Free State: Lutheranism, Political Liberty, and the U.S. Constitution

By Dr. Gene Edward Veith

In Germany in the 1840s, some of the absolute rulers had the bright idea of bringing the Lutherans and the Reformed into a single state church. Creating this happy ecumenical union meant, of course, that the Lutherans had to compromise their theology on so-called little points such as Holy Communion. As was the habit of German absolute rulers, especially the most enlightened and ecumenical ones, they brutally suppressed the Lutherans who objected, throwing many pastors into dungeons.

Thus began a vast migration of the hardcore Lutherans from Germany to America and elsewhere. These Lutherans, who would rather leave their homes and families than compromise their faith, became the founders of what would become the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. (This is why to this day, the LCMS, as well as the Wisconsin Synod and groups with a similar heritage, are so leery of ecumenical unions and doctrinal compromise.)

One of the earliest groups of Lutheran immigrants found themselves in the wilderness of nearly-unsettled Wisconsin. They cut down trees for room to grow their crops and used the logs to build their homes and their church. They exulted in their new freedoms and loved their new country. They named their settlement Freistadt, that is, “Free State.” Lutherans came in droves to take advantage of America’s constitutional liberties, but did Lutheranism play a role in America’s founding? Yes, indeed, though not as you might expect.

Even though the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms forbids the Church from meddling in politics and casts a skeptical eye on political revolutions, without the Lutheran Reformation, America’s Constitution would literally be unthinkable.

The Two Kingdoms under One King

Lutherans do not believe in establishing a theocracy or in making the Bible the law of the land. They do not believe that America is God’s chosen nation, or that only Christians should rule, or that the Church should establish a Christian republic. Some Christians talk that way but never Lutherans.

Lutheran political teachings are summed up in the doctrine of the two kingdoms, which is connected to the distinction between Law and Gospel. God governs His spiritual kingdom by means of His Word, which brings people to faith through the power of the Gospel of Christ, calls them into the community of the Church, and sustains them by Christ’s sacramental presence for everlasting life. God governs His earthly kingdom by virtue of His rational created order, His moral law, and human vocations, through which He provides for the needs of believer and non-believer alike.

According to the doctrine of the two kingdoms, God is already ruling as King even in the secular realms. The Church’s business is to proclaim the Gospel, not to exert political power. The state’s business is to enforce the first use of the Law (to restrain outward evil so that sinners will not destroy each other), not to evangelize. Both churches that seek to govern politics and states that seek to govern religion are confusing Law and Gospel. Both politicized churches and theologized states are confusing Law and Gospel.

The doctrine of the two kingdoms, however, does not mean that anything goes in the secular realm, as is sometimes assumed. Those who deny the creation, act irrationally, undermine His moral law, and do not respect vocation are not following the doctrine of the two kingdoms. Nor does it mean that every ruler has the authority of God. According to Romans 13, God works through the vocation of lawful magistrates to punish evildoers and rewards the innocent. But God calls and authorizes no ruler who instead punishes the innocent and rewards evildoers.

Reformation and Revolutions

The most direct impact of the Reformation on the rise of political liberty was in Luther’s promotion of universal literacy. He wanted everyone from all social classes, including women, to be able to read the Bible. This meant opening schools for everyone. Luther could have started learn-to-read-the-Bible schools, then sent the peasants back to their farms, but instead he and Philip Melanchthon started schools grounded in the classical liberal arts. Liberal came from the Latin word for “freedom.” The curriculum was designed to form a free citizen as opposed to the mere joboriented training that the Greeks and the Romans gave to slaves. Once the masses of ordinary people had access to that kind of education, self-government was only a matter of time.

Furthermore, as M. Stanton Evans observes in his book The Theme is Freedom, it was the Bible that first limited the power of kings. While neighboring pagan kings claimed to be gods, the Hebrew prophets taught that their own kings were subject to the higher Law of God. Thus was born, conceptually, the rule of law. This principle—that rulers, too, must obey the law and that governments consist of laws and not men—would prove fundamental to the Constitution.

Evans shows also how the Bible, with its transcendent moral law and the value it ascribes to individual life, led to the acknowledgment of human rights. Already in the Middle Ages—despite the lack of self-government—rulers and peasants alike had distinct legal rights that the others were not to violate. One of those rights, sealed with the Magna Charta, provided for representative legislatures.

During the Reformation, the smaller, local governments of the German princes asserted their rights and stood up against the emperor to defend Luther and the Gospel. This was a blow for decentralized governments against the large, allpowerful sovereignty of the empire.

In the generations after Luther’s death, Europe was torn by the Thirty Years’ War, which began when a Protestant legislature in Prague deposed its king for attempting to reimpose Catholicism. Similar assertions of the authority of legislatures over kings in the name of the Reformation took place in other nations, including England.

The American founders based their revolution against the king of England on their rights to legislative representation under English law. Whereas the French Revolution was an Enlightenment-inspired attempt to destroy the old order, the American Revolution justified itself in terms of that order, invoking the rule of law. Though Lutherans to this day will debate whether the Americans were right to cast off the authority of King George, the legitimacy of the American government was established beyond doubt with the Treaty of Paris wherein King George himself granted his former colonies their independence as sovereign states.

Yes, that pastor during the Revolutionary War who, at the end of the worship service took off his vestments to reveal the uniform of a Continental Army officer, his new calling, was a Lutheran named Peter Muhlenberg. And two Lutherans, Jacob Broom and Thomas Mifflin, were signers of the Constitution.

But the Constitution bears the fingerprints of the Lutheran reformers in more important ways. The awareness of human sinfulness, cultivated in the Reformation, led the founders to put into place a careful system of checks and balances to prevent any individual or part of the government from wielding unrestrained power. Luther’s emphasis on the freedom of conscience and that religious beliefs must not be coerced loomed behind the Bill of Rights.

And whereas Germany tried to make Lutheranism into a state church—a theological disaster according to LCMS founders—the Constitution’s separation of church and state arguably established as state policy the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith is the Provost at Patrick Henry College, the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, and the author of seventeen books. His e-mail address is geveith@phc.edu.