Okay, just one more Jerry Falwell, Jr. response, and I’m moving on. In his bizarre interview with the Washington Post last week, Falwell took one of my favorite passages out of context, and I’d like to spend some time exploring its actual meaning. Here’s the original quote from Falwell:

Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome. He went out of his way to say that’s the earthly kingdom, I’m about the heavenly kingdom and I’m here to teach you how to treat others, how to help others, but when it comes to serving your country, you render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

First of all, this take on “two kingdoms” is pretty sloppy. While the Bible does feature some extreme dualities (spirit and flesh, darkness and light, etc.), it would be a major stretch to say the spiritual and physical worlds should be totally divorced from one another. The idea of separating spirituality from the physical world has deeper roots in Greek philosophy (and later on in some schools of Gnosticism), and Jesus and his followers probably would have hated it. If anything, Jesus’s teachings show how the spiritual and physical are beautifully intertwined (for example, pretty much everything Jesus said about money).

As for “not telling Caesar how to run Rome,” well, at the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry, Caesar wasn’t yet paying attention. Jesus’s primary audience was the Jewish people in his immediate area, so he spoke almost exclusively to them before empowering his apostles to minister to Gentiles all around the Mediterranean. Still, Jesus had critiques to offer Rome, and the New Testament authors capture this. Luke drops Caesar’s name right at the start of his gospel to highlight Rome’s presence, Rome is all over Paul’s letters, and it’s likely some of Revelation’s symbolic elements represent Roman oppression of Christians. The Sermon on the Mount offers suggestions for peaceful resistance, and then there’s Matthew 22, which isn’t the neat and tidy endorsement of church/state separation we often make it out to be. Let’s dive in:

The controversy surrounding Jesus created some unlikely bedfellows in the ancient Galilee, and thus, groups who hated each other found themselves collaborating against the Son of God. In Matthew 22, the Pharisees and the Herodians approached Jesus with a question. As their name implies, the Herodians were sympathetic to Herod and the occupying Romans, while the Pharisees were the guardians of Israel’s legal tradition and the synagogue. These two groups could not have been more opposed, yet they brought a question to Jesus together: “Should we pay the imperial tax to Caesar?” Jesus must have realized this was a trap.

The tax in question could only be paid with a denarius, a coin bearing the image Caesar and an inscription proclaiming Caesar as a god. If Jesus said to pay the tax, not only would he endorse the Roman occupation, he would acknowledge Caesar as divine. The Jewish law is famously strict about having no other gods, so Jesus could not say to pay the tax. At the same time, to refuse the tax would be an act of political insurrection. In Jesus’s tumultuous era, Jewish rebellions against the occupying Romans were all too common, with assassinations and armed conflicts being the norm. Decrying the tax would have lumped Jesus in with the more violent revolutionaries (possibly leading to Jesus’s immediate discrediting and execution as an instigator), so Jesus could not say not to pay the tax either.

With “yes” and “no” out as viable options, Jesus created a third answer: he called the Herodians and Pharisees on their trap. Asking for a coin, Jesus posed the question to the crowd, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” The crowd confirmed them as Caesar’s, and Jesus gave the now-famous retort, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” Genesis 1 suggests all humans bear God’s image, so by saying we should “give to God what is God’s,” Jesus said to give your whole self to God. As for the coins, they’re pocket idols anyway, so Caesar can have them back; they’re as worthless as his claims of divinity.

We often use this exchange in Matthew 22 to give a biblical justification for the separation of church and state, but as you can see, that’s not really what this passage is about. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for the separation of church and state, and I think people should pay their taxes. We just shouldn’t use Matthew 22 to explain why.) By saying “render unto Caesar,” Jesus subtly criticizes Caesar and calls out his currency as idolatrous. He’s not acquiescing to Caesar or giving him a free pass; Jesus is saying we owe a higher allegiance to God, and he’s pointing out Caesar is not God.

In his interview, Falwell used this passage to imply Christians should always be obedient to their country and its leaders. In fact, the passage really says the opposite: a Christian’s first loyalty is to God, and when political figures try to wield divine authority as if it were their own, we should be skeptical.