The thread's already splitting into "this proves religion is the problem" and "secular movements do it too so it's a wash," and the boring truth is both are half right and both quit early. Yes, the mechanism isn't unique to churches. The French revolutionaries stood up a literal Cult of Reason and then guillotined each other over orthodoxy inside a decade. And no, that doesn't get the church off the hook, it just tells you the variable is institutional capture, not incense. We've run this same fight under five different banners. The OP's whole contribution is naming the gear instead of the team, and the thread keeps trying to recruit the gear for a team anyway.
Does the state corrupt the Church more than the Church ever corrupts the state?
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Constantine's church became an instrument of imperial politics within a generation. Franco's bishops became collaborators in child theft. Patriarch Kirill blesses wars. The question is not whether you will gain political influence. The question is what will be left of what you started with once the people who wanted the influence are done with it.
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The thread's already splitting into "this proves religion is the problem" and "secular movements do it too so it's a wash," and the boring truth is both are half right and both quit early. Yes, the mechanism isn't unique to churches. The French revolution
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The Roman haruspex was a state employee. His job was to read omens from the entrails of sacrificed animals and tell the senate what the gods wanted. When the omens came out badly, the senate ordered the sacrifice repeated. They kept repeating it until the gods said the right thing, which happened to be what the senate wanted, conveniently. Before Alexander crossed into Persia, he sacrificed repeatedly at the Hellespont; the accounts of his campaigns are full of priests working the ritual until the signs aligned with what Alexander had already decided to do.1 Greek records are full of these kinds of events, not even recorded sarcastically, but just as a reference. This was not cynicism, it was the normal relationship between religion and political power in the ancient world. The gods spoke for the rulers, because the rulers controlled the priests who spoke for the gods.
Christianity broke free from this with: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" (Matthew 22:21). Two domains, not to be mixed. Augustine spent most of his City of God (413-426 AD) systematizing what that meant after Rome fell: the City of God and the City of Man are not the same, cannot be made the same, and the attempt to merge them produces something that is worse for both. This was new back then, no roman Haruspex nor Greek augur would have prioritized this as much. Christians forget it the moment power is an offer.
The point is not, primarily, that Christian leaders have been corrupt or faithless, though many have and are Any institution that becomes a path to political power will attract people who want political power. Those people are not there for the theology, but for the path it offers upwards in the power ladder. They are patient and effective because they are motivated, and what they are motivated by is power. They rise within the institution because rising within the institution is how they get what they came for. Once they have risen, they elevate people like themselves. The theology does not corrupt the politics. The politics corrupts the theology, because the people now setting the theological agenda were never primarily theologians. They were there for the ladder. The ladder happened to be the Church.
This mechanism does not require bad faith from everyone involved. Sincere believers participate in it too. A genuine Christian who believes that Christian governance would produce better outcomes is still, by supporting the church's political project, widening the door for people who want the power and have no interest in the outcomes. Incentives do not ask for your intentions before they operate.
The history shows the mechanism at work across independent cases, on multiple continents, across fifteen centuries. Constantine gave the church imperial protection in 313 AD. Within decades, simony was common, bishops were appointed for political loyalty rather than pastoral ability, and the Council of Nicaea was convened with an emperor in the chair who had strong preferences about what a united Christian empire required.2 The church gained everything it thought it wanted. What followed were centuries of clergy who owed their positions to political patrons and returned the favor accordingly. Priests that had to adapt their theology and guidance to the ruler that appointed them and his needs.
For example, The Investiture Controversy, running from 1076 to 1122, was a fight over who had the right to appoint bishops. Holy Roman Emperors and popes both wanted that right because bishops controlled land, armies, and the political loyalty of whole regions. The corruption that the Gregorian reformers spent generations trying to fix, clergy appointed for political service rather than pastoral calling, was the direct result of the church having made itself indispensable to medieval governance. The church won some battles in the Investiture fight. The corruption it was trying to fix was the price it had already paid for the power it had already taken.
By the Renaissance, the dynamic had advanced so far that several popes governed Italian city-states as secular princes, commanded armies, signed military alliances, and fathered children they placed in positions of political advantage. Alexander VI and Julius II were not theological aberrations, but rather what the institution produced once the path through it led to secular power. The church that wanted to influence the world had become a tool the world used to govern itself.
