The Prodigal Empire
The City of God and the American Moment
In the summer of 410AD, the Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome. The city that had not fallen to a foreign army in eight hundred years was breached, looted for three days, and left smoldering. Rome was the center of civilization, or so its citizens believed, and its fall was unthinkable. The pagan intellectuals believed Rome fell because it abandoned the old gods, and Christianity had weakened the empire. The new religion had made the Romans soft, turning their eyes toward heaven when they should have been watching the frontier.
Augustine of Hippo heard the charge and spent thirteen years answering it. The result was The City of God, one of the most sustained theological arguments in Western history.
The American version of the pagan complaint is easy to find. Depending on one’s political orientation, the country is either failing because we have abandoned traditional values or because traditional values were always the problem. The left blames institutional Christianity for enabling authoritarianism. The right blames secularism for hollowing out the civilization Christianity built. Both sides agree that something essential has been lost, and the loss explains the collapse. Augustine would have recognized the argument and rejected both versions for the same reason.
According to the Pew Research Center, trust in the federal government to “do the right thing” has not exceeded 30% since 2007. The Gallup Confidence in Institutions Survey shows average confidence across all tracked institutions at historic lows, with Congress and television news hovering near single digits. Confidence in organized religion has fallen from 53% to 32% over the past two decades. These are the numbers of a civilization that no longer believes its own institutions work.
The instinct, on all sides, is to treat this as a problem to be solved. If we could just get the right people in charge, reform the right systems, and win the right elections, the machinery would start working again. Augustine’s answer is that the machinery was never the point. The earthly city has its uses, and those uses are real, but anyone who places ultimate confidence in it has misidentified which city they belong to.
“We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self” (XIV.28).
This is the thesis of The City of God. Every human society, Augustine argues, is organized by its loves. The question that determines the character of a civilization is what it loves most. Rome loved its own glory.
What Rome and America Have in Common
Augustine wrote his treatise to explain why Rome’s fall should not have surprised anyone, and why Christians should not have been shaken by it. The pagan accusation rested on the premise that Rome, under the old gods, had been a just and stable commonwealth. Augustine spends the first ten books dismantling this premise. Rome under the old gods was violent, corrupt, sexually debased, and addicted to spectacle. The gods themselves, as Augustine catalogs at considerable length, were honored with entertainments so obscene that the Romans were embarrassed to describe them in polite company but not embarrassed to perform them in public worship (II.4-8; V.12-13).
Augustine’s argument is structural. Every earthly city, no matter how impressive, is built on a disordered love. And disordered loves produce disordered societies. Rome’s fall wasn’t the result of a lack of devotion to Jupiter; it was always falling because it worshipped itself.
Augustine had read his Cicero. In fact, he quotes Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth against Rome itself. Cicero defined a res publica as “an assemblage united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and by a community of interest” (XIX.21; citing Cicero, De Re Publica, I.25). Augustine argues that if justice is essential to the definition, Rome never qualified. A commonwealth without justice is just a large gang. He explains, “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?” (IV.4).
The premise of American public life is that our institutions, properly functioning, are the commonwealth. We speak of “our democracy” the way Romans spoke of the Republic (Never mind that America was also founded as a republic). The assumption is that the system itself guarantees justice. Augustine would say the system cannot guarantee justice because justice is not a product of systems. Justice is a product of rightly ordered loves, and rightly ordered loves come from somewhere outside the system entirely.
The Pilgrim Who Uses the Road Without Worshiping It
This is where Augustine makes the move that distinguishes his theology from both Christian nationalism and Christian withdrawal. The Heavenly City does not eternalize or despise the earthly city. It uses it.
“The Heavenly City, or rather that part of it which is on pilgrimage in this condition of mortality, and which lives on the basis of faith, must needs make use of this peace also, until this mortal state, for which this kind of peace is essential, passes away” (XIX.17).
