Have we come to this point in our culture or is this just an “outlier”?  Yesterday, Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md) made the following statement in a speech to Federal union members:

“People do not seem to understand that so many people come to government knowing that they are not going to make the kind of money that they would make in the private sector but they come to government to feed their souls.”

In the nineteenth century and into part of the twentieth, some philosophers and would-be dictators did write about the state as some sort of God-like savior, a messianic state.  Hegel said the state is “the march of God on earth.”  But I never thought I would hear such similar talk from a United States congressman, or generally in the United States, except of course on university campuses.  It is disturbing that he would say it, and disturbing that perhaps people will take it seriously.

The state is to be sure ordained by God (Romans 13), but to be ordained by God means by definition that it is not God itself.  Nor can it be God because it possesses none of the necessary attributes that make a god a god.  Yes, it can make many people dependent on it and in that sense it can act a bit like a god.  But even here there is a huge error in thinking.  We are dependent on God as believers, but we are not looking to God just to “get things” from Him.  We serve Him because we love Him.  Why would someone serve the state?  Or be servile to the state?  It seems only to get something in return.

And even if that is the case, what can the state actually do?  It can give away things—money and goods.  But can it satisfy the deepest longings of the soul, as Cummings seems to imply?  He cannot possibly mean what he says (though he may).  No human entity or person can do such a thing.  No human entity or person can meet the deepest needs we as sinful humans have.

It appears political messianism risen its ugly head again.  My hope is that most Americans still have enough of at least a vestige of Christianity that they would not fall easily for this kind of rhetoric.  But then, many thought that about Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  I don’t want to be cynical, but I am asking what will happen to Christianity in the United States and will its substitute be the state?  I pray not.