Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State by Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (review)

Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State challenges a number of widely held assumptions about the nature of, and relationship between, church and state. The authors explain that conventional wisdom holds that the relationship between church and state is much like that of the relationship between the religious and the secular—the two are perceived to be competing spheres of influence where one displaces the other in its success. Think, for example, of the logic of the secularization paradigm: as the secular spheres of politics, law, and education gain power and influence, the religious sphere is pushed to the margins of the society. Ekklesia tells a much different story.

In the introduction, Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan explain that the term "ekklesia" has two etymological references. It signifies both the ancient Athenian citizen as well as early Christian churches. Their point is that for much of history it would not make sense to separate the spheres of church and state. Furthermore, they argue that attempts to separate out these spheres have provided insight into the ways in which church and state remain to be mutually entangled and inseparable. Therefore, instead of considering church and state as independent and singular institutions, they use the term "churchstateness" to refer to their co-constitutive nature.

The three essays included in Ekklesia provide historical and contemporary support for their claims. In each of these examples, church and state (or "churchstateness") are strategically employed to both establish and challenge claims of sovereignty, to control minority populations through violence, and to pass moral responsibility from the community as a whole to the individual. In the first essay, Paul Christopher Johnson recalls a contentious moment in Brazil's history when the newly-formed republic exerted immense pressure on a small nomadic religious movement known as the people of Canudos. Brazil had just instituted an official policy of separation of church and state in 1890, which Johnson argues was deliberately crafted to weaponize a larger church-state alliance against the Canudos. After slaughtering the entire community of Canudos, the republic sacralized the murders by claiming that their deaths were to be understood as a necessary sacrifice to save the honor of the republic. It was specifically the "churchstateness" of the republic that allowed the republic to retain and exert its moral, legal, political, and military power.

The second essay examines a number of treaties that the native peoples of Canada signed with their British colonizers in order to demonstrate the ways in which a new ekklesia came into being. The native peoples had their own ekklesia in place, one that privileged ceremonial and sacred agreements between communities, while the British Crown exerted the pressure of its ekklesia, which functioned to "civilize" the natives. In short, Klassen explains that the ekklesia of the colonizers placed Christianity at the center of public religious life and the Crown at the center of the state. The two, she explains, continued to mutually enforce the other, which ultimately functioned to dispossess the native peoples of their land, language, and sovereignty.

In the final essay, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argues that the effort to ban Bibles in the sentencing stages of death penalty cases unveils a paradox found within a juridical ekklesia. She explains that jurors sentencing someone in a capital case are asked to decide the person's fate based on their own ethical judgments, which can include the juror's religious beliefs. The effort to ban Bibles in their deliberations, Sullivan argues, is evidence of a paradox at the center of the American judicial system. There is an effort to secularize the process alongside an admission of the impossibility of such a task. In the end, this is a symptom of the disestablishment of religion in the United States; while citizens are generally skeptical of the authority of both church and state, the...