Ought the Mighty To Punish Blasphemers?

Abstract

In The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology, Nick Wolterstorff defends the claim that Christian and liberal democratic conceptions of political authority are fundamentally compatible.1 They are fundamentally compatible because both affirm the claim that governmental authority is bound by robust normative constraints. According to liberal democratic conceptions of political authority, government must never violate the natural rights of its citizens, not because so doing would be an abuse of its authority, but because it lacks entirely the authority to do so. “Liberal democracies, as we know them in the West today, have an 'idea' behind them, an implicit commitment to values or principles that make sense of the whole; they are not just fortuitous collocations of disparate elements. I have tacitly been assuming that a central component in the governing idea of those polities is that the natural rights of citizens place normative limits on the authority of government” (153). This generic conception of the 'rights-limited state' comports with a Pauline understanding of political authority and thus an understanding that is normative for Christians: “When we put what Paul says in Romans about the task and authority of the state together with the political implications of the nature and existence of the church, what we get is an argument for a state that is limited in exactly the sort of way that our liberal democracies are limited. . . . That there are normative, rights-based, limits on state authority is implicit in what Paul says God authorizes government to so” (151). At the core of a Christian conception of political authority, says Wolterstorff, is the claim that God authorizes the state to curb wrong-doing and thus that the state lacks the authority to issue directives that wrong citizens (99). In short, in a serendipitous convergence, Christian theology and liberal democracy affirm the legitimacy of a properly limited, morally constrained state. To be sure, this compatibility claim would be rather empty were it not married to the further claim that Christian and liberal democratic conceptions (roughly) agree on the moral limits that define the contours of state authority. Wolterstorff believes that there is substantial agreement and he focuses primarily on the 'first freedom'—the right to religious freedom (152). Both Christian and liberal conceptions of political authority incorporate the claim that each citizen has a right to the 'free exercise' of religion: to speak about God, to gather with others in worship of God, to urge others to join in that worshipping community—all without the