Every serious Christian who engages with the criminal justice system—whether as a prisoner, a family member, a minister, or simply a citizen—must eventually confront a question that most churches avoid with determined silence: What does the Bible actually teach about the relationship between the church and the state, and how does that teaching apply to a system that routinely destroys innocent lives?

In Suffering Unjustly, I devoted extensive analysis to this question, drawing on Scripture, historical theology, and the insights of public choice economics. In this chapter, I distill that analysis into a framework that any Christian can understand and apply—because unless you understand the biblical relationship between church and state, you will never understand why the criminal justice system produces so much injustice, and you will never know how to respond to it faithfully.

The Relationship Between Church and State

The Bible teaches that civil government is ordained by God for a specific purpose: the restraint of evil and the blessing of those who do good (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-17). However, who defines what is good and evil is ambiguous. Nearly all the First Century Roman rulers would have considered Christians to be the evildoers, and the “normal, everyday citizens and merchants” who practiced paganism and Caesar worship—sometimes joining or applauding the persecution (Acts 19)—to be those who did good.

The Greek word ponerós (πονηρόν), translated “evil” in Romans 12:9—where Paul commands believers to abhor it, contrasted with the agathón (ἀγαθόν, good) we must cling to—is much more forceful (meaning morally wicked, malicious, depraved, and reprehensible) than the broader, more functional word kakón (κακόν), which Paul deliberately uses just verses later in 12:17, 12:21, and 13:3-4 (meaning misdeeds or general harm). Was the change of term accidental or insignificant? Most Christians have presumed that states generally operate according to God’s standard, but the history of state rulers indicates the opposite is true, especially in the case of Caesar Nero, who reigned when the apostles Peter and Paul wrote their epistles. In other words, the state defines what is good and bad based on its public policy, which is often arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to the word of God. For them, there may be no objective standard of evil, which is reduced to social misdeeds, or whatever the regime decides to punish at that moment in time.

Furthermore, the state’s divine purpose has also included bringing judgment upon wayward people (Habakkuk 1:6; Isaiah 10:5-7), as was seen in Jerusalem, for instance, in both 587 B.C. and 70 A.D. Yet, the Bible teaches—with equal clarity and far greater emphasis—that the state, as a human institution dominated by Satan (Luke 4:6-7; Psalm 2:2; 94:20; Revelation 2:10; 13:1-8), is corrupted by the same sin that corrupts every human institution. The state is not merely imperfect; it is one of the primary instruments through which Satan advances his anti-Christian agenda in the world. The “unholy trinity” (666) that opposes God’s people consists of Satan and his demons, the state, and false religion—and of these three, the state has been the most consistently lethal throughout human history.

This is not an extreme position. It is the testimony of Scripture. The Psalms cry out against rulers who “frameth mischief by a law” (Psalm 94:20). The prophets denounce kings and judges who pervert justice. Jesus was executed by the state. The apostles were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and killed by the state. The Revelation of John portrays the state as a beast that persecutes the saints and demands worship.

When Paul and Peter instruct Christians to submit to governing authorities, they describe the divine will as a means to avoid unnecessary conflict with the state, rather than endorsing the moral character of every government. Paul and Peter wrote their epistles under the same regime that would eventually execute them. These men were not naïve about the nature of the state. They understood, as we must understand, that obedience to government is a general principle with clear limits: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Submission is never absolute in the Scriptures. Even a wife has the right to disobey her husband if he asks her to do something sinful.

Moreover, godly people in the Bible disobeyed the authorities and were not condemned for doing so: the Hebrew midwives in Egypt (Exodus 1:15-21; Hebrews 11:23), Rahab (Joshua 2:1-21, commended in Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25), Ehud (Judges 3:15-30), Elijah (2 Kings 1:9-15), Naboth (1 Kings 21:1-4), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 26:8-16; 38:1-13), Ebed-melech (Jeremiah 38:7-13), Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego (Daniel 3:17-18), Daniel (Daniel 1:8-16; 6:1-28), Amos (Amos 7:10-17), Esther (Esther 4:11-16; 5:1-2), Mordecai (Esther 3:1-4), the three wise men (Matthew 2:7-8, 12), Peter, James, John (Acts 4:18-20; 5:27-29, 40-42), and the Apostle Paul (Acts 9:23-25; 2 Corinthians 11:32-33). Honorable mention goes to John the Baptist (Matthew 14:3-4; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20), who publicly rebuked Herod for marrying Herodias and was imprisoned and executed for it. John was killed by the state for moral confrontation. Ditto for Moses’ parents (Exodus 2:1-10; Hebrews 11:23), who “were not afraid of the king’s commandment,” and Stephen (Acts 6:8-15; 7:1-60), who defied the Sanhedrin with an extended indictment of Jewish-state collusion against the prophets. On only two or three of these occasions did the righteous disobey a prohibition to preach the Gospel. They mostly disobeyed when ordered to violate a biblical principle. Especially in modern democratic societies, the question is not so much in what rare cases we must disobey, but rather when we can, in good conscience, obey policies repugnant to God’s principles to avoid being hassled by the state.

