The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty by Andrew Willard Jones. 2025. New Polity Press. 321 pp. Hardcover. $34.95.
As someone who has been conversant with the “postliberal” literature for about fifteen years, two things have increasingly bothered me about the current era of the discourse: the obsession with the state and erasure of the concept of the common good. Enter The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty.
In this capstone to what can be understood as a trilogy of political theory, Andrew Willard Jones offers unique resources to critique modern social orders. The first installment, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, was a deep historical dive into a single period to gesture at an alternative framework for political order. The second installment, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics, provided a sweeping overview of the history of politics from a theological angle that centered the church as the key player on the human level. This volume interjects a unique line of argumentation into the postliberal discourse, though Jones does not foreground that term. In fact, he explicitly repudiates some prominent postliberals. His main agenda is to attack the modern notion of sovereignty and to promote subsidiarity in its stead. In pursuit of this project, Jones also opposes both liberalism and statist forms of postliberalism. He believes both adopt fundamental frameworks that are related to sovereignty and are antithetical to a truly Christian vision of political order.
This is a book primarily of political theory. It is not practical, and the author is forthright about this. He wants us to grasp what is true before we begin to come up with plans of what to do. So, the book is organized by reframing a series of fundamental political concepts. What is truly basic to politics? Not—à la Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt—enmity, coercion, and pure willful power. Politics is not all about the “state,” and the “state” is not all about violence, as these seminal thinkers propound. The theory of sovereignty, which Jones opposes, is built on the modern assumption of “primordial violence”—of basic enmity between human persons and corresponding fear—out of which the state emerges as the only entity that is afforded legitimate use of violence to keep at bay violence between individuals. This state thus conceived is also totalizing because it is an association categorically distinct from all others, one which none can escape. One must live within the “registry,” as Jones describes it. Within this legal regime, persons relate by contracts with others which the state defines and enforces.
In contrast, Jones presents politics as fundamentally defined by friendship, virtue, and the common good. The “fundamental principle of Christian politics,” argues Jones, is “that all power ought to be used for the common good.” A “just and happy polity” is one made up of friends who seek the good together. And in this pursuit, they need the guidance and direction of authorities. Proper authority functions within a harmonious hierarchy, what Augustine referred to as the “tranquility of order.” Within the subsidiarist vision, authority is generative, seeking the good of those it leads, and higher levels are ordered toward the fulfillment of lower levels. The archetypal relation of this form of authority is that of the parent and child. Such a relation is based on duties, gifts, and love and is defined by a fundamental inequality and a common good. These types of relationships, which don’t fit neatly within a liberal political framework, are foundational for a truly Christian social vision. Relations are given, not merely constructed by atomistic monads seeking mutual self-interest and contracting under the determinations and defense of the state.
As Jones explains, that combination of anthropological individualism and extrinsic power is central to modern liberal orders. Sovereignty and liberalism go together, as both operate within a shared understanding of power—which is of pure voluntary will, unrelated to truth and disconnected from any harmonious order. Law within such a framework is then merely coercive. Even Christians who embrace the classical notion that law habituates into virtue can interpret this to mean that virtue must just be imposed on others through legislation. Rather, Jones argues, we should reform our conceptions of the nature of law with virtue in mind. Here again the parent-child relation is instructive. This relation is archetypal of relations in which virtue is the end and happiness is shared and forged together. A father leads his son through morally formative acts. Jones pairs this motif with another image to explain the nature of political leadership: that of an architect. As a legislator, the political leader is like an architect of the common good shared among virtuous friends. He guides those under him who are sub-architects, seeking to elevate their work into the great project which is political society. But the political leader does not just build a more perfect peace; his more basic task is to protect the peace over which he is a steward. Peace is fundamental. With this move, Jones relativizes coercion and violence within political theory. Even the most depraved polities hold together because of some lingering participation in the tranquility of order. No real society can be fear and domination all the way down.
