On Civil Government

David Lipscomb did not sit down to write a book. In 1866 and 1867, with the Civil War just over and Tennessee still counting its dead, he wrote a series of articles for the Gospel Advocate, the religious paper he had helped revive after the fighting stopped. The war had split churches the way it split families, and Lipscomb, who had watched the suffering from his home outside Nashville, used the paper to work out a position more radical than pacifism alone: not only was war wrong for a Christian, he argued, but so was any deeper entanglement with civil government at all, voting and office holding included, because Christ's kingdom and every human kingdom were built on fundamentally different and incompatible foundations.

It took more than two decades for those articles to become a book. On Civil Government, Its Origin, Mission and Destiny, and the Christian's Relation to It appeared in 1889 from the Gospel Advocate's own publishing house in Nashville, gathering the wartime argument into a single, durable statement. By then Lipscomb was one of the most influential editors in the Restoration Movement's southern wing, and the book arrived as that wing was moving toward its own formal identity, a separation from the Disciples of Christ that the 1906 religious census would recognize as the distinct Churches of Christ. The book did not cause that split by itself, but its argument for a church strictly separated from worldly power sat close to the center of the theology that carried Lipscomb's congregations toward it.

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.