What Would the Non-Jurors Do?

Rodney Howard-Browne is not exactly my idea of a sound theologian. Those who would have recognized his name prior to the events of this week would have remembered this South African born evangelist-pastor primarily as a leading figure in the “Laughing Revival” of the 1990s. A Canadian manifestation of this, the so-called “Toronto Blessing”, began in January of 1994, during my last semester of high school and was the subject of much discussion that fall when I began my theological studies in Otterburne. My attitude towards the phenomenon at the time could have been summed up in the words of Shania Twain “that don’t impress me much.” It has not changed much since.

That having been said, I must say that I felt a certain degree of admiration for Howard-Browne this week when I read about his having been arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly” for holding services in defiance of Hillsborough County, Florida’s “safer at home” order.

Note that I said “a certain degree of admiration”. It is not an unqualified admiration. I am not a believer in Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience, nor do I hold in high esteem those practitioners of the same that have been elevated to sainthood if not apotheosized in the last generation or two, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

That having been said, the state has no legitimate authority to suspend worship services and tell Churches to close. Some might point to the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the Apostle enjoins us to be “subject unto the higher powers”, meaning the civil authorities, because they are “ordained of God” and the “minister of God to thee for good” as saying otherwise, but to do so would be to twist the meaning of the Scriptures. Does anyone seriously believe that St. Paul was telling the Church in Rome that if Emperor Nero ordered them to renounce their faith, disband, and never meet together as a Church again that they were to obey? Obviously that is not the case.

All across what used to be Christendom, Churches and sects are closed because an insane mass panic over the flu’s bigger, tougher, second cousin, twice-removed on its mother’s side has persuaded everyone to blindly trust politicians and public health officials, both of which groups are at the present high on the biggest power trip that I have witnessed in my entire life, and hence are completely unworthy of the trust they demand from us. Those politicians and public health officials have decided that to save us from the big, bad, coronavirus, they need to lock us in our houses, take away our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion, and dehumanize us by conditioning us to fear human contact and non-virtual social interaction. They are, in other words, doing evil of the kind and on the scale that is only ever done by those who are convinced that they are doing good.

There have been some “Christian” commentators who have spoken out in favour of the – hopefully – temporary closing of the Churches and sects. Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option, who blogs at The American Conservative, has been commenting on the coronavirus for a couple of months now. His way of looking at the whole thing is very different from my own. He describes his approach as one of prudence rather than panic, although he has failed to convince me that the line between the cardinal virtue and the irrational, fear-driven, mob mentality falls where he thinks it does. Two weeks ago he expressed relief when his Eastern Orthodox Archbishop ordered the laity to stay away from the Liturgy, offering a justification from Eastern Orthodox theology that seems a bit bizarre when we consider that the lit in Liturgy comes from the same root as the word laity. I wonder if this was something like how the Anglican Church of Canada gave us a theological justification for Communion in one kind prior to the closing of the dioceses altogether even though this flatly contradicted Article XXX of the Articles of Religion. More recently he expressed his support for his Archbishop’s essentially cancelling Easter. Needless to say he does not think very highly of those pastors who have continued to hold services. He castigates Christians who argue that to refrain from our duty of coming together to worship as the Body of Christ during this pandemic is to allow ourselves to be governed by fear rather than to walk by faith, accusing them of being selfish and judgmental towards their brethren who support the anti-COVID measures, apparently without any sense of the irony of his own shrill, hysterical, self-righteous, and judgmental tone.

Dreher, who believes that “social distancing” and the other measures being imposed upon us to fight COVID are necessary, views the entire question as being that of a choice between human lives and the economy. Framed that way, the only moral answer to the question is to choose human lives. As I argued in my last two essays, however, this is the wrong way of framing the question. The non-economic cost of the anti-COVID measures needs to be factored into the equation. Instilling in people a fear of meeting with each other, shaking hands, hugging, and human contact in general is a way of killing social capital, robbing us of our sense of community. One would think that Dreher of all people, whose first book was very communitarian, would understand this point. The telephone, Skype, live-streamed liturgy, and other technological replacements for community are not adequate substitutes, especially not over extended periods of time. Conditioning the entire populace to look upon them as if they were is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Especially when this conditioning goes hand-in-glove with a request that we give up our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion. Moreover, it is quite evident that Dreher hasn’t got a clue about what the real cost of sacrificing the economy would be. As true as the words in the title he borrowed from Flannery O’Connor are, this is not a choice between poverty and death. It is a choice between the death of billions, which will be the Malthusian consequence of shutting down all but the “essential” sector of every national economy for too long, overloading that sector, causing it collapse under the strain, and creating a worldwide depression worse than that of the 1930s, and the death of the thousands or, at worst, millions who might die from COVID-19, apart from these measures. It is the choice, in other words, between what is potentially another Spanish flu and what could potentially be a global-scale Holodomor.

Given his point of view, it is perhaps understandable that Dreher has been taking the stance that Christians should regard the forsaking of Church assembly, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a self-denying sacrifice for the sake of others. I cannot help but wonder, however, what he would be saying if some world leader were to arise and tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic can be contained, but to do so we will all have to stay at home, except for essential purchases such as groceries, and that to ensure we do this everyone will be required to receive a mark on his right hand or forehead authorizing him to take part in permitted market transactions. Would he tell us it is our Christian duty to submit to the mark as a sacrifice to save lives or would he tell us, as St. John does, that anyone who submits to the mark will be permanently cut off from the Covenant of Grace?

