One Take on the Nation-State

A genealogy that blames it on the Protestants.
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Christianity can certainly abandon the state, if by "state" we mean the modern nation-state, ordered as a monopoly on legitimate violence and constructed after the Reformation to resist the spiritual power of the Catholic Church.

— Marc John Paul Louis de Montfort Barnes! (@BadCatholicBlog) October 27, 2020

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Sure, it is a state of affairs that confronts us. It must be dealt with. But part of Christianity's dealing with imperial Rome was destroying it; undoing its structures of power, banning its cults; abasing its emperor to the bishops; forbidding participation in its armies/markets

— Marc John Paul Louis de Montfort Barnes! (@BadCatholicBlog) October 27, 2020

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But to say the Church cannot abandon the state as it cannot abandon the poor equates these two, and makes "political Catholicism" out to accept of the state and Hobbesian/Schmittian sovereignty *as* it accepts the poor -- not as a destroyer of idols, but as giving succor to them.

— Marc John Paul Louis de Montfort Barnes! (@BadCatholicBlog) October 27, 2020

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Not to be resident hair-splitter here, but if the object/end of political Catholicism is the Church, it does not make sense for it to work "with" the politically-Protestant structure we call the modern nation state, designed to have a complete world without the Church.

— Marc John Paul Louis de Montfort Barnes! (@BadCatholicBlog) October 27, 2020

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