Hobbes’ View on the Church’s Role in the State

Thomas Hobbes lived through the English Civil War, a period when disputes over religion tore the country apart and made the question of who controls the church a matter of life and death. For Hobbes, this was not an abstract theological puzzle. It was the root cause of political chaos. In Leviathan, his most famous work, Hobbes devotes nearly half the book to religion precisely because he believed that divided loyalties between church and state were the surest path to civil war. His solution was radical: the political sovereign, not any priest or pope, must hold supreme authority over religious matters. Let us unpack how he arrived at this conclusion and why it still provokes debate.

Why religion became a political problem 🔗

Hobbes begins his political theory with a grim picture of human existence without government. In this “state of nature,” there is no common power to keep people in check, and life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this condition, individuals agree to a social contract, transferring their right of self-government to a sovereign who holds absolute authority. This sovereign maintains peace by being the final word on law, property, and justice.

The trouble was that religion created a rival source of authority. In Hobbes’ time, the church was not merely a place of worship but a powerful political institution with its own claims to power. When priests or popes claimed to speak for God, they offered subjects a competing master. A person who believed the church held authority above the king faced an impossible choice about whom to obey. Hobbes saw this division of loyalty as fatal. As one scholar notes, control over religious doctrine appears in Leviathan as one of the three essential marks of sovereignty, alongside the power to make law and wage war.

For this reason, Hobbes argued that religious practices and expressions must fall under the jurisdiction of the political sovereign. The sovereign determines which doctrines may be taught and which religious practices are permitted. In Hobbes’ ideal commonwealth, subjects could not practice or promote a religion the sovereign had banned. This was not hostility to faith but a practical measure to prevent the kind of religious warfare that had devastated England.

The sovereign as supreme interpreter of scripture 🔗

Hobbes pushed his argument further than simply giving the state oversight of the church. He concluded that religious and civic authority must be united under one source. The sovereign should be the head of the church just as he is the head of everything else in society.

This meant that the sovereign was the supreme interpreter of scripture. Hobbes worried about individuals or groups who claimed private access to God’s word and used that claim to challenge the ruler. If anyone could appeal to a personal revelation or a special spiritual gift to justify disobedience, then no commonwealth could remain stable. By making the sovereign the only legitimate interpreter of religious doctrine, Hobbes removed this avenue for rebellion. According to Britannica, Hobbes maintained that churches possess no authority that the civil sovereign has not granted them.

Hobbes reassured believers that obeying the sovereign would not endanger their salvation. A Christian could obey the ruler’s decrees and still keep faith, because the truly essential article of belief was straightforward. This argument allowed Hobbes to insist on total political obedience without, in his view, asking anyone to sacrifice their soul.

The attack on the Papacy 🔗

Hobbes reserved some of his sharpest criticism for the Papacy, the central governing authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope claimed a spiritual authority that crossed national borders and reached into the affairs of every Catholic ruler. Hobbes saw this as a direct threat to sovereignty.

Interference in sovereign affairs 🔗

The core problem was the claim that the church could override a ruler’s commands. Hobbes pointed with distaste to the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council, which held that if a king failed to purge heresy from his kingdom, the Pope could excommunicate him and release his subjects from their duty of obedience. To Hobbes, this was an intolerable interference. It meant that an external power could dissolve the bond between a sovereign and his people, plunging the realm into the very chaos the commonwealth was designed to prevent.

He used the example of Elizabeth I, who was excommunicated by the Pope and declared an illegitimate ruler. Hobbes questioned the Pope’s authority to make such judgments and insisted that it is the people who grant the ruler his power, not any foreign bishop. The conflict between the spiritual authority of a pope and the civil authority of a monarch was, for Hobbes, a perfect illustration of the danger.

The ghost of the Roman Empire 🔗

Hobbes also offered a memorable historical explanation for the Papacy’s power. He described it as “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” In his view, the papal hierarchy had simply grown out of the ruins of the old Roman imperial structure, even keeping Latin as its official language. Hobbes compared this whole hierarchy to a “kingdom of fairies,” suggesting its spiritual power rested only on fear, false miracles, and misinterpreted scripture rather than on any genuine authority. His detailed rebuttal of papal claims focused heavily on Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who had argued as strongly as possible for the Pope’s supreme ecclesiastical power.

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Darkness 🔗

A central pillar Hobbes had to dismantle was the belief that the church was already the “Kingdom of God” on Earth. This idea suggested the church held a divine right to rule that stood above any earthly sovereign. If true, it would justify the church’s claim to both spiritual and temporal authority.

