The most influential institutions in the world are governments. Nothing else commands the sword, the treasury, and the loyalty of whole populations at once. So any religion that gains a following lives with a standing temptation to become one and take the form of the most powerful thing in its environment. Israel did it when it asked for a king like all the nations (1 Samuel 8:5). The church did it after Constantine. And the pattern has one ending, which Scripture predicted and history has never once contradicted.

To see why, you first have to grant what religious people are often reluctant to grant, that Jesus brought a government.

It is a government

The word is basileia. Far from being a soft word, it's the ordinary Greek for a kingdom, a reign, an empire, the word for what Rome had. Isaiah had said of the child to be born that the government shall be upon his shoulder, and of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end (Isaiah 9:6-7). Daniel saw a stone cut out without hands strike the statue of the empires and become a great mountain, and interpreted it: the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed... it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms (Daniel 2:35, 44). A kingdom that consumes kingdoms is a rival polity, which is a long way from a private spirituality.

And the New Testament church had every organ of a state. There was a king and a law, the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). Its people held a citizenship, a politeuma or commonwealth (Philippians 3:20), as fellowcitizens with the saints (Ephesians 2:19). The church kept a treasury (Acts 4:34-35) and ran a welfare system with eligibility rules (1 Timothy 5). It had a judiciary: Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? (1 Corinthians 6:1). It had due process, in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Matthew 18:16), and a sanction, exclusion from the body (1 Corinthians 5:13).

So the question was never whether the church is a government, only what kind of government it is.

The one distinguishing mark

Jesus answered that standing in front of the governor of Judea:

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (John 18:36)

The definition hangs on the if clause. Jesus says that if his kingdom were the kind of government this world has, his servants would be fighting. He never calls it unreal, or absent, or apolitical. The one thing that would prove his government was an earthly one is the sword in his followers' hands. Its absence is the mark. A few hours earlier, when Peter drew one, the correction was immediate: Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52).

Jesus also said where this kingdom is found: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21). The Greek can mean within you or among you, and scholars divide. The argument doesn't depend on which, because on either reading this government is seated in people. It has no territory and no map. The prophets had said this is how the new covenant would govern: I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts (Jeremiah 31:33); I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes (Ezekiel 36:27). A law written on hearts is a government operating from inside its subjects. Its citizens are scattered through every nation as strangers and pilgrims (1 Peter 2:11), and its only sanction is the withdrawal of fellowship.

Jesus was offered the other kind twice and refused both times: all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them in the wilderness (Matthew 4:8-9), and the crowd that would come and take him by force, to make him a king, from which he departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15).

What an earthly government must have

I'm not saying governments are wicked. Paul calls the magistrate the minister of God (Romans 13:4), and Joseph, Daniel, and Erastus the city treasurer (Romans 16:23) served in them honourably. The trouble starts when a religion tries to become one.

Every government of this world runs on three things. The first is power, meaning the sword and the capacity to coerce, since a state that can't enforce isn't a state. The second is resources, a treasury filled by taking. Samuel's six he will takes (1 Samuel 8:11-17) describe what any government must do to exist, good king or bad. The third is politics, the management of factions, the trading of favours, and the securing of allies, without which power and resources can't be held.

Put a religion in the position of needing all three. To coerce, it needs a sword and has to decide whom to use it on, and the obvious candidates are those who disagree with it about religion. Revenue means it must own property and defend it. Managing factions turns its offices into things to be traded. None of these can be declined; each is a condition of being the thing it has decided to be. Bad men get the blame for the mixing, but the arithmetic of the form produces it.

The king's chapel

Scripture shows the arithmetic running. Jeroboam invented a religion, and the text gives his reasoning: If this people go up to do sacrifice... at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord... and they shall kill me (1 Kings 12:27). The two golden calves, the priesthood of the lowest of the people, and the feast devised of his own heart (12:28-33) were all engineered for the security of the throne.

Two centuries later, at that shrine, the priest told a prophet exactly what it was: O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah... But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court (Amos 7:12-13). The king's chapel is the honest name for a religion that has become an organ of government. Its priest reports the prophet to the state as a conspirator and orders him to take his message elsewhere.

The end of the line is the religious government of Judea at the trial of Jesus, reasoning as a state reasons. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation... it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not (John 11:48-50). They set place, nation, and expedience, the survival of the institution, on one side of the scale and one man's life on the other. The man is the Messiah, and the calculation is the high priest's. The establishment's last word to the Roman governor was We have no king but Caesar (John 19:15). A priesthood that had become a government confessed the only king a government can have.

The church ran the same experiment

Within a century of Constantine the church had the sword. In 385 the bishop Priscillian became the first Christian put to death by Christians for his beliefs, executed for heresy over the protest of Martin of Tours. The church's bishops were no worse than their martyred predecessors, yet within a lifetime the persecuted had become the persecutor. It now had a jurisdiction, and a jurisdiction must be defended. It had the treasury too, with the largest estates in Europe, tithes by law, offices for sale, and forgiveness at a price. It had the politics of prince-bishops, papal armies, and a two-century war over who appointed bishops. The Reformers reproduced all of it. The ruler's religion became law, Geneva burned a heretic, and Massachusetts hanged Quakers. Every party that took the state did what the state does.

Why it is inevitable: two relations to death

An earthly government must survive. Its first duty is its own continuance, so survival becomes the end, and once survival is the end, any means that secures it becomes permissible: the alliance with Egypt, the sword against the heretic, the one man dead for the nation. Monstrous as it sounds, Caiaphas's reasoning is what a government is.

The government Jesus brought has no survival imperative, because its survival is guaranteed from outside it: the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18); a kingdom which cannot be moved (Hebrews 12:28). It doesn't have to win. It can afford to lose, and it can afford to die, and they loved not their lives unto the death (Revelation 12:11), because its continuance was never lodged in its own strength. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit (Zechariah 4:6). The weapons of our warfare are not carnal (2 Corinthians 10:4).

So the two governments stand in opposite relations to death. One can't afford martyrdom and must compromise; the other can afford it and need not. The moment a religion becomes an earthly government it inherits that government's relation to death, and from then on it will do what survival requires and call it faithfulness. Its people needn't be any dirtier for this to happen. The filth is in the nature the religion has taken on, whose first law is self-preservation.

The objection, answered

Israel was a nation with a sword, constituted by God, so someone will ask why the church is forbidden what Israel was given. The New Testament says the arrangement changed: the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof (Matthew 21:43), and that nation is strangers scattered (1 Peter 1:1) through every country on earth. A government without territory can't have a sword, because a sword requires a jurisdiction. There's no border for it to defend. The church might prefer to treat the form Jesus described to Pilate as an ideal to aspire to, but it's the only form a scattered people can take.

We tend to hear It shall not be so among you (Mark 10:43) as a word about leadership style. It's the one thing that distinguishes his government from every other, and the one thing the church has spent sixteen centuries trying to acquire.