Reconciling personal faith and civic service has never been easy. Even before relatively modern concerns about the separation of church and state, Christians recognized a tension between the state’s divine duty to enforce justice and its tendency toward fallen corruption. Augustine famously dealt with this in The City of God, distinguishing between the earthly city that serves temporal needs and the city of God that serves true and eternal justice. Understanding that human rulers are unlikely to perfectly serve justice, he exhorts Christians to pray for their rulers and endure even unjust laws that do not oppose the laws of God.

This exhortation is complicated in a democracy, where citizens are also the rulers for whom they must pray. Is a Christian culpable for the actions of a ruler that she helped elect? Is she culpable for a ruler elected through her inaction? In recent years, such questions have dominated Christian political discourse.

Those looking for answers should take an afternoon to read Paradise Regained, a seventeenth-century poem by John Milton.