, politically active citizens at all levels of the empire inevitably yearned for some sort of cultural glue capable of rebinding the armies and their generals to the legal order. The teachings of Jesus met this need, because they featured the idea of a “kingdom of God,” a kingdom in which rulers and subjects alike subordinated themselves to higher laws. Hence, the legend and teachings of Jesus spread through the empire along the path established by Roman law, which had been built atop the laws, customs, and religions of the subject territories. Subsequently, after reuniting the empire by force of arms, Constantine took advantage of this cultural reinforcement by declaring Christianity to be the empire’s official religion. He also required the Church leaders to call the Council of Nicea to adopt a single creed, a creed which to this day is accepted by virtually all Christian denomi- nations. From this point forward, the social and political order was no longer to be a multicultural conglomeration of separate city-states bound together by abstract law; it was to become a unicultural empire in which law was once again interwoven with religion as it had been before, in the martial cities.9
The separation of morality, religion, and law in the modern era represents, in important respects, a reversal of Constantine’s policy and a return to the method of political integration practiced under the empire before Christianity. This is why Strauss10 speaks of two forms of liberalism:
ancient and modern. Liberalism is a political philosophy that calls for religious tolerance and authorizes religious freedom within a framework of abstract legal rights and obligations. Ancient liberalism was the practice by the early Roman Empire of placing abstract law above religion and allowing subject states to maintain their indigenous cultures within certain limits. Modern liberalism subordinates religion as well as law to an abstract morality. That this morality is higher than law can be seen in the ability of such modern leaders as Jefferson and Lincoln to criticize and change the United States Constitution to bring it closer to the Declaration of Independence.11 It also evident in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials for “crimes against humanity,” and other instances where the laws of nations are treated as less than ultimate.
Modern liberalism was necessitated by the Protestant Reformation, which broke the Church’s monopoly on biblical exegesis and opened the way for multiple creeds and denominations within an overarching Christian culture. Religious pluralism brought civil war, repression, intolerance, and fanaticism, and just as disorder in ancient Rome had facilitated the rapid
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diffusion of integrative religious beliefs, the religious wars of the 15th and 16th centuries caused a compensatory search for common ground between the conflicting sects. The product of this culture-work was a moral code deemed to be inherent in human reason and therefore independent of religious creeds and doctrines.12