When the State Becomes the Persecutor

History provides an unbroken record of states persecuting Christians. The early church suffered three centuries of Roman persecution before Constantine’s political conversion in 313 A.D. and was solidified via the state-church formation in the Edict of Thessalonica of 380 A.D., after which persecution was limited to groups like the early Waldenses and others, mainly in Asia Minor and Southern Europe, who refused to accept the fused state-church model. That nefarious merger gave rise to many tyrannies. The medieval church was corrupted by its merger with state power, leading to the persecution of dissenting Christians—Waldenses, Hussites, Moravian brethren, Lollards, Paulicians, Albigenses, and others—by Roman Catholic-backed governments. The Reformation of 1517 A.D. produced its own waves of persecution through 1689 A.D., with Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants and Waldenses, and both Catholics and Protestants killing Baptists and proto-Baptists (Anabaptists). The Russian Orthodox killed many Molokans, who, like the Baptists and proto-Baptists, killed no one, nor did they ever have an allegiance with the state. Early Rhode Island (1630s) was the classic case, along with the highlands of the southern Alps, where religious freedom was practiced, from the Fifth to the Seventeenth Century, and no union between church and state was encouraged or allowed.

The Baptist tradition has a particularly rich—and painful—heritage of state persecution, perhaps most notably in seventeenth-century England and its American colonies. Thomas Helwys died in Newgate Prison around 1616 for writing A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity against King James I. Benjamin Keach was pilloried for his catechism. William Kiffin was imprisoned multiple times. John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching without a license. Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in Puritan Massachusetts for conducting Baptist worship. Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony. Centuries of Baptists in England, Holland, and the American colonies suffered fines, imprisonment, and violence at the hands of state-backed churches. The same continues today, even in the West, although in Muslim states in Africa and Asia, North Korea, and China, the onslaught is even worse.

As I argued in Suffering Unjustly, the advance of the Gospel has always been accompanied by unjust suffering at the hands of the state. There have been relatively few periods in history when serious, committed believers have enjoyed a relaxed and tranquil life. Those periods—the four and a half centuries (Acts 13:20) under the political anarchy and judges of Israel, portions of the reigns of David, Solomon, Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, the era following the American Revolution, and perhaps the English Civil War (at least the early Cromwellian Commonwealth before the Restoration)—have been exceptions rather than the rule. Peace and prosperity, as an economist might say, is not the equilibrium position for serious, committed Christians.

This historical reality should inform our expectations. The Christian who is shocked by the injustice of the criminal justice system has not read his Bible carefully enough. The Christian who expects fairness from the courts has confused the divine purpose of government with its actual performance. The two are not the same, and they have rarely been the same at any point in human history. The fact that God ordains the state does not mean that the state is good or even has a decent framework for following God’s standard. After all, God also ordains the devil and demons in His sovereign decree and election, which are quintessentially evil. Before Pilate, Jesus Himself declared that His kingdom was “not of this world” and reminded Pilate that his power was derivative of God’s sovereign purpose (John 18:33-37; 19:10-11). Moreover, the Bible indicates clearly that Satan raises up states and dominates them to do his pleasure. The “conscience” Paul refers to in (Romans 13:5) does not mean our concern that we might sin by disobeying the state, but rather that we might be preoccupied by what the state might do to us for disobeying, even if doing so is not sinful. Perhaps that is why the Apostle Peter places the command to fear God just before the command to honor the king (1 Peter 2:17), establishing the priority order Peter himself assumed, written under Nero’s reign.

Criminal Justice Reform from a Biblical and Libertarian Perspective

The criminal justice system in most modern democracies is broken. It is broken not because it lacks resources or because its practitioners are uniformly incompetent, but because it operates according to principles fundamentally at odds with biblical justice.

Biblical justice is restitution-based. The thief who steals must restore what was taken—plus a substantial penalty (Exodus 22:1-4), even, in the wisdom literature, “sevenfold” or “all the substance of his house” (Proverbs 6:31). Biblical justice is proportional. The punishment must fit the crime—“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:24), which limits punishment rather than escalating it. Biblical justice distinguishes between malice and accident, between premeditation and self-defense, between victimful or nonconsensual crimes (theft, assault, murder) and victimless or consensual “crimes” (drug use, regulatory violations, consensual transactions between adults), which are arbitrary and capricious.

Modern criminal justice, by contrast, is incarceration-based. Instead of restoring the victim, it warehouses the offender at enormous public expense—and in conditions that are frequently more destructive than the original crime. It criminalizes behaviors that have no victim, filling prisons with drug offenders and regulatory violators while violent criminals negotiate plea bargains. It destroys families as collateral damage. It produces recidivism rather than rehabilitation. And it operates with an institutional inertia that resists reform, because the system itself—the guards’ unions, the prison construction industry, the bail bondsmen industry, the bureaucratic apparatus of corrections, the judges, the public defenders, the prosecutors, the expert witnesses, the criminal lawyers—has a vested interest in perpetuating incarceration.

From a libertarian perspective—a perspective that I hold as both a Christian and a trained economist—the criminal justice system represents one of the most egregious examples of government failure in modern society. The state has assumed a monopoly on the administration of justice, and like all monopolies, it delivers an inferior product at an inflated price. The “customers” of this monopoly—the accused, the convicted, the victims, and the taxpayers—have no meaningful alternative. Unwary taxpayers are forced to “buy” this tragic and defective product with their taxes.

Christians should care about criminal justice reform because the current system violates the biblical principles that should govern the administration of justice. Prisons and jails are not part of God’s program laid out in the Scriptures. They harm the innocent, foment more crime, and ruin countless lives, all so that special interest groups can reap concentrated benefits while the costs are dispersed over the unwitting, huge populace who errantly believe that prisons keep crime in check. We should care because the system’s failures fall disproportionately on the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable—the very populations that Jesus singled out for the church’s compassionate attention. And we should care because many of the men and women inside these prisons are our brothers and sisters in Christ, suffering unjustly under a system that has failed to do what is right and true.