Christian Complicity Christian Culpability

From the standpoint of New Testament ethics and the teachings of Jesus, continued support for a leader whose policies or actions cause systemic harm, history reveals for us as Christians is an absolute indictment of complicity.

And when we come to understand this through both a theological and a moral lens, several foundational principles emerge for supporting the argument, “that a believer bears moral responsibility for the leaders they choose to enable.”

The Covenant of Grace and Moral Responsibility

According to Jesus in Matthew 7:16 “a tree is known by its fruit.” In that fruit bears witness to evidence of faith, it supports the indictment of a leader whose "fruit" is consistently marked by deceit, cruelty, or the exploitation of the vulnerable as a direct contradiction to the call to be a disciple of Christ.

True Justice vs. Power: Throughout the Gospels, Jesus aligns His ministry with the marginalized. In New Testament theology, a believer cannot separate their private confession of grace from their public endorsement of systems that actively harm the "least of these" (Matthew 25:40).

The Sins of Others: The Apostle Paul warns in 1 Timothy 5:22 not to "share in the sins of others." When voters or supporters actively defend, minimize, or ignore a leader's corruption, they move from being passive observers to active enablers, sharing in the moral weight of those actions.

The Mechanism of Democratic Complicity

In an ancient context (like the Roman Empire under which Romans 13 was written), citizens had no say in who ruled them. In a modern democracy, the dynamic is fundamentally different:

Power Flows from the Voter: Democratic leaders rule by the explicit consent and support of their base.

Endorsement Equals Ownership: When a believer lends their vote, their voice, and their financial support to a leader, they are delegating their political power. Therefore, the outcomes of that power—whether just or harmful—partially belongs to the ones who bestowed it.

In effect, using faith with nationalist power and ignoring the suffering it produces is akin to acts of "heresy and hypocrisy," explicitly stating that "silence in this moment is complicity". Which ultimately, from a strict New Testament perspective, if a person’s political allegiance requires them to justify lies, overlook cruelty, and ignore the oppression of the vulnerable, it serves as a direct indictment of their spiritual alignment. By aiding and abetting actions that oppose the teachings of Jesus, we become complicit in the very desolation we choose to ignore.

In fact, numerous early church writers addressed believers who compromised their faith for safety, social status, political favor with imperial power in order to protect their own status. Perhaps, most noteworthy, was the Roman Empire’s weaponization of state power, where Christians faced the choice for either standing firm in the teachings of Jesus or giving in to compromise in order to keep their societal standing. Those who chose political survival over the Gospel were fiercely critiqued by the early Church fathers.

The Crisis of the "Lapsi" (The Lapsed)

In the third century, Roman Emperors like Decius demanded that all citizens perform pagan sacrifices to prove their loyalty to the state. Those who did received a certificate called a “libellus.”

The Compromise occurred when many wealthy Christians did not want to lose their property, social status, or lives. They either performed the sacrifices or bribed officials to give them a fake certificate.

Their Indictment was, according to Cyprian of Carthage, an early Christian bishop, who wrote extensively about this in his treatise De Lapsis (On the Lapsed) “that being under intense political pressure did not excuse them.” Instead, he argued “that by securing their own safety through state-mandated deception, they had abandoned Christ.” In other words, he viewed their wealth and desire for social status as “a spiritual trap that made them complicit in idolatry.”

Lactantius and the Critique of Imperial Cruelty

Writing during and after the severe Diocletianic Persecution, the Christian author Lactantius wrote De Mortibus Persecutorum (Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died). The compromise, he observed, “was for those Christians who stayed silent or cooperated with brutal Roman authorities to maintain their government jobs, political offices, or safety.”

Their Indictment, Lactantius maintained, was “that true justice cannot exist where humans are not valued.” He asserted “that rulers who govern through cruelty and deception are inherently anti-Christian. For a believer to align with or validate such a ruler for their own protection or status was, to Lactantius, a complete betrayal of the justice demanded by God.”

Augustine and the "Two Cities"

Then, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 AD by Constantine (in 380 AD the Roman Empire officially made Nicene Christianity its state religion through a law known as the Edict of Thessalonica), it was actually Christians who were gaining immense political power and using it to protect their status, while often ignoring the poor and vulnerable.

The compromise that occurred was that believers began confusing the political success of the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God, “and began to justify state violence and corruption because the rulers claimed to be Christian.”

The Indictment, based on Augustine of Hippo’s response in “The City of God,” was to “draw a sharp line between the "City of Man" (earthly political power driven by the love of self and dominion) and the "City of God" (driven by the love of God and sacrificial service).” And Augustine further warned, “that no earthly empire or leader represents God’s kingdom, arguing that Christians who compromise the ethics of Christ to preserve their status in the earthly city are guilty of spiritual pride and infidelity to the true covenant.”

