by Adi Schlebusch
Demographics is destiny, and this is nowhere more true than in the area of religion. When Althusius, one of the leading political philosophers in the Federal or Covenantal political tradition, famously stated that “diversity destroys unity,” he was referring to ecclesiastical diversity.[1] I wonder what Althusius would make of the modern nation building project where a multitude of different peoples and worldviews are united under the all-powerful state, whose despotism is the only thing keeping the multiculturalist project from falling apart.
What distinguishes classical Federalism from other forms of localism or decentralization, is precisely its emphasis upon the covenant as decisive for the entire social order. In their 1991-book, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the covenantal tradition, the authors Charles McCoy and James Baker emphasizes that Federalism is fundamentally rooted in the covenant theology of the Protestant Reformer, Heinrich Bullinger.[2] For Bullinger the covenant starts with God calling families to exercise the dominion mandate—something which organically leads to the establishment of clans or peoples as extensions of the nuclear family as basic social order unit. Bullinger then goes as far as to apply the Old Testament covenant relationship between God and Israel to his own Swiss people. He writes the following in a tract he published in 1528 where God addresses the Swiss people in the first person:
I will be your God and you will be my people ... If you become apostate, and fail to protect that which is good and punish evil, if you do not cease your wars and fail to install a Christian government, I will judge you like I had judged Israel and Judah.[3]
Federalism is derived from the Latin foedus, which means covenant. Federalism starts with covenant parents raising their covenant children in the ways of the Lord. Althusius therefore also emphasizes that a Christian social order organically grows from the family as most basic unit in the social order, from where this extends to sanctify the neighborhood, city, county, and eventually the nation. For Althusius the role and place of the individual in any society is also rooted in that individual’s relationship to the extended family or rather “blood relations” (consociationes consanguineorum).[4]
As R.L. Dabney also points out:
The theistic scheme, then traces civil government and the civic obligation to the will and act of God, our sovereign, moral ruler and proprietor, in that He from the first made social principles a constitutive part of our souls, and placed us under social relations that are as original and natural as our own persons. These relations were: first, the family, then of the clan, and, as men multiplied, of the commonwealth. It follows thence that social government in some form is as natural as man.[5]
In other words, even considering launching a project aimed at establishing Christian nationalism as long as the constitutive parts of the national life, out of which that national life organically grows, aren't reformed as covenanted socio-confessional units, would be completely irrational. There can never be a Christian nation without Christian families, Christian clans, Christian cities, and Christian counties capable of self-rule.
The author is a senior researcher at the Pactum Institute.
[1] Althusius, J. 1610. Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata. Groningen: Radaeus, p. 45.
[2] McCoy, C.S. en J.W. Baker. 1991. Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the covenantal tradition. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, p. 27.
[3] Bullinger, H. 1544 (1528). Anklag und erstliches ermanen Gottes Allmachtigen zu eyner gemeynnen Eydgenosschaft. Zürich: Froschauer, p. 7, 57.
[4] Althusius. Politica, p. 715.
[5] Dabney, R.L. 1892. Discussions: Philosophical. Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, p. 305.