The Limits of Civil Government: Robert Dabney’s Opposition to Church Establishments

I recently published an article in Themelios on the changes American Presbyterians made to the Westminster Confession relative to the doctrine of the civil magistrate. As an addendum to that piece, I thought it might be helpful to explore what Robert Dabney (1820–1898) taught on the same subject.

My interest in Dabney is not because he has been a strong theological or ecclesiastical influence in my life. Growing up in the Dutch Reformed tradition in Michigan, I hardly knew anything about Dabney (or the Southern Presbyterian tradition more broadly). Even today, Dabney is not one of my go-to theologians. We also have to acknowledge when using Dabney as any sort of plumbline that his views about Blacks were dishonorable and sinful. For all the many biblical and confessional truths Dabney defended, he also harbored extreme racial prejudice. No amount of historical context can excuse some of the things Dabney said and stood for.

My reason for bringing up Dabney is that some voices on the Christian Nationalism Right—or what we might call the Christendom Right—are especially fond of Dabney, finding his emphasis on manliness and his views on the family to be refreshingly anti-modern. In light of these affinities, it is worth noting how strongly Dabney opposed church establishments and how much he defended the voluntary principle of church government.

Opening Considerations

At the heart of Dabney’s political theology is the contention that the purpose of civil government is secular and not spiritual. He thoroughly and frequently rejected any “theocratic conception of civil government” (Systematic Theology, 869). The proper object of government is the safeguarding of man’s life, liberty, and property. Intellectual and spiritual concerns belong to the family and to the church. The civil magistrate should not interfere in the area of religion. His powers were limited to “regulating and adjudicating all secular rights, and protecting members of civil society in their enjoyment of their several proper shares thereof.” Practically, this meant three things: taxation, punishment for crimes, and defensive war (ST, 869). Everything else was beyond the scope of government’s God-given mandate.

Of course, this does not mean Dabney wanted Christianity banished from the public square. Far from it. To keep the civil government separate from the church is not the same as keeping Christian principles out of government or Christian influence out of society. Dabney took for granted that Christianity was a kind of public truth and that the best civilization would be a Christian civilization. Dabney opposed church establishments not because he was opposed to the idea of a godly commonwealth or a Christian people, but because he thought establishments were unbiblical and ineffective.

It should also be noted that Dabney’s views diverged in significant ways from the American Founders. He rejected social contract theory as the North’s “radical social theory” and the attendant idea of natural rights as “anti-biblical theories of rights” (Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 178–79).  He believed that the theory of equal and natural rights inescapably led to abolitionism, egalitarianism, and the weakening of social and familial hierarchies. No doubt, with the justification of slavery in view, Dabney argued that man’s civil liberty consisted only in “the freedom to do whatever he has a moral right to do” (ST, 867).

In the spiritual sphere, Dabney argued strenuously in favor of religious liberty. He explicitly rejected arguments in favor of punishing heretics and enforcing religious conformity, whether these arguments came from “later Romish writers” or from Augustine in his defense of persecuting the Donatists (ST, 873–74). Dabney’s reasons for opposing religious persecution are many: man has the right of private judgment, rulers are often non-Christians, suppressing heresies makes the heresies more popular and the heretical groups more sympathetic, persecution corrupts the persecuting community, religious sects are made more dangerous when they are oppressed than when they are left alone. 

Dabney did not want the government enforcing its religious preferences. The alternative to religious liberty is for competing religious communions to fight over “which shall have the right to coerce the other” (ST, 876). But the only umpire fit to decide which communion is right is God himself. And since every communion believes God is on their side, each one’s claim is, in his own eyes, equally valid. Hence, the real referee between religious claims is pure power. Dabney condemns this view as nothing more than: “The strongest rules. Might makes right” (ST, 876). In the end, Dabney insists that “the only safe theory” is the one that binds the state to the commitment “that every man enjoys religious freedom untouched because the right to this religious freedom is a secular, or political right” (ST, 879).

Importantly, Dabney acknowledges that “the doctrine of religious liberty was not evolved at the Reformation.” He admits that “Protestants held it a right and duty to persecute heretics” (879). For Dabney, this admission was not a reason to reject the American understanding of religious liberty but to celebrate it. “The separation and independence of Church and State was not only not the doctrine of the Reformation. No Christian nation holds it to this day, except ours” (880). If America’s experiment in disestablishment was novel, so be it. In Dabney’s mind, America was right, while others had not sufficiently evolved in their thinking.

Having sketched a basic outline of Dabney’s view, we can turn now to the specific issue of church establishments. Under this heading. Dabney explores two theories in support of the establishment principle. He finds both theories unscriptural and unconvincing.