Hobbes attacked this belief by reading scripture closely. He selectively quoted Jesus to argue that the Kingdom of God is not present now but will only arrive at the end of the world. A believer could accept the ultimate sovereignty of God while recognizing that God’s kingdom does not exist on earth until the end of time. In the meantime, the believer must obey the civil sovereign. This clever interpretive move stripped the church of its strongest claim to rule.

The final part of Leviathan, titled “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” describes what Hobbes called a “confederacy of deceivers.” This was not a physical place but an allegory for those who spread false doctrines to gain power over others. Hobbes argued that the Kingdom of Darkness must be understood metaphorically as the deceivers who lead people down wrong paths. He directed much of this critique at Catholic and Presbyterian clergy who claimed to represent God’s kingdom, since this claim implied the church held authority above the sovereign and had, in his view, caused enormous turmoil during the English Civil War.

The nominalist foundation 🔗

To understand why Hobbes was so confident in dismissing the church’s spiritual claims, we need to look at his philosophy of language and reality, known as nominalism.

What nominalism means 🔗

Hobbes was a nominalist, which means he believed that the only universal things are names. Consider the word “tree.” For Hobbes, there is no abstract, universal “tree” floating in some realm of ideas. There is only the word “tree,” which we apply to many individual trees because they resemble one another. The general term is just a label we attach by an act of will. Only particular, concrete things truly exist.

This stance set Hobbes against the older Aristotelian and scholastic tradition, which held that universal forms and essences had a real existence. Hobbes saw that tradition, taught in the universities of his day, as the source of much confused and dangerous thinking.

How nominalism dismantles the church’s claims 🔗

The consequences for religion were significant. If abstract universals do not exist, then the church cannot claim to be a mystical, spiritual body with an independent existence above and beyond its individual members. Talk of the church as a single divine entity becomes, in Hobbes’ eyes, just a misleading name. The same logic let him dismiss belief in incorporeal spirits and other doctrines he considered holdovers from pagan religion, which he counted among the false beliefs that needed to be banished from the church.

By denying that abstract spiritual entities have real being, Hobbes cleared the ground for his political conclusion. The church could not be an independent spiritual kingdom because no such thing could exist in the way its defenders imagined.

The church as a corporate body under civil authority 🔗

Having denied the church any independent spiritual existence, Hobbes reframed what a church actually is. For him, a church is a corporate body, an assembly of Christians, but one that has no legitimate existence without the authority of the sovereign.

Hobbes argued that a gathering of people only becomes a single, unified body, capable of acting as one, when it has lawful authority to assemble. Without such authority, any act done by a crowd remains the separate act of each individual present, not the act of one body. From this he drew a striking conclusion: only the sovereign has the authority to unite a multitude of Christians into one personified church. The church and the commonwealth, in a properly ordered Christian state, are made of the same people and governed by the same authority.

This is why some scholars describe Hobbes’ position as going beyond mere Erastianism, the doctrine of state supremacy over the church. Hobbes argued something stronger: that in a Christian commonwealth, the church and the state are effectively identical. The sovereign was not just supervising a separate institution but was, in his mature theory, the supreme pastor from whom every clerical power ultimately flowed. A church, in this scheme, is simply the commonwealth considered in its religious aspect, governed by civil authority rather than standing independent of it.

Why this mattered then and now 🔗

It is worth remembering the context that drove Hobbes to these conclusions. He wrote during and after a brutal civil war in which religious disagreement was a major fault line. His central aim was to remove every source of divided authority that could give people grounds for rebellion. By placing the church firmly under the sovereign, he hoped to guarantee peace.

His ideas were deeply controversial. The Roman Catholic Church added his complete works to its list of banned books in 1649, and Leviathan alienated much of the seventeenth-century church establishment. Yet Hobbes’ arguments about sovereignty, the social contract, and the relationship between political and religious authority went on to shape the foundations of modern political thought. His insistence that legitimate authority comes from the people through a contract, rather than from divine appointment of the church, pointed toward later theories of secular government, even if his own conclusions were far more authoritarian than the liberal democracies that followed.

What do you think? Was Hobbes right that peace requires a single authority over both religious and political life, or does his solution sacrifice too much freedom of conscience? And in a modern democracy with guaranteed religious liberty, how much of Hobbes’ worry about divided loyalty still holds true?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Leviathan-by-Hobbes
2. https://pages.pomona.edu/~mjg14747/033-2006/HobbesReligion.shtml
3. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hobbes/section4/
4. http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2005/11/kingdom-of-darkness.html
5. https://philarchive.org/archive/JONTNK
6. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/
7. https://academic.oup.com/book/7959/chapter/153261856
8. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/hobbes-on-politics-and-religion/
9. https://reason.com/2022/07/25/leviathan/