Earlier this week, the Manitoba Public Health Officer ordered all “non-essential” services to close from April 1st to April 14th. The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in a directive on March 31st, remarked that “While several social service agencies were exempt, Churches specifically are not exempt.” Services had already been suspended as of March 16th by an earlier directive from His Grace. Some parishes, including my own, had switched to online services, either live-streamed or pre-recorded until the lifting of the interdict. Whether even this, inadequate, substitute for gathering together and worshiping will be available during the next two weeks under the limitations of the new directive remains to be seen.*

I bring this up not to criticize my bishop but to draw attention to what is implied by the Manitoba provincial government’s order. If “non-essential” services must close, and Churches are not exempted from that, then Churches are clearly deemed to be “non-essential” by the government. This is not a point of view which orthodox Christians are allowed to share. In my last essay I pointed out that the government’s distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” when it comes to businesses is a fraudulent one and that it is even worse that the government is treating our fundamental freedoms as if they were “non-essential.” If it is not the state’s place to tell anybody that the business he depends upon for his living is “non-essential”, and it is not, and it is not the state’s place to tell us that our freedoms of assembly, association, religion, belief, etc. are “non-essential”, and it is not, it is certainly not the state’s place to tell us that Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is non-essential.

We live in an age in which our thinking about the proper authority of the Church and the state within their own spheres and in relation to each other has been fogged by the triumph of liberalism and its presuppositions derived from a secularization of the heretical view of Church and state held by the Anabaptists and the disestablishmentarian branch of Puritanism. This was not the case four, or even three, centuries ago.

In 1688, the Right Reverend William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the order of King James II, along with Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wales, John Lake, Bishop of Chichester, William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, and Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough. The issue was that these prelates had refused to publish the king’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence and had sent a petition to the king, explaining their opposition to it.

There were two elements to their opposition to the Declaration, its content and its legality. The Declaration relaxed the strictest of the Church establishment laws in two ways, first, by allowing private worship for Roman Catholics and Non-conformist Protestants, second, by suspending the Test Act, which required that all who hold public office belong to the Church of England. Today, most would find it difficult to understand why this was problematic, and regard it in a positive light, as moving towards freedom of religion. The second part, the suspension of the Test Act, was the reason why they viewed it so differently in the seventeenth century.

James II was a Roman Catholic. His father, Charles I, had been falsely accused by the Puritans in the English Civil War, of trying to bring the English Church back under the jurisdiction of Rome, as Mary Tudor had done. This, ironically, led to James becoming a Roman Catholic, because when the Puritans murdered his father after an illegal trial, he spent the interregnum in France where he was first exposed to and attracted to Romanism. He “crossed the Tiber” as the saying goes, during the reign of his brother Charles II. As king, he had the right to set aside the Test Act requirements for individuals. Suspending it entirely, however, was regarded as a step towards packing the government with Roman Catholics, as well as an illegal infringement on the rights of the Parliament that passed the Act.

The bishops were tried and acquitted. Parliament then invited William III, Prince of Orange, who had married James’ daughter Mary, to come over, depose his father-in-law, and take his place as king. This accomplished, Parliament then required the clergy of the Church of England to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king.

For five of the seven bishops – Lloyd (1) and Trelawney are the exceptions – as well as four other bishops, and over three hundred priests, this was a problem. If the king had overstepped his divine right by trying to overturn an Act of Parliament, Parliament had overstepped its authority by deposing the king. Furthermore, it had no right to command the clergy to commit an immoral act – to swear an oath, which contradicted the oath they had already sworn to James II and his heirs. They refused to swear the new oath, for which reason history remembers them as the “non-jurors”, and were deprived of their livings.

New bishops were appointed to their sees, turning what was already a political and a moral dilemma, into a theological one. The non-jurors maintained, and they had the weight of the consensus of Catholic antiquity behind them, that Parliament had no legitimate power to depose a bishop, that a bishop so deposed remained the legitimate bishop, and that the bishop put in his place was illegitimately consecrated and schismatic. George Hickes, who as a priest had refused the new oath, was later consecrated a bishop by the non-juring bishops, and become the de facto leader of the group after the death of Archbishop Sancroft, explained these principles at length in a posthumously published book entitled The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Consequences of Schism. Briefly summarized, it was that the Church and the State were two distinct realms, whose membership overlapped, in the former of which the bishops were the governors and kings as members were subject to them, in the latter of which kings were the governors and bishops as members were subject to them, each government having its own sword to enforce its authority, the bishops having the power of excommunication, the king’s sword being somewhat more literal, but neither had the right to depose the other, or to intrude into the other’s sphere of authority.

The non-jurors had a much clearer understanding than the vast majority of people today, of the distinction between Royal authority, Parliamentary authority, and Ecclesiastical authority, and stood up for the rights of each when infringed upon by one of the others at the cost to themselves of prison, deprivation and poverty. What would they think of today’s totalitarian health bureaucrats ordering Churches to close and “Christian” writers like Dreher who cheer them on?

(1) There were two bishops named William Lloyd. The Bishop of Norwich by that name did become a non-juror, but he was not one of the seven who had signed the petition against the Declaration of Indulgence.

* Update: On April 1st, His Grace updated this directive. He began by saying "In light of further information received from Minister Friesen’s Office and interview on CHVN Radio, it is clear that live-streaming celebration of worship is permissible. I therefore encourage you to continue the practice of live-streaming as you were, because they offer a much needed pastoral response and relief to our people."