Argument #1 for Church Establishments: The Moral Argument 

The first theory is the moral or ethical argument for church establishments. Dabney cites the Prussian lawyer, Emer de Vattel (1714–1767), and the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone (1809–1898), as both making similar arguments in favor of church establishments. Their key argument, according to Dabney, is that the commonwealth is a moral person—with judgment, conscience, and responsibility. Consequently, as a corporate moral person, the state must recognize and obey the true religion as any other moral person is bound to do. Just as every person has a religion (for even no religion is a religious commitment), so every state must have a religion. And if the state must have a religion, it is bound to profess the true religion. Moreover, the state must profess this religion by concrete acts, which means (at least) religious tests for office and the use of state power in the propagation of its religion. The only alternative to a Christian state, argued Gladstone, is one that is anti-Christian and atheistic (ST, 880–81).

Dabney’s Response

Dabney’s response to this line of thinking is not easy to outline (as there are various rabbit trails, points, and subpoints), but we can enumerate at least six arguments he makes against the moral theory of church establishments.

1. Dabney rejects the idea of the state as a corporate moral person. True, he says, a nation is bound to obey and worship the true God, but this “obligation is nothing else but the individual obligation of all the members, and nothing more is needed to defend or sanction it than their individual morality and religiousness” (ST, 881). In other words, an association of persons fulfills its religious obligations (if it has any such obligations) through the individual members of that association.

2. Dabney further rejects the notion that every corporation must have a corporate religion. Should we expect that banks, armies, insurance companies, gas companies, railroad companies, and stagecoach companies all profess a corporate religion? Dabney considers the idea absurd. Not every association of persons is bound to profess and establish a corporate religious identity.

3. Dabney rejects the argument that the state is like a large family and therefore has the same obligations to religion as the family. After mentioning the examples above (banks, armies, etc.), Dabney acknowledges that some might argue that these corporations are trivial and partial. For example, there is no divine warrant for railroad companies, and all persons are not bound to be members of the gas company. The family and state are different. They exist by divine appointment; they are perpetual; they embrace everyone. The right analogy is not with the state and a bank, the argument goes, but with the state and the family. Just as the family ought to have a family religion, so the state, as a larger family, ought to have a state religion.

While Dabney does not concede the logic of this argument, he is willing to deal with it on its own terms. He insists that the state and the family are not analogous corporations. The object of the family, with regard to children, is “to promote their whole welfare.” This is not the object of civil government. This is a key point for Dabney and a key point in the debate over church establishments. Dabney does not believe that the state has the responsibility for its citizen’s highest or heavenly good. Its scope is much more limited. “The object of civil government is simply the protection of temporal rights against aggression, foreign or domestic” (ST, 882). The state is not analogous to the family because the latter is responsible for the total well-being of the subject—spiritual, physical, educational, and moral—in a way that the former is not.

Dabney disagrees with Gladstone’s contention that the proper end of human government is to foster the welfare of human beings in all things. Dabney calls this the to pan (Greek for “everything”) view of civil government, and he rejects it for three reasons: Romans 13:4 teaches otherwise; it is utterly impractical; and it renders every association of human beings an extension of the state. 

Dabney is especially exercised by this last point. If the proper object of the state is the whole welfare of man, including his highest and ultimate good, then there is no family and no church that exists originally and independently of the state. “The parent is but the delegate of the government” as the government concerns itself with man’s summum bonum in all things, including the family. Likewise, “ecclesiastical persons and assemblies are but magistrates engaged in one part of their functions” (ST, 882). The state that is, by its very nature and object, designed to be concerned with the whole welfare of man, is a state that can, and must, interfere in everything.

4. Dabney rejects the argument that the magistrate has a duty to establish religion because upon this principle the rulers of the world are empowered to establish many false religions. Dabney is realistic about the present, and he can see what has taken place over the centuries. If the sovereign must choose a religion, he will choose the one he thinks is right. And that means that the Sultan will choose Islam, the emperor of China will choose Buddhism, the king of Spain will choose Popery, and that Julian the Apostate had a right to choose the Roman gods (since paganism was Julian’s preference and the historic religion of the empire) and to persecute Christians (ST, 882). How sensible is that theory, asks Dabney, which ensures the teaching of errors, by the authority and power of the civil government, in almost every nation on earth?

5. Dabney rejects the notion of religious tests for government functions. He imagines the British government, for example, telling a skilled financier, “You shall not help in my treasury, because you do not believe in Apostolic Succession,” or telling a Presbyterian, “I will have none of your courage and skill to release my armies from probable destruction, because you listen to a preacher who never had a Prelate’s hand on his head,” or to a faithful pilot, “You shall not steer one of my ships off a lee shore, because you take the communion sitting” (883). True, these examples all deal with finer points of Christian theology. Perhaps Dabney would have thought differently if the religious options were more extreme. But as far as he could see, to insist on these sorts of tests was a failure in good and effective governance.

6. Finally, Dabney rejects the moral argument for church establishments because he thinks that the power to propagate a state religion also entails a duty to persecute religious dissenters. Dabney believes the “medicine of error is not violent repression, but light” (883). The best way to promote true religion is for the state to protect freedom of discussion and to ensure that the truth can be openly taught and that those in error can come to it.

