The Anatomy of a Hybrid, A Study in Church-State Relationships by Leonard Verduin.
The author writes: “During the past half-century the world has witnessed the rise of totalitarian governments and monolithic societies, that is, societies in which all are expected to share in the same ultimate loyalty. These are societies in which there is no room for diversity of conviction. I view this development with alarm. My conviction is that for a person to be his proper self he must live in the presence of genuine options; must be able to exercise choice; must, in a word, be free to enjoy a measure of sovereignty. In order to be fully human, a person must be part of a composite society.
Moreover, it is my conviction that the composite society is to a large extent the product (albeit a by-product) of the world-view of authentic Christianity. Authentic Christianity is firmly committed to the idea of non-sameness, to the idea that people are never to be thought of as all being in the same category in the matter of ultimate convictions. Authentic Christianity sees human society as composite, that is, consisting of people of diverse ways of thinking. It does not expect to encounter unanimity in human society; it expects to find some men stumbling at the very same cross in which other men glory. Totalitarian systems, on the other hand, view all members of a given society as basically unanimous; such systems can thus arise only in a climate in which authentic Christianity has either lapsed or has never been. If this is correct, authentic Christianity is the only viable alternative to totalitarianism.”
