An essential aspect of debates over political theology and Christian politics in the 21st century revolves around the question of whether the government can enforce the first table of the Law. Presbyterian and Reformed debates over this question are intense, precisely because there is no unified Reformed tradition stretching from the American Revolution to the 21st century that offers a unitary answer. Surprisingly, Anglicans offer considerably more unity on the question of law, the church, and politics across 250 years of American history, for several reasons. Historic ties to the state and state actors meant that pietistic and spiritualist renderings of Christian devotion common among the Reformed and Evangelicals never carried much weight among Anglican churchmen, in Britain or in North America. Politics and religion were connected, even if the church and state were not. There was no sense in pedantic handwringing over what seemed an unquestioned historic fact and present reality. Anglicans rejected the first/second table framework Presbyterians and the Reformed used to litigate political theology. Anglicans did not spend as much time trying to justify slavery as Presbyterians, and so the Spirituality of the Church doctrine never had an Anglican analog. Lastly, and most importantly, Anglican connections to the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy were minimal, which allows for more continuity on political theology.

Early Episcopalians in the newly independent United States like Samuel Seabury, antebellum bishops like Charles Petit McIlvaine, and increasingly heterodox bishops like early 21st-century presiding bishop Michael Curry all understood a tie between God’s law and the civil law, and they all professed that Christians had a right to make the latter conform to the former. Samuel Seabury, William White, and John Henry Hopkins connected religion to morality, morality to virtue, and virtue to the political. Hopkins argued that politics was “the noblest and most extensive of all human sciences, because it embraces the whole scope of government, law, and moral action.” The true basis of politics, the Vermont bishop posited, was morality, and the “true basis of morality is religion.” This syllogism–politics, morality, and religion–defined Anglican political theology, but Reformed Protestants also appealed to it as well. Presbyterians in the 19th Century regularly appealed to morality and virtue, rather than the Biblical-legal framework that overwhelmingly dominates Reformed work on law and politics today.

Unlike the Reformed, Anglicans continued to appeal to natural law, morality, and virtue throughout the 20th Century. The reason lay in the Fundamentalist movement’s shattering of conservative Presbyterians’ intellectual continuity and sent most soteriologically conservative Presbyterians on a mission to find supposed doctrinal perfection to defend the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith. While conservative Presbyterians and Baptists in the 1920s and 1930s—especially in the South—retreated from any intellectual engagement with human association outside the church, the Episcopal bishop of Georgia, Frederick F. Reese, could confidently proclaim that “in our day, the Church must be the voice of conscience in the state, reminding it of its moral obligations.” Reese respected “the separation of church and state,” but insisted that Christians “must not shy away from speaking truth to power when the dignity of humanity is at stake.” The state, he said, “has its role, but the Church’s mission is to uphold the eternal truths that guide just governance.” Here, a century after the antebellum era, Reese was defending the Anglican political theology syllogism of politics, morality, and religion.

Anglican prelates pursued political theology through this form of syllogistic unity, rather than the legal framework Calvinists operated from. You won’t find Episcopal or Anglican bishops getting out ecclesiastical or socio-political surgical knives to divide the first and second tables of the Law, because Anglicans then and now did not and do not believe religion and politics could ever be separated, even in a disestablishmentarian order. N.T. Wright and Michael Bird state flatly that keeping the church or religion “out of politics is impossible. We must be political in some sense because the kingdom of God has political implications for proclamation and poverty, for justice and judgment, for Congress and Church, for love and liberty.” Democratic and disestablished political regimes are no exception. “While Church and State are separable, there is always going to be a connection between religion and politics because of the intersection of values and voting.”