The most influential institutions in the world are governments. Nothing else commands the sword, the treasury, and the loyalty of whole populations at once. So the standing temptation of any religion that gains a following is to become one: to take the form of the most powerful thing in its environment. Israel did it when it asked for a king like all the nations (1 Samuel 8:5). The church did it after Constantine. And the pattern has one ending, which Scripture predicted and history has never once contradicted.

To see why, you first have to grant something religious people are often reluctant to grant. Jesus brought a government.

It is a government

The word is basileia, and it isn't a soft word. It's the ordinary Greek for a kingdom, a reign, an empire, the word for what Rome had. Isaiah had said of the child to be born that the government shall be upon his shoulder, and of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end (Isaiah 9:6-7). Daniel saw a stone cut out without hands strike the statue of the empires and become a great mountain, and interpreted it: the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed... it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms (Daniel 2:35, 44). A kingdom that consumes kingdoms isn't a private spirituality. It's a rival polity.

And the New Testament church had every organ of a state. A king. A law: the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). A citizenship: politeuma, commonwealth (Philippians 3:20); fellowcitizens with the saints (Ephesians 2:19). A treasury (Acts 4:34-35). A welfare system with eligibility rules (1 Timothy 5). A judiciary: Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? (1 Corinthians 6:1). Due process: in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Matthew 18:16). And a sanction: exclusion from the body (1 Corinthians 5:13).

So the question was never whether the church is a government. The question is what kind.

The one distinguishing mark

Jesus answered that standing in front of the governor of Judea:

My kingdom isn't of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I shouldn't be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (John 18:36)

Read the if clause carefully, because it's the definition. He doesn't say his kingdom is unreal, or absent, or apolitical. He says: if it were the kind of government this world has, his servants would be fighting. The one thing that would prove his government was an earthly one is the sword in his followers' hands. Its absence is the mark. A few hours earlier, when Peter drew one, the correction was immediate: Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52).

The location is stated too: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21). The Greek can mean within you or among you, and scholars divide. The argument doesn't depend on which. Either way, the seat of this government is people, not territory. It has no map. And the prophets had said this is how the new covenant would govern: I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts (Jeremiah 31:33); I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes (Ezekiel 36:27). A law written on hearts is a government operating from inside its subjects. Its citizens are scattered through every nation as strangers and pilgrims (1 Peter 2:11), and its only sanction is the withdrawal of fellowship.

Jesus was offered the other kind twice and refused both times: all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them in the wilderness (Matthew 4:8-9), and the crowd that would come and take him by force, to make him a king, from which he departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15).

What an earthly government must have

This isn't a claim that governments are wicked; Paul calls the magistrate the minister of God (Romans 13:4), and Joseph, Daniel, and Erastus the city treasurer (Romans 16:23) served in them honourably. The claim is about what happens to a religion when it tries to become one.

Every government of this world runs on three things. Power: the sword, the capacity to coerce; a state that can't enforce isn't a state. Resources: the treasury, filled by taking; Samuel's six he will takes (1 Samuel 8:11-17) weren't a description of a bad king but of what any government must do to exist. And politics: the management of factions, the trading of favours, the securing of allies, without which power and resources can't be held.

Put a religion in the position of needing all three. It must coerce, so it must have a sword and decide whom to use it on, and the obvious candidates are those who disagree with it about religion. It must have revenue, so it must own and defend property. It must manage factions, so its offices become things to be traded. None of these can be declined; each is a condition of being the thing it has decided to be. The mixing isn't an accident of bad men. It's the arithmetic of the form.

The king's chapel

Scripture shows the arithmetic running. Jeroboam invented a religion, and the text gives his reasoning: If this people go up to do sacrifice... at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord... and they shall kill me (1 Kings 12:27). Two golden calves, a priesthood of the lowest of the people, a feast devised of his own heart (12:28-33): every element engineered for the security of the throne.

Two centuries later, at that shrine, the priest told a prophet exactly what it was: O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah... But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court (Amos 7:12-13). The king's chapel is the honest name for a religion that has become an organ of government, and notice what its priest does with a prophet: reports him to the state as a conspirator and orders him to take his message elsewhere.

Then the end of the line: the religious government of Judea at the trial of Jesus, reasoning as a state reasons. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation... it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not (John 11:48-50). Place, nation, expedience, the institution's survival weighed against one man's life, and the man is the Messiah and the calculation is the high priest's. Then the establishment's last word to the Roman governor: We have no king but Caesar (John 19:15). A priesthood that had become a government confessed the only king a government can have.

The church ran the same experiment

Within a century of Constantine the church had the sword: in 385 the bishop Priscillian was executed for heresy, the first Christian put to death by Christians for his beliefs, over the protest of Martin of Tours. The persecuted became the persecutor within a lifetime, not because its bishops were worse than their martyred predecessors but because it now had a jurisdiction, and a jurisdiction must be defended. It had the treasury: the largest estates in Europe, tithes by law, offices sold, forgiveness priced. It had the politics: prince-bishops, papal armies, a two-century war over who appointed bishops. And the Reformers reproduced it: the ruler's religion by law, Geneva burning a heretic, Massachusetts hanging Quakers. Every party that took the state did what the state does.

Why it is inevitable: two relations to death

An earthly government must survive. Its first duty is its own continuance, so survival becomes the end, and once survival is the end, any means that secures it becomes permissible: the alliance with Egypt, the sword against the heretic, the one man dead for the nation. Caiaphas's reasoning isn't monstrous. It's what a government is.

The government Jesus brought has no survival imperative, because its survival is guaranteed from outside it: the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18); a kingdom which cannot be moved (Hebrews 12:28). It doesn't have to win. It can afford to lose. It can afford to die, and they loved not their lives unto the death (Revelation 12:11), because its continuance was never lodged in its own strength. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit (Zechariah 4:6). The weapons of our warfare are not carnal (2 Corinthians 10:4).

So the two governments stand in opposite relations to death. One can't afford martyrdom and must compromise; the other can afford it and need not. The moment a religion becomes an earthly government it inherits that government's relation to death, and from then on it will do what survival requires and call it faithfulness. That's the filth: not that its people are dirtier, but that it has taken on a nature whose first law is self-preservation.

The objection, answered

Israel was a nation with a sword, constituted by God. Why is the church forbidden what Israel was given? I say this because the New Testament says the arrangement changed: the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof (Matthew 21:43), and that nation is strangers scattered (1 Peter 1:1) through every country on earth. A government without territory can't have a sword, because a sword requires a jurisdiction. There's no border for it to defend. The form Jesus described to Pilate isn't an ideal the church may aspire to. It's the only form a scattered people can take.

It shall not be so among you (Mark 10:43) was never a word about leadership style. It's the one thing that distinguishes his government from every other, and the one thing the church has spent sixteen centuries trying to acquire.