We Have No King

No.265: July 4, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Happy Independence Day!

Erick Erickson wrote an interesting piece yesterday on one minor—very minor—but still meaningful reason for having supported the election of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. I don’t find it compelling enough to wish I’d voted for him, but the point in and of itself is quite compelling:

Next year will be the two-hundred-fiftieth birthday of the United States of America. Were Ms. Harris the President next year and progressives in charge, we would be forced to hear sob stories of the founding white slave owners while being forced to celebrate the transgender amputee midget people of color whose sacrifices made victory possible. Instead of praise for Jefferson, Washington Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin we’d all have to sit through insufferable lectures about the non-Jewish people of color and lesbians who built this country and how white people ruined it all.

Every one of you knows this is true.

Ouch. Yes. That is the unfiltered, unvarnished truth. Progressives uniquely know how to ruin a patriotic occasion. I, too, am looking forward to the 250th anniversary of our country, and hope that God’s Providence so continues to smile that we make it to that milestone.

But today is the 249th birthday of America, and I want to share with you what I think is the unique secret to our success.

We have no king.

The simplicity of that fact obscures vast depths.

Having “no king” is not just a matter of the colonies becoming politically detached from the English throne. It is far more radical. America represents the first systematic attempt in history to constitutionally prevent the deification of political power. Put another way, it is the first viable civic polity to “de-deify” the State. The State is not God. Whereas before the State sought to be all-encompassing and all-authoritative—to “providentially” micro-manage the body politic toward some beneficent end, usually the enrichment of the few by the many, the ruling class by the ruled (Aristotle thought this was just “natural law”), here the State is limited in scope and shackled in power. Rights and liberties are taken out from the prerogative of kings (who were, remember, allegedly kings by divine right) and placed squarely in the prerogative of our Creator and granted directly, unmediated, unto all. The responsibility of the civil authorities is to “secure these rights,” not to grant them. Certain rights are “unalienable” and pre-political. There is in the American experiment, almost for the first time, the conceptualizing of a “space” between God and the State, the possibility of divergence between the will of the ruler and the will of God. They are no longer assumed to be one and the same.

The history of the past century alone, with its mass delusions of communism, fascism, and national socialism ought to make it obvious to us that the temptation is ever-present to conflate or merge together civil powers with divine powers. In all of those arrangements, the State is conceived as totalitarian (“all encompassing”) and the individual is simply one cog in a collective wheel. But one could trace this back much further. From the Roman Imperial cult to Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon all the way back to the Tower of Babel itself, bodies politic have organized themselves in idolatrous fashion, fancying their kings or princes or Caesars or politburos or “Führers” as nothing less than gods walking on earth. This is precisely what German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (who inspired legions of would-be autocrats, including Karl Marx) called the State: “God walking on earth.”

What resulted from America’s de-deification of the State? Put simply, the emancipation of divine image-bearers in every facet of social, communal, and civic life. Emancipation not from nature or from God’s moral law, but emancipation from illegitimate interference from the coercive power of the State. Mutually reinforcing ideas of commitment to individual equality before the law, representative government, private property rights, along with wide freedoms of economic exchange, speech, religion, and association opened up a civic “space” wherein newly unleashed human potential and dynamism brought about prosperity and improvement to the quality of life heretofore never imagined by the human race. That is quite a claim, but it is in fact uncontroversial. It is a simple fact that the world has never known a more powerful and prosperous nation than the United States of America.

In theory, and in partial reality (only after bloodshed from 1860-1865 did it begin to apply to everyone) America was a land of liberty, free people. This freedom manifested itself both horizontally and vertically. Hierarchical, aristocratic societies had the tendency to “silo” or freeze people into their proper “stations” in life. Now, gone were the days when one was destined to marry among one’s own social class or to pursue the exact same profession as one’s father and grandfather and his father before him. One was free to pursue lateral movement throughout society. Put in economic terms, human capital—the talents and gifts and strengths of individual human beings—were now free to flow and to move to their most advantageous and prosperous use. That is what the “pursuit of happiness” meant. And there was vertical mobility; “rags to riches” became a real and distinct possibility. No longer were people doomed to intergenerational, grinding poverty. It is as though the gears of social dynamism, lateral and vertical, forever gummed up or rusted over by aristocratic expectations and/or collective State tyranny, were now broken free.

The empires of old were built on hierarchical social stratification and were supported, like a pyramid scheme (the Egyptians even made it their brand logo!), on the backs of the lower classes. They were slave societies. They lacked the internal economic dynamism to sustain their nations, so ever more conquest and tribute and taxes were the only alternative. And they crumbled from within; consumption without production will do that. Bricks without straw, indeed. But America? A quarter of a millennium into its experiment, polarized and sclerotic and dysfunctional as it seems, a nation comprising a mere 4.34% of the global population represents 26% percent of global gross domestic product. A full quarter of the world’s wealth. This is not because America is more clever than the ancient Egyptians at extracting wealth from other people; it is because America produces wealth unlike any other nation in world history. And this is because, in no small measure, they are not ruled by descendants of the “sun god,” but rather by public servants.

And that lesson is becoming a distant memory.

I well remember the days of 2008 when Christians everywhere mocked Presidential candidate Barack Obama for his messianic campaign promises. He said that, if elected, he would literally make the oceans recede. He promised that, if elected, the lame would literally walk again (by way of uninhibited stem cell research). He alone would bend the “arc of history toward justice” and “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Many stood aghast at the spectacle of his followers almost literally worshiping him—people fainting, journalists reporting “thrills shooting up their legs” at his banal stump speeches, campaign spokespeople declaring him a “light-worker,” a semi-divine Gnostic emissary from another world. It was a something to behold.

But I must also observe that a vast number of Christians, having one moment been appalled at the spectacle of messianic politics, almost instantly converted to their own form of it when the promises of deliverance—and the promiser—were to their taste. It will do America no good to pretend that we are not witnessing a substantial amount of rank political idolatry on both sides of the aisle. I could belabor the point with endless examples, but I know, and I know that you know, people we might call True Believers. People for whom the old maxim does not apply: “Do not get too attached to politicians; they will disappoint you.” Some are currently incapable of such disappointment. And when one’s favored politician cannot fail, but can only be failed (by others, unforeseen circumstances, etc.), one is more invested in something like a sun god than a mere man.

Messianic politics, the deification of the State, viewing the State as “God’s Vicar” on earth, is the very thing America resisted and by so doing liberated its society to pursue their God-given individual and communal purposes with dynamism and energy and fruitfulness the likes of which the world had never seen. This “civil society” is akin to the very “soul” of America. How can we seek to preserve America for the next 250 years in a way that does not sacrifice its soul?

Remember that in America—by God—we are the kings.

Happy Fourth of July.

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