This brings Jones to his sharp critiques of “the Hobbesian tradition.” Targeting Hobbes is a controversial move, since many object to his categorization as “liberal.” But Jones sees in Hobbes a crystallization of what is fundamental to all liberal orders: anthropological individualism and the notion that any given order only emerges out of the intrusion of power—thus, society is the result of sovereignty. And while not all liberals are professed Hobbesians, Hobbes is a particularly sophisticated thinker and his theories encapsulate the essential elements of liberal orders characterized by sovereignty. His thought exhibits a “ruthless consistency,” argues Jones. All power, according to Hobbes, is coercive imposition and basically self-interested. Hobbes, like all liberal theorists, begins with asocial man. These atomistic individuals exist in fear of others, and as a result they form sovereign orders to keep violence at bay. These structures of power stand alone. Truth is demoted and marginalized. This is sovereignty. The Hobbesian principle of sovereignty is that power, rather than truth, makes law. This is a radical abandonment of the harmonious hierarchy of a Christian social vision. This is why Jones argues there can be no possibility of a “Christian sovereign,” because the Christian vision would have to be reduced to fit the mold of the modern state. This is in fact what happened with “divine right” theorists. According to such “Christian” theories, no one can judge the ruler but God, and all subjects must unreservedly submit to the sovereign’s will.
Jones presents Schmitt in continuity with this Hobbesian tradition, sharing fundamental assumptions about social order and power. Schmitt carries Hobbesian assumptions to an extreme with his argument that politics is fundamentally about the capacity to determine the friend-enemy distinction. In Jones’s best chapter, he delivers a brilliant, multi-pronged takedown of Schmitt’s views. First, Jones argues that Schmitt conceives of something that is essential to man—i.e., his political nature—as a result of the fall—i.e., enmity. This is to make something unnatural part of the nature of man. Second, according to Jones, Schmitt presents an unscriptural distinction that limits love only to private enemies. This can only work if love in Scripture is delimited to private enemies (which it is not) and if love is completely divorced from the use of “force” and punishment (which any parent knows is untrue). Third, Jones explains that Schmitt, for all of his emphasis on the distinction between friends and enemies, never defines friendship, even as he expounds at length on enmity. Thus, it would seem that for Schmitt “friends” are simply groups oriented against enemies, and a “friend” is nothing more than one with whom you are not currently at war. The “friend” is thus nothing but a potential enemy; the “friend” thus doesn’t exist. Jones, extending the classical Augustinian privation theory of evil, argues that, in fact, the enemy is the one who doesn’t really exist, because enemies are just estranged friends. Thus, since the enemy doesn’t really exist, he cannot be the foundation for politics; rather, friendship is.
Christianity makes better politics possible. This does not mean a complete return to the pre-fall condition. Rather, one could characterize Jones’s proposal as Augustine’s posse non peccare applied to politics. In the age of grace, as Christianity progressively penetrates society, the actualization of true neighbor love grows. A Christianized order increasingly anticipates the peace for which we were made and toward which human history is heading. But this also means the progressive undoing of sovereignty.
Now, the book as a whole is somewhat inconsistent. The sections on the liturgical cosmos and the application of medieval hermeneutics to a theology of history were somewhat convoluted and meandering, adding little directly related to the fundamental argument of the book. Furthermore, at a couple of points Jones is unnecessarily uncharitable toward Protestantism. For instance, when he effectively blames the Reformation for the emergence of the theory of “sovereignty.” Seminal works such as that by Joseph Stayer’s On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State would challenge this point, locating the origins of sovereignty much earlier in the medieval period. And when Jones lampoons Protestants for having a merely negative view of politics as just an effect of the fall, he could have easily directed that critique at Augustine. Furthermore, this characterization falls flat once one takes into account more “positive,” Aristotelian accounts like that of Althusius’s Politica (among others). And Jones’s negative conception of the “state” would be contested by some, like Oliver O’Donovan who argues that the “state” is the product of Christendom, conceiving of rule under law.[1]
Notwithstanding these points of contention, this is a work that merits attention. Away with Hobbes and Schmitt. Politics is about friendship in an order of harmonious hierarchy. Authorities stand not alone as sovereigns. As subjects to the Truth and protectors of the peace, they serve all in the pursuit of the common good.
James R. Wood is Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University in Ancaster, ON. He is also a Commonwealth Fellow at Ad Fontes, a teaching elder in the PCA and former associate editor at First Things.
See Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 231ff. ↑