Christianity has always had an uneasy relationship with the State. Jesus himself had no time for the secular society of his day; he gave Nicodemus, whom one could describe as a good man and a good Jewish leader, short shrift. And the Church, during the early centuries of its life, looked forward to the Second Coming of Christ, at first with imminent expectancy, and later I imagine with growing disillusionment. This effectively prevented any official collaboration between Church and State. And the Church was a reasonably well-behaved and intolerant society within the State. But when Constantine was willing to make Christianity the religion of the Empire, partly because it was intolerant, the Church fathers either overcame their reluctance for worldly power, or were outmanoeuvred by Constantine. Having tasted power, they must have been torn between loyalty to their Founder and safeguarding the future of the Church. They chose the Church; but they seem to have lacked much political wisdom, or Christian states would have put up a more spirited resistance to the Arab horsemen of Islam centuries later.
Mohammed regarded Jesus as a prophet, but judged correctly that he left no political philosophy behind him; his was an other-worldly Gospel. Mohammed’s message was very different, and was most certainly concerned with success in this world. And a century after the prophet’s death, Islam must have seemed almost unstoppable. Despite the shame of this debacle, the Church in what remained of Christendom never worked out a political philosophy. It dabbled in politics; indeed much later it vied with the Holy Roman Empire as to who was to be the ultimate power in Europe, but it never thought things through. And today its Gospel to the secular world is still, “Love solves all problems”; which is so naïve, that any educated man of the world has to try not to laugh. If it were not so desperate for England to recover its religion, before such cohesion as exists in society disintegrates, the performance of the C.of E. vis-a-vis society or the State would be good entertainment.
It is fair to say that during the decline of the Roman Empire, the Church hastened on the coming of the Dark Ages, which it alone was able to survive. As its Gospel is unchanged, it is trying to do the same today. It is vital for us that it should fail. Religion is too important to be left to priests. In the early 1900s Professor Eucken, who was professor of philosophy at Jena, was saying that though Christianity was much the best religion the world had known, the clergy of all denominations had led it down a cul-de-sac from which it would be difficult to extricate it.