A Founder's Argument Most Congregations Left Behind

On Civil Government asks more of a Christian than most Churches of Christ congregations have asked of their own members for well over a century. Lipscomb's conclusion was not simply that war is wrong, a position he shared with Restoration Movement mentors such as Tolbert Fanning and with older pacifist traditions like the Quakers and the Dunkards, but that voting, holding office and any deeper participation in civil government are wrong as well, because true citizenship belongs entirely to Christ's kingdom. Over the century and a half and the several wars since the book's 1889 publication, most Churches of Christ congregations moved away from that fuller separatist position, keeping the tradition's emphasis on New Testament pattern and local church autonomy while quietly setting aside Lipscomb's specific case against political participation.

The book has nonetheless found a second life outside the tradition that produced it. Scholars working on the history of American Christian anti-statism, including the economist Edward Stringham's work connecting nineteenth century Christian primitivism to modern libertarian political theory, treat Lipscomb's argument as an unusually early and thoroughgoing case for radical separation between church and state, made not on secular grounds but from inside a specific reading of the New Testament. Read that way, the book is less a doctrinal position most of today's Churches of Christ hold than a founding document whose reasoning has traveled further, and into different company, than the congregations that grew from it did themselves.