Christians are pilgrims living in the earthly city. They obey its laws, benefit from its roads, participate in its commerce, and serve in its armies. They do all of this without confusing the earthly city with their home. The road is useful for walking and driving, but you do not build a shrine to it.
“She takes no account of any difference in customs, laws, and institutions, by which earthly peace is achieved and preserved, provided that no hindrance is presented thereby to the religion which teaches that the one supreme and true God is to be worshipped” (XIX.17).
Augustine’s pilgrim is neither a culture warrior nor a quietist. He participates in the earthly city because the earthly city provides genuine goods: order, safety, the conditions under which families can be raised, and the gospel can be preached. But the earthly city does not hold ultimate significance. Civil government exists by divine ordination and has a real, legitimate, delegated authority, but that authority is limited. The magistrate serves under God; he does not get to sit on the throne.
The practical consequence is that Christians can lose an election, watch an institution crumble, see a political movement collapse, and suffer none of the existential vertigo that afflicts their neighbors. The earthly city is not their ultimate city. They have genuine grief when the earthly city is disordered, but also understand it is not armageddon.
Two Cities in One Country
The most frequently misunderstood feature of Augustine’s two cities is their invisibility. They are defined by what they love, and what they love is invisible to the polling organizations. He writes, “In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment” (I.35).
This means you cannot draw a line on a map between the City of God and the City of Man. The two cities sit next to each other in church, vote in the same election, and shop at the same store. The wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:30). Augustine knew that some of the church’s most visible members belonged to the earthly city, and some of the earthly city’s residents were elect people who did not yet know it.
No nation, no political party, and no cultural movement can claim to be the City of God. The identification of any earthly political project with the Kingdom of Christ is a category error so fundamental that it corrupts everything downstream. The Christian who says “America is a Christian nation” in the sense that America holds covenantal priority with God is making a theological claim that has no warrant in Scripture. To be clear, it is legitimate and defensible to say that America was founded on ideals deeply shaped by Christian thought, and that many of the early states were established with explicitly Christian foundations. However, under the new covenant, the people of God are no longer identified with any particular nation or ethnic group. They are defined by faith in Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit into local churches, and scattered as sojourners and ambassadors across every nation on earth. No modern nation-state inherits a unique covenantal status. God may providentially bless or judge nations according to His moral order, but the church’s identity and mission remain distinct from any earthly political entity. The people of God all around the world are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). The holy nation is the church. It has no borders, no capital city, and no army.
This does not mean that nations are irrelevant or that Christians should be indifferent to the character of the nation in which they live. Augustine spent twenty-two books explaining why the character of earthly societies matters. What it means is that the character of earthly societies is a penultimate concern. The ultimate concern is the City of God, which will outlast every earthly city because it is the only city whose architect and builder is God himself (Hebrews 11:10).
The Seduction of the Useful Crisis
Every generation of American Christians faces the temptation to believe that this crisis is the one that will determine the fate of the gospel. Each group that claims Christianity is convinced that if it loses the cultural battle currently being fought, the church will be crippled, and the gospel will be hindered beyond recovery.
Augustine would find this conviction both understandable and absurd. Understandable, because the earthly city’s troubles always seem urgent to the people living through them. Absurd, because the church survived the actual fall of Rome, and it was stronger on the other side.
The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith locates the church’s invincibility in its head: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the church, in whom, by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or government of the church, is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner” (26.4). The church depends on the sovereign power of its head, who has promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). The health of any civilization is not the determining factor of the church’s survival. If the gates of hell cannot prevail, then neither can the decline of American institutional confidence.
This is the freedom Augustine points to. When you know which city you belong to, you can participate in the earthly city without being enslaved to it. You can vote (or not) without idolizing the outcome. You can grieve national sins without panicking about national decline. You can participate in public life with the seriousness of a man who knows that government is a divine institution and the peace of a man who knows that no government is the Kingdom.
The Earthly City Glories in Itself
The deepest problem with the earthly city, for Augustine, is theological. It is the problem of glory. “The earthly city glories in itself; the Heavenly City glories in the Lord” (XIV.28).