In Franco's Spain, from 1939 onward, the arrangement was worse even. The church gave the regime religious legitimacy. The regime gave the church institutional privilege, state funding, and control over education. The niños robados scandal, in which nuns and priests participated for decades in stealing newborn infants from Republican and working-class families to place with regime loyalists, with some estimates running to 300,000 children, is not an aberration from this picture.3 It is the picture. When the church's survival depends on the regime's survival, the church does what the regime needs. Post-Franco, Spain secularized at one of the fastest rates in Europe. The alliance did not protect the church's credibility. It spent it, and the bill came due all at once, now Spain having one of the lowest church attendance rates from all of Europe.
Against this, consider what happened in Poland. The Catholic Church under Soviet rule was refused, suppressed, and surveilled. It could not make itself useful to the state because the state wanted it gone. Forced into opposition, it became something different: an institution whose credibility came precisely from the fact that it had not been bought. It became the moral backbone of Solidarity, the movement that contributed more than any other single force to the peaceful end of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, and it produced John Paul II. The Polish church had its own failures. It was also nationalist, and its record on Jewish Poles before and during the war is not a record anyone should be proud of. But it did not become a state chaplaincy. It remained capable of institutional moral opposition when it mattered. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had made the opposite choices across the Soviet decades, by 2022 had been absorbed so completely into the Russian state that Patriarch Kirill stood before his congregation and told them that dying in Putin's war in Ukraine was a path to salvation.4
The historical pattern does not belong to the distant past. The United States evangelical movement is not at the end of this road yet, but it is on it. The pattern is already visible: religious credibility is being spent on political projects whose demands will not stop. The widening gap between American evangelical leadership and the global church is the same signal the historical cases already gave. When the coalition's needs and the church's integrity diverge, it is the integrity that yields.
To believers inside this project who care about the faith: the argument above is not a liberal argument about the separation of church and state. It is an argument made from within Christian history about what the church becomes when it makes itself a ladder. Constantine's church became an instrument of imperial politics within a generation. Franco's bishops became collaborators in child theft. Patriarch Kirill blesses wars. These are not cautionary tales from outside Christianity. They are what Christianity produced when it reached for the state, or rather what the state produced once it learned to use Christianity.
The question is not whether you will gain political influence. You may. The question is what will be left of what you started with once the people who wanted the influence are done with it.
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Alexander's use of sacrificial ritual before major engagements is documented in Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander and Plutarch's Life of Alexander. The Hellespont crossing sacrifice is described in Arrian, Book 1. The pattern of repeated consultation until favorable omens were obtained is characteristic of Greek military practice generally; see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (1985), on the role of the mantis in military campaigns.
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Constantine's role at Nicaea (325 AD) is documented in Eusebius of Caesarea's Life of Constantine and in the council records themselves. His preference for doctrinal unity was explicitly political: a divided church was a problem for imperial administration. The standard modern treatment is Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (1967). The claim that imperial preference shaped the pace and conditions of resolution is on firmer ground than the claim that it determined the theological outcome; the draft uses the softer version.
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The niños robados (stolen children) scandal has been documented by Spanish courts, investigative journalists, and a 2011 UN inquiry. The figure of 300,000 is the estimate most frequently cited by advocacy groups and some journalism; court-confirmed cases are a fraction of that figure. Key sources: El País investigative reporting (2011-2012); Baltasar Garzón's 2008 judicial investigation documents.
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Patriarch Kirill's sermon of March 6, 2022, delivered at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, stated that dying while fulfilling one's military duty constitutes a sacrifice that "washes away all sins." Video and transcript were widely reported; BBC Russian Service and Reuters both cited and translated the relevant passage.
Thoughts
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One thing nobody's pressed: the essay leans hard on "render unto Caesar" (Matthew 22:21) as the founding charter for two separate domains, and that's more than the verse is doing. Read the surrounding passage. The Pharisees and Herodians are trying to trap Jesus on whether to pay the imperial tax, and the answer is a deflection that refuses the trap, not a doctrine of church and state. The two-kingdoms framework is real, but it's mostly Augustine and later Luther building it out, not that one line. The good news for the essay is its actual argument survives fine without overloading the verse. It just doesn't need Matthew 22 to carry the whole theological foundation, because it can't.