Argument #2 for Church Establishments: The Necessity of Virtue Argument 

The second theory we might call the “necessity of virtue” argument for church establishments. (This is my label, not his.) Dabney calls it the Chalmerian View, after the famed Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), but the necessity of virtue is at the heart of the argument. This second theory makes fewer claims for the state and is generally a more attractive theory. The argument goes like this: The proper object of civil government is man’s secular well-being. The government is concerned with a limited sphere of activity, not with the whole welfare of man. But the public welfare of any commonwealth depends on its public morals, its virtue. And true virtue can only be inculcated by Christianity. Therefore, the state must establish and maintain the Christian church in order to meet its obligation to provide for decency, order, and the public morality necessary for the common good.

Dabney’s Response

Dabney does not deny the premises of the argument. He agrees that the public welfare depends upon public morals and that Christianity is the source for these public morals. What Dabney denies in the Chalmerian syllogism is the conclusion. “The contested point,” he writes, is the proposition that “‘voluntaryism’ will usually fail to diffuse a sufficient degree of public morals; and that a State-endowed Church, or Churches, of good character and spiritual independence will do it far better” (ST, 884). Dabney thinks that churches organized according to the voluntary principle will be healthier, more evangelical, and do more to strengthen the religious character of a nation than churches organized under the establishment principle. 

We can trace out five arguments Dabney makes in support of this conclusion.

1. State churches are bound to be more irreligious, more carnal, and more anti-evangelical. He reasons that governments are usually made up of people who acquired their post by party tactics, by political skill, by riches, by bribery, or by family connections. In short, most government officials are not in their positions because of their Christian graces. Even if church membership is required to serve in political office, these men tend to be nominal Christians. The result is that that state religion ends up being hostile to the evangelical faith, and the state bestows preferment upon those Christian ministers that are least effective from an evangelical point of view. History has borne this out, with Anglo-Catholics being given preferment in England, Arminians in the Netherlands, and Moderates in Scotland (ST, 884–85).

2. When financial support is guaranteed by the state it attracts carnal-minded men, and the more carnal-minded they are, the more ambitious they will be for ecclesiastical preferment.

3. When the church is endowed by the state, it adopts an oppressive attitude toward those who refuse to belong to the state church. This, in turn, makes many people prejudiced against the state church. They see it as an arm of the government (which it is), and they resent paying taxes for the preaching of doctrines they do not agree with.

4. Dabney insists that the religious state of America (in the second half of the nineteenth century) proves that the voluntary system is more effective. There was no established church (either federally or at the state level) at the time of Dabney’s Systematic Theology, and yet he saw plenty of churches to supply the needs of a growing nation. He believed that with free and open competition, the churches tended to become more evangelical. Likewise, he believed the growth of the church in England and Scotland came chiefly from dissenting groups.

5. Most importantly, Dabney believes that church establishments—of any kind, for whatever reason—compromise the independence of the church.This is what he saw in Scotland when Chalmers led the Free Church out of the Church of Scotland because of the government’s commitment to patronage. If the state employs a denomination to teach its subjects religion and morals, then the preachers of the state church are, in their ministerial functions, state officials. As such, they must bind themselves to what the state wishes them to teach. But what happens when the minister cannot in good conscience obey the state? “Whenever it happens that the magistrate differs from his conscience, he can only retain his fidelity to this Master by dissolving the State connection” (ST, 886). That is to say, ministers in the state church only adhere to the establishment principle so long as they agree with the establishment. Only by the voluntary principle can the independence of the church be fully maintained.

A Concluding Biblical Postscript

I’ve tried to present Dabney’s arguments fairly and without much comment. Some of his arguments are stronger than others, but on the whole, I think his case against church establishments rests on good logical, philosophical, and historical grounds.

But, you may ask, what about biblical grounds?

I’ve not summarized everything Dabney says about civil government, nor have I included his many proof texts (and we shouldn’t think that proof texts are always necessary to make biblical arguments). But it’s true, his argument is not mainly about the meaning of biblical texts, because the arguments for church establishments over the years have not been mainly about biblical texts. 

Historically, almost all the biblical arguments for suppressing heretics, enforcing religious conformity, or establishing a state church have come from the example of Israel in the Old Testament. The “grand appeal” for the establishment principle—whether from England or from Scotland or from Geneva—has been based on “the example of the Israelitish kingdom, where State and Church were united so intimately.” Dabney’s terse response: “a theocratic State is no rule for a State not theocratic.”  His longer response is also worth quoting:

When a State can be shown, where there is but one denomination to choose, and that immediately organized by God Himself just then; where there is an assurance of a succession of inspired prophets to keep this denomination on the right track; where the king who is to be at the head of this State Church is supernaturally nominated by God, and guided in his action by an oracle, then we will admit the application of the case. (ST, 887)

Unless we have all the blessings and spiritual realities enjoyed by the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, we should not try to adopt, for our nation, the government given to Israel.

In conclusion, Dabney warns that governments are often eager to lean on the church to do its bidding and that if we are not careful the energies of the church will be subsumed under the aims of the state. The establishment of the church by the state almost always turns out better for the state than the church. And then this final sentence: “Do not suppose that this question will never again be practical.”

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.