The Church sees the world as God’s good and harmonious Creation, a primordial peace. As Europe began to abandon the Church in the early modern period, it left this vision behind. The new societies it built presupposed primordial competition and fear instead. Order could be secured only by centralized, monopolized power that recognized no higher authority. Theorists of the time called this new conception of power “sovereignty” and the new Leviathan government it required “the state.” 

For centuries now, we have lived in systems like this as fish live in water. We use “the state” as a simple synonym for “government,” and even Christians are tempted to take the logic of sovereignty for the way the world is. But the Church has never ceased to preach “subsidiarity”: real, natural distribution of power. She has never ceased to preach the goodness of Creation—or the reality of grace, renewing bonds of love. 

In his acclaimed book Before Church and State, Andrew Willard Jones revealed that society in the High Middle Ages was a striving toward liberation by grace, which led to subsidiarity. In The Church Against the State, he argues that this uniquely Christian political form is still with us, present in our love, our courage, and in all that is noble within us, brought to new life through the Church. By grace, we are liberated to live at home and at peace in a limitless, surprising world: a world in which every action, every relationship, and every institution is open to the heavens.

Praise for The Church Against the State

Andrew Willard Jones has already established himself as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of this generation. The Church Against the State only solidifies that status. Combining his formidable erudition with a profound theological imagination, Jones thoroughly diagnoses the pathology common to both modern secular politics and to reactionary Catholic attempts to overcome it. Even more, he offers us a vision of what a truly Catholic politics could look like. This is an exhilarating, edifying, and indispensable book.  

— Michael Hanby, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America

This work offers a masterful presentation of Thomistic political theory, especially the Thomistic affirmation of subsidiarity, alongside an analysis of the liberal idolatry of the sovereign state. Few authors have Andrew Willard Jones’s knowledge of both contemporary and medieval political theory....  A postliberal and authentically Catholic guide.

 — Tracey Rowland, University of Notre Dame, Australia

Andrew Willard Jones is the leader of a new generation of thinkers who seek in a radical way to engage the realities of politics, both theoretical and practical, from the very heart of the Church. This book demonstrates why so many turn to him for insight: the essays collected here are invariably brilliant, wise, and full of life. Moreover, they show how fruitful thinking can be when, faithfully and courageously, it takes as its standard nothing less than the truth of God revealed in the Incarnate Christ for the redemption of the whole world.

— D. C. Schindler, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America

Andrew Jones is one of the most thought-provoking critics both of our exhausted liberal regime and of some of the proposed alternatives to it. These essays are an important contribution to the emerging postliberal conversation.

— Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., Heiligenkreuz Abbey

This powerful book shows that authoritarian postliberals who want to restore a confessional state are trapped in the liberalism they seek to reject. An astute historian and a perceptive political theorist, Andrew Willard Jones carefully diagnoses what is wrong with trying to inculcate virtue through state power, and sketches an alternative Christian vision of friendship both embedded in local cultures and simultaneously reaching for the heavens. This is a bracing read for those of us looking for a better politics but unwilling to impose it on others.

— William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University

Every Christian tempted by the devil to support new forms of nationalism and fascism needs to read this superbly written book. Andrew Jones shows exactly why the celebration of the sovereign nation-state is not a break with liberalism but was always an intrinsic part of its logic. He calls instead for an authentic Christian postliberalism able to celebrate and integrate plural localities and identities through the ecclesial and liturgical acknowledgment of the true transcendent universal in which we all remotely participate.

— John Milbank, University of Nottingham