The Common Thread

What these early writers clearly established was a clear theological truth: “that the moment a believer compromises the ethical commands of Christ—especially the defense of truth and the vulnerable—to secure political safety or cultural dominance, they cease acting as the Church.” In-other-words, “they viewed political compliance and the defense of corrupt systems as an explicit indictment of a person's faith.”

In early debates over the lapsi (early Christians that renounced their faith) and the proper boundaries of the "Two Cities" actually laid the intellectual and theological groundwork for the modern concept of the separation of church and state—specifically the idea that the Church must remain separate to protect its own moral integrity from state corruption. As history has proven, “when the Church merges with state power, it inevitably begins to justify the state’s violence, lies, and oppression of the vulnerable to maintain its own privileged status.”

Examples of Early Historical Lessons that Distinctly Shaped Modern Theological Ways Include:

1.) The Birth of the "Confessing Church" Model.

The debates of Cyprian and Augustine proved that the true Church is not defined by its access to political power, but by its adherence to the teachings of Jesus. This distinction gave rise to the "Confessing Church" model—"the idea that the true body of believers must exist as a moral counter-culture, completely independent of the ruling political regime.”

It was also this framework that was directly invoked during the 20th century in Nazi Germany. Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth formed the Confessing Church in direct opposition to the state-sanctioned "German Christian" movement, which had compromised the Gospel to support Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer argued “that when the official church aligns with state cruelty, true Christians have a duty to not just bandage the victims under the wheel of the state, but to "jam a spoke in the wheel itself" (See “Barmen Declaration,” “a historic Christian manifesto resisting the Nazi co-optation of the German church. It rejected state supremacy, racial ideology, and the "Führer" principle, asserting that Jesus Christ—not Adolf Hitler—was the church's only absolute authority”).

2.) Baptist Theology and the Radical Reformation.

During the Reformation, groups like the Anabaptists, and later the early Baptists, looked directly back at the early Church fathers to argue “that Constantinianism—the merging of church and empire—was the moment the Church lost its soul.”

It was leaders like Roger Williams, a theologian and the founder of Rhode Island, who maintained “that forcing a church and a state together corrupts both, but harms the Church more, and famously coined the phrase "wall of separation" to describe protecting the "garden of the Church" from the "wilderness of the world."

Williams’ theology was not designed to protect the state from religion, on the contrary, it was “to protect religion from being weaponized by corrupt political leaders. Which directly influenced the drafting of the First Amendment in the United States, cementing the idea that the Church must never tie its identity to a political officeholder.”

3.) The Rise of Neo-Calvinism and "Sphere Sovereignty."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a number of Christian theologians wrestled with how believers should engage in modern democracies without becoming complicit in political corruption. Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and statesman, was one such theologian. He developed the doctrine of “Sphere Sovereignty,” which built upon Augustine's City of God. Kuyper argued that “God has ordained different spheres of life—such as the family, the church, and the state—and each has its own independent authority directly under God.”

Under this model, “the state’s job is strictly to maintain public justice, while the Church’s job is to proclaim the Gospel and care for the soul and the vulnerable. When the Church allows a political leader or party to dictate its moral boundaries, it violates its own sphere, submits to the state, and becomes an accomplice to the state's sins.”

The Modern Theological Indictment

When the early Church refused to give the Roman Emperor the title of Kyrios (Lord), they were asserting that political power is always secondary to Christ. When we draw a straight line back to this resistance, it can be legitimately argued, that when the contemporary Church trades the Sermon on the Mount for political influence, it enters into the exact state of desolation and complicity that Cyprian, Lactantius, and Augustine warned against centuries ago, and German theologians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, in modern times.

In that many of the founders of this nation, including George Washington, James Madison, John Adams and Jefferson Davis, with the exception of Washington, they all received formal classical academic educations. Washington, though he did not receive a formal education, but through “reading and self-guided study,” with a focus on classical education, he was “heavily influenced by Roman ideals.”

And of particular note, in the case of Madison, who was the main author of the “Constitution” and “The Bill of Rights” and Jefferson, who was the principal author of the “Declaration of Independence,” as a result of their formal classical educations they would have known of the repeated dire consequences that occurred when the lines between the separation of church and state were erased.

Which is why a system of checks and balances was deemed to be an absolute necessity in order to hold our three branches of government in check, as well as the necessity for a strict adherence to the separation of church and state. And by including such a stated adherence to, in effect, would also serve as a check on people of faith from being culpable in the corrupt actions of elected leaders; especially leaders who profess alignment with their faith beliefs, and promise their allegiance to their cause(s).