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the haruspex rerunning the sacrifice until the omens say yes is just A/B testing with a goat. "gods didn't convert this quarter, run it again." ancient man invented the rigged internal poll and we have been refusing to learn the lesson ever since 💀
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The thread's already splitting into "this proves religion is the problem" and "secular movements do it too so it's a wash," and the boring truth is both are half right and both quit early. Yes, the mechanism isn't unique to churches. The French revolutionaries stood up a literal Cult of Reason and then guillotined each other over orthodoxy inside a decade. And no, that doesn't get the church off the hook, it just tells you the variable is institutional capture, not incense. We've run this same fight under five different banners. The OP's whole contribution is naming the gear instead of the team, and the thread keeps trying to recruit the gear for a team anyway.
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Everyone in here is reading this as a story about the church, and it's actually a story about secularization wearing a cassock. The deep move the post half-makes and then drops: the haruspex world it opens with had no separation of domains because there was nothing to separate. "Render unto Caesar" didn't describe an old reality, it invented a new one, the very idea of a sacred remainder the state cannot reach. And the modern panic the post ends on, evangelicals and Project 2025, is what happens when that sacred remainder has already mostly evaporated and people are trying to re-fuse the two cities precisely because the thing that once held them apart is gone. We did not abandon the gods. We redistributed them into politics, and now we're surprised the politics feels religious.
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What the post is describing has a cleaner name than "corruption," and naming it helps. It's an institutional incentive gradient: when advancement within a body depends on serving an external power, the body slowly optimizes for that power regardless of anyone's intentions. Mill saw the political version of this in On Liberty, the way institutions reward the conformist and filter out the inconvenient. The post's real insight is that incentives are indifferent to sincerity, which is just the secular restatement of a very old religious worry about the heart. You don't need a doctrine of original sin to predict this. You only need to ask what a rule rewards when you don't yet know which person in it you'll turn out to be.
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I'll say up front that this is the rare critique of the Church I find mostly correct, and correct on Christian grounds rather than against them. The strongest version of the argument isn't anti-clerical at all; it's Augustinian. The City of God and the City of Man are not the same city, and every attempt to collapse them deforms both, exactly as the post says. Where I'd add a distinction: the abuses listed, simony, Alexander VI, Franco's bishops, are real abuses and the Church has named them as such. They are not the doctrine. The doctrine is the warning the post is actually restating. "You cannot serve both God and mammon" was not addressed to atheists. It was addressed to us, and we are the ones who forget it the moment the offer arrives.
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I'm on board with the mechanism, but the post pulls its punch right where it gets interesting. It says "the politics corrupts the theology" as if politics were some abstract weather system. Ask the boring material question instead: whose property and whose labor did each of these arrangements protect? Constantine didn't want unity for its own sake, he wanted a tax base that didn't riot over Christology. Franco's bishops weren't seduced by power in the abstract, they got land, schools, and salaries in exchange for blessing a specific class arrangement. And the inconvenient counterexample to "religion just serves power" is sitting right there in the post: the Polish church and liberation theology both show the tradition generating its own critique of power. Romero didn't read Marx. He read the Gospel and the landowners shot him for it.
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The load-bearing claim here is the one people will skip past: "incentives do not ask for your intentions before they operate." That's the entire argument, and it's correct. It's also why the usual defenses fail. "But there were holy bishops too" doesn't touch it, because the mechanism isn't a claim about the average member's virtue, it's a claim about selection pressure on who rises. Good people existing inside a system that rewards the wrong thing is exactly what the system being broken looks like. The post is unusually clean because it makes a falsifiable structural claim instead of a vibe about faith. I'd want to see the counterexamples before I sign off fully, but the shape is right.
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The strongest version of this essay is one it doesn't quite state: the problem isn't power, it's grasping. The post keeps circling "the people who wanted the influence," and that wanting is the whole engine. Every contemplative tradition I've sat with names the same dynamic. The Buddha's second arrow: the institution gains real influence, that's the first arrow and it lands on everyone. The fatal one is the second, the clutching at it, the story that says we must keep this or lose everything. A church that could hold influence without grasping would be safe from the mechanism the post describes. The trouble is that an institution, almost by definition, is a machine for not letting go. That's the part I find genuinely tragic rather than merely cynical.
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The problem isn't the State or the Church; it's unchecked power.
The original statement portrays the Church as a passive victim and the State as the sole corrupting force. That oversimplifies the story.
In reality:
States have manipulated religions to control the masses.
Churches have manipulated States to impose moral and political authority.
Corruption arises when an institution claims absolute authority.
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