The earthly city’s fundamental orientation is self-congratulation. It builds monuments to its own greatness. America has been particularly susceptible to telling its founding story as a sacred narrative. The constitution can be treated as scripture and its founders as demigods. The stories serve important civic functions, and Augustine does not deny this. What he denies is that these stories have saving power. I love my country, I marvel at the brilliance of the Constitution, and I thank God for the convictions and courage of the founders. But the best nations, the greatest institutions, and the wisest of men are still imperfect. They all make terrible gods.
The church in America faces a temptation that the church in the Roman Empire faced as well: the temptation to attach the gospel to the glory of the civilization. When Rome was Christianized under Constantine, the church’s fortunes became linked to Rome’s fortunes, and when Rome fell, the link threatened to drag the church’s credibility down with it. Augustine wrote The City of God partly to sever that link.
American evangelicalism has its own version of the Constantinian settlement. For much of the twentieth century, Christianity and American civic religion were so thoroughly intertwined that many believers could not tell where one ended and the other began. When an American said, “One nation under God,” very few stopped to wonder whether we all meant the same God. The unraveling of that settlement is what many Christians are sensing today. But the collapse is not the church. It will never be the church. What is collapsing is the assumption that the church and the American project were the same thing, or at least close allies with the same destination. Augustine would call this a mercy.
What the Pilgrim Owes the Road
If Augustine’s framework forbids the worship of the earthly city, it also forbids the abandonment of it. The Heavenly City makes use of earthly peace. The pilgrim works for the good of his city. He prays for its peace, exactly as Jeremiah instructed the exiles in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).
The exiles in Babylon were told to seek the city’s welfare, because the welfare of the earthly city is genuinely good. Roads, courts, hospitals, clean water, the rule of law, the suppression of violence: these are gifts of common grace. They serve everyone, and Christians should labor to preserve them. Christians are “to pray for magistrates, to honour their persons, to pay them tribute and other dues, to obey their lawful commands, and to be subject to their authority for conscience’ sake” (2LBC 24.3).
Christians should be civically engaged, but should never be civically idolatrous. The man who serves his country because he loves his neighbor and fears his God is a pilgrim. The man who serves his country because he believes his country is the Kingdom Come is a citizen of the earthly city who has dressed his self-love in religious language.
Augustine understood this distinction because he lived it. He was a Roman citizen, a bishop in a Roman province, a man who used Roman roads, Roman courts, and Roman legal conventions to advance the work of the church. He never pretended that Rome was Babylon or the heavenly Jerusalem. He understood that Rome was a city of men, providentially useful, terminally disordered, and destined to pass away.
The City That Cannot Be Shaken
The author of Hebrews announces the destruction of everything shakable so that only what cannot be shaken will remain (Hebrews 12:27). The earthly city, for all its genuine goods, is shakable. Its roads crack, its laws change, and its armies lose. Its citizens forget what they once collectively held to be true. But the city whose builder is God does not crack, change, lose, or forget. It endures because it is built on the only foundation that holds: the finished work of Christ and His establishment of an indestructible kingdom that will never be handed over to another people (Daniel 2:44).
Christians living in America need Augustine because they need to stop panicking. The institutional confidence numbers are real, and the cultural changes are real. Something foundational is shifting underneath the country. But none of it is news to the God who raises the dead. And none of it changes the church’s assignment, which is the same assignment it had when Augustine was writing in North Africa while the Vandals were besieging his city: be faithful to God, utilize the means of grace, love your neighbor, and keep your eyes on the city that is coming.
Augustine died in 430AD with the Vandals at the gates. The Roman Empire in the West would be officially finished within fifty years. But the church Augustine served is still here. The earthly city always falls. The Heavenly City cannot.
“In fact, that City relates the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which is so truly peaceful that it should be regarded as the only peace deserving the name” (XIX.17).