Schmemann says that the distinctive mark of the converted Roman Empire, and of the Byzantine order, was the “state’s” acknowledgement that the end of the church was the end of all things, also then the end of the state. The state no longer existed to promote its own ends, but to serve the end of the kingdom of heaven.
When the eschatology changes, the whole political system changes. When America was founded on the conviction that it represented the novus ordo saeclorum , it abandoned the political eschatology of Western Christendom and Byzantium both. Instead of promoting the transcendent and genuinely eschatological end of the kingdom of God, a nation founded as the new order of the ages can only promote itself.
In American political eschatology, we are the already. The rest of the world is the not yet. And here we come.
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