State and society

At the beginning of   Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , William Cavanaugh challenges the distinction between state and civil society that is inherent in much Christian thinking about politics.  The two are inseparable, but, Cavanaugh says, it’s in the interests of the modern state to claim otherwise.

The ruse goes this way: The state strips away the traditional moorings of society, atomizing society into individuals; this individualized society is then described as a locus of conflict, a war of rights against rights; and the state then steps in to claim that only its coercive monopoly will be capable of keeping the peace.  But the conflicts that it claims to resolve are conflicts of its own making: “it can be said that the state defends us from threats which it itself creates.”

Cavanaugh has written that the secularity of the modern state is a particular instance of the same process: The wars of religion were not such, but rather were the occasion for the creation of the category of “religion”; the state, having created “religion” and characterized it as a threatening irrationality in the body politic, had to intervene to adjudicate between conflicting religious claims.  Again, the state defends us from threats of its own making.