Last week saw an astonishing display of the ravages of establishment Christianity running roughshod over biblical Christianity.
First, the Church of England—a bulwark of British society, we’re told—installed a woman as the first archbishop of Canterbury in the history of Anglicanism. Not to be outdone, Finland’s judicial system dropped the hammer of justice on a member of parliament, Christian Democrat Päivi Räsänen. Her crime? Promoting traditional views about sexuality through pamphlets written in the early 2000s and eventually posted on Facebook. We cannot leave out the important detail that Finland has two national churches.
The inquiring among us should ask two important questions: Why is establishment Christianity, of the sort practiced in England and Finland, ceding ground to the forces of feminism and sexual revolution? Should not the alliance of the state with ecclesial bodies, armed with Bibles that prohibit female ordination and homosexuality, resist these forces? One would think that a form of Christianity backed up by the imprimatur of state authority would possess the unassailable authority to resist the slide into theological liberalism.
But it’s worth examining whether there’s a correlation between England’s state church ordaining a woman as archbishop and Finland persecuting actual evangelicals. State-sponsored egalitarianism (along with clergy-sanctioned gay marriage, abortion, and euthanasia) and state-sponsored persecution coming at the hands of a government called to “promote true religion,” as some pine for in America, is not the solution we’re told it is. It will not work because it cannot work.
Why? Because the state lacks an internal disciplinary mechanism to preserve orthodoxy, it cannot perpetuate proper doctrine among its officials in perpetuity. There is no regenerate community within government ordered by the Word of God, administering the ordinances, and exercising church discipline.
And that’s by design, I believe, as government is not called, nor is it competent, to administer ecclesial affairs according to Scripture. The government is called to a limited task of upholding law in accordance with God’s natural law. When government co-mingles with established religion, all that’s left is a hollow shell of a once-vibrant faith held captive to religious nominalism that serves, in the long run, to merely baptize an increasingly secular state’s paganism. When the state formally allies itself with a religious body, nothing of benefit accrues or persists—only long-term dilution of real faith. The historical record is unbeaten in nationalized Christianity corrupting true religion. What the state will do is either whittle itself down into unbelief (in the case of England) or go in the opposite direction of narrowing the parameters for what’s religiously tolerated (as in the case of Finland).
Vesting an ecclesial body with the machinery of government power does not end well for the church. It has not. It does not. As history shows us, state-established churches lack the moral reserves to press against secularism’s advance. There is no historical evidence of a church-state union that provided either the state or the church with biblical fidelity. We may wish that constitutions did a better job of explicitly acknowledging a religious ontology to settle matters such as public justice and human rights (and I’m open to such considerations), but acknowledging a moral ecosystem as a historical and moral matter is not the same as allowing Caesar to formally intermeddle in religious matters.
Every serious proposal with disestablishment involves trade-offs. The question is: Which trade-offs are we willing to accept? The first trade-off we should not accept is sacrificing what the Bible teaches if it does indeed posit something like a disestablishment ethic, as I think it does. But then there are pragmatic trade-offs: Is a society without an officially established religion truly worse off than a confessional state that now persecutes conscientious Christians and embraces egalitarianism (to say nothing of the deadened religious nominalism now defining these religio-political arrangements)?
And there’s a flipside reality we need to reckon with: Nothing about disestablishment inexorably yields secularism or an autonomous sphere of public neutrality. Something will inevitably anchor society’s moral imagination, and there is no barrier to Christians organizing and mobilizing toward morally righteous ends. Secularism is a choice just as religious influence is. Americans are just as free to be religious as they are secular. Is it not the case that American evangelicalism is starkly more vibrant, as Alexis De Tocqueville observed, because of its voluntary nature—a voluntary nature that does not prevent us from mobilizing and voting for laws that reflect true moral righteousness—than the doctrinal atrophying traditions of England and Finland?
Critics of my argument will no doubt respond that America’s descent into decadence makes disestablishment no better off. Perhaps. But at least America comes by its paganism honestly, and without a row of bishops sitting in Congress’s balcony signing off on it with hypocrisy.
If you want to lose the gospel, let the government manage it. If you want to accelerate the decline of vibrant Christian witness and baptize abortion and sodomy, let the unregenerate bureaucratize Christianity for some instrumental end. Over time, we’ll learn once again the timeless truth that God’s appointed buffer to keep the gospel intact, the church, is the only institution that effectively stewards it.
There is also a criticism that arguments like mine need to take seriously: Neither is disestablishment enough to protect the gospel’s purity. As we saw in the hyper-woke era, disestablishment was no safe harbor from secularism trying to establish itself as a state religion. And, to be clear, while my focus in this column is on establishment Christianity, that is hardly an imminent threat. The bigger challenge, on orders of magnitude, is a creeping secularism that wishes to establish itself as America’s moral framework, which is just as much a worldview with all the theological pretensions of a religion, but which drapes itself in the language of “neutrality” only to smuggle in claims that are, unquestionably, as far-reaching as any other religion. The lesson, as I see it, is two-fold: Never empower leftists, who will seek to dislodge religious influence and impose their own secular framework, and second, preserve the conditions that safeguard the purity of the gospel, which, to me, means formal disestablishment.
The best solution of all is not a government uniting itself to a religious body, but a civil society buttressed by a thick Christian consensus. Only then can disestablishment work within the boundaries of moral restraint without collapsing into doctrinal decline or coercive authoritarianism dressed up in a bishop’s mitre.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on March 30, 2026.
