But is it accurate to say Christianity is inherently not political? The Catholic church was and in many ways still is very political. That’s true, and no one is pretending obviously that Christianity has never served political motives - Constantine seems clearly to have embraced Christ for political reasons - but the Reformation worked because of the political corruption at the heart of Catholic excess - and this appeal referred directly I think to the simple, apolitical nature of the Gospels, which is why Protestantism lent itself naturally to the ideas of a separation of church and state, of secularism in public life, and religious liberty - Locke and Hume etc could really only happen in Protestant England and to me that eventually is a reflection of Christianity’s inherently apolitical nature. To get to the same place in Catholic France it took a bloody revolution that explicitly targeted the church in the name of secularism. Yes, Henry VIII made himself head of the Church of England and therefore I guess technically created a theocracy - but he didn’t care about questions of theology because they didn’t much matter in any fundamental way to his political desires - in other words, Christianity, in its truest form, does not require a political component that is operative to function - Islam does - and therein lies the difference between the two and the problem.
