Definition of the state

Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. — Max Weber, in Politics as a Vocation.

The “state” is… “a political organization whose rule is territorially ordered and which is able to mobilize the means of violence to sustain that rule.” — Anthony Giddens, from The Nation-State and Violence

If these definitions are taken as normative, then it seems to me that Christianity has inherent to it a component of natural resistance to the state as we take up the way of the Cross, that did not do violence but rather absorbed it and defeated it through the Resurrection.

There are other useful ways of discussing the state too, for example Hobbes viewed the rule of a tyrant as preferable to the fear of humanity in its natural, wild, chaotic state. The ruler imposes order, which is preferred to chaos. But the ruler was justified in exercising power in whatever way in order to maintain that order, because fear of the ruler was to be preferred to the fear that reigned in that chaotic state. It’s all there in his Leviathan.

For Locke, the state existed as an agreement, or social contract, between property owners for the mutual protection of their power over their holdings. This does involve some mutual relinquishment of individual rights, but it is still essentially the formation of a hegemony to maintain property power under the name of freedom, equality, and morality. See his Second Treatise on Civil Government. Locke was probably the most influential force on the ideas of civic formation of the American founders (not Christianity, as is believed by many conservative Christians).

I don’t have a long, drawn-out argument here, just pointing out a couple of things. Namely, that defining the state as a consolidation of power in one form or another goes back to the very foundations of the modern nation-state concept.

The most prominent example in the Bible of consolidation of power from a close-up narrative source is in the development of David’s kingdom, it’s consolidation by Solomon, and its deconstruction throughout the rest of the books of Kings and Chronicles. Even David, ostenably a man after God’s own heart, seems to lose his grip the more he consolidates his power. The accumulation of power under his reign seems to coincide in the narrative with his losing control of his household affairs and indeed even of his mental faculties beginning with the moment he uses his power as king to take away the wife of one of his subjects. And the child of that union, Solomon, further solidifies that power by becoming just like the pagan kings of the nations: forced labor, domestication of religion (by consolidating it in the temple system), economic prosperity that shares just enough to keep people in line (and little enough that it keeps the poor oppressed), and a succession of primogeniture, rather than of merit.

All this leads me to question the very notion of whether there can even BE a Christian nation-state, let alone whether the United States is one. It leads me to question the morality of the very existance of nation-states. Now, that does not mean that every aspect of every state is evil, but the foundations of such seem to me to depend on principles that are at least contrary to the message of Jesus.

Blessed are the power-mongers? The warlike? The consolidators of wealth?

No. Blessed are the meek, the peacemakers, the poor.

God bless America.

(originally posted in my Livejournal on August 14, 2006)