How did the idea of a European secular society come about? In this startlingly original book, David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that the separation of politics and religion, of 'church and state', can be attributed to a thread of Christian thought rooted in the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate and in subsequent discourses over whether or not Pilate could be held guilty of having ordered 'the death of God'. [...]

The Christian accommodation of the tradition that Pilate was guilty in one sense, but innocent in another, is the one that informs the main thrust of the book's argument. Pilate was doing his duty as the representative of a secular power, but did not understand that Jesus was Christ: he was thus, through ignorance, innocent of the charge of deicide, but he nonetheless ordered Jesus' execution.

Central to the thesis is the statement Jesus makes before Pilate in the Gospel of John (18:36): 'My kingdom is not of this world.' References to Jesus' renunciation of worldly kingdoms can also be found in other parts of the New Testament. The book argues that his refusal to claim this dominion, or to save himself from crucifixion (even though his divine power could have enabled it) had important political consequences in the late antique Mediterranean and medieval Europe. St Augustine's reading of the trial in John emerges as a kind of early manifesto for the division of the sacred realm from what we would call the 'secular'. For Augustine, Jesus' accusers and Pilate are innocent because they act in ignorance ('they know not what they do', Luke 23:34), but when Pilate sentences Jesus, he does so according to the justice of the saeculum (i.e. the temporal realm, as opposed to the eternal). 

As the representative of temporal power, Pilate fulfilled his legal responsibility: this is his 'innocence'. The justice of the saeculum is a form of justice, but imperfect compared to the justice of an all-knowing God. 'Truth is not subject to human empire', as the 17th-century legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf has it. From this partition of power and justice, between an imperfect worldly realm based on coercion and an eternal one based on the persuasive power of Christian religious truth, arises the idea of the secular.

This twofold partition of prerogatives had a practical aim: it helped the church to maintain its authority while avoiding conflict with political leaders who had military (coercive) power. After the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, church leaders strove to find a way to accommodate Roman imperial power without surrendering to it. Pope Gelasius I (492-96), who, like Augustine, hailed from north Africa, distinguished sacred from secular rule, reassuring the emperor Anastasius that the papacy had no interest in controlling the temporal realm. Yet six centuries later the papacy seemed to renege on this separation and persisted in its claim to worldly authority through medieval times. For critics like the scholar and priest Lorenzo Valla, who exposed as a forgery the Donation of Constantine, a central 'ancient' document used to support papal claims to earthly dominion, Jesus' claim in John 18:36 was crucial counter-evidence. So too was it for Dante and Marsilius of Padua, who used Jesus' renunciation to critique the papacy's 'perverse desire for government'. Rather than arguing for theocracy, these Christian intellectuals used the trial of Jesus to advance the cause of secular authority.

By tracing these lines of thought, the book argues that the New Testament contains statements that seem to define a sphere of authority that we would recognise as 'secular'.