Pagan critics of the early church called the gathering of those faithful to a crucified Jew named Jesus a “superstitio” -- “beliefs and practices that were foreign and strange to the Romans . . . the kinds of practices and beliefs associated with cults that had penetrated the Roman world from surrounding lands” (Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, p. 50). Roman elite contrasted such groups with Roman cults and sacrifices – a type of “religio” that was useful to sustain the Roman social order. True “religio” was “a patrimony from the past which sustains the life of the state” (p. 63). Of course, Christians did not accept the label of “superstitio” as a definition for themselves. They saw themselves, instead, as a “school of virtue.” As a result those who ruled the political order saw them as arrogant, self-righteous, and irrational yet the church endured according to its own polity, rather than have its inner life subordinated to the ruling politics of the day. Christians knew that their life as church needed to reflect the “city of God” rather than the “city of men” in which they dwelt as “aliens” and “pilgrims.”

In contrast Christians today seemingly have no trouble, consciously or unconsciously, accepting the definition of the church as a type of “civil society”. Such “faith-based” groups represent a type of organization useful to sustain the social order in a liberal democratic society. Yet I would argue that for Christians to accept such a definition fundamentally distorts the witness of a congregation and inoculates membership from the work of the Spirit necessary to bring forth the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love. The best meaning clergy and laity subtly shift the practices of the church to fit the definition of a civil society often with a Christian sounding vocabulary of “community” and “love” and “support” and “meeting needs” – all good things, if not co-opted by the false politics of the contemporary liberal political order.

Alasdair MacIntyre engages the moral and rational problems of “civil society” within liberal political orders in an essay called “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” (see The MacIntyre Reader, pp. 223-34). MacIntyre contrast the background understandings of activities of a group from within the political presuppositions of a “civil society”:
In activities governed by the norms of civil society there are no ends except those which are understood to be goals of some particular individual or individuals, dictated by the desires of those individuals, and no goods are recognized except those involved in the satisfaction of the wants and needs of individuals. Because there are many goods which individuals can achieve only by cooperative attention to the goods of others, civil society recognizes as common goods those goods which are pursued in common by individuals. But the only available conception of a common good is one constructed from the reducible to conceptions of the goods pursued by various individuals in their attempts to satisfy their desires” (p. 225). “The central conceptions informing thought within civil society about human relationships are therefore those of utility, of contract and of individual rights. And the moral philosophy which gives expression to the standpoint of civil society consists of a continuing debate about those concepts and how they are to be applied” (p. 223).

When congregations live as a civil-society, the social power of a congregation, either an entrepreneurial pastor and/or the invested “ownership laity” determines the needs that provides the common good for the congregation to pursue in contract (or “covenant”) with each other. If these needs are not met, then the utility of the congregation and its leadership are called into question. Either the congregation’s programs must be revised or the social contract is determined violated, leading in congregational dissatisfaction and/or departure.

MacIntyre insightfully gazes more deeply into the moral formation that goes on in civil society. Civil society demands a bifurcation between those who decide and service particular needs, and those who receive these services. MacIntyre writes, “Those who without abandoning the standpoint of civil society take themselves to know in advance what needs to be done to effect needed change are those who take themselves to be therefore entitled to manage that change. Others are to be the passive recipients of what they as managers effect. This hierarchical division between managers and managed is thus legitimated by the superior knowledge imputed to themselves by the managing reformers, who have cast themselves in the role of educator” (p. 231). If a congregation can find order between those who need to manage the services and those who need to receive the services, then it might achieve social equilibrium for awhile. If a different assessment of what needs deserve serviced arises or authority to manage the services becomes denied or disputed, then social disruption within the congregation will arise because it will be experienced as a violation of the social contract established.

Underlying this, however, is the fact that the church as a civil society does not require personal moral transformation, but instead, works to support individuals to function within the current liberal social status quo and the dysfunctions that it produces. Needs may be serviced, but the service has no other end than maintaining life within the society as it is, or allowing others to participate more fully in the liberal social order. The services quickly take on an individualistic therapeutic task to help individual’s cope with psychological discomfort and the anomie that the liberal social structures produce. Personal survival and satisfaction become the key ends of a congregation that operates as a part of civil society within a liberal social order. The congregation thereby becomes a significant cog in sustaining the social order of the nation-state, just as in the Roman empire, proper religio functions to sustain the order of the patronage system that was the Roman empire.

What then is the option? It is a return to the church as it was before modernity and liberalism colonialized it. It is the church as a revolutionary Thomistic school of virtue by engaging in the practices that reveal the church’s true nature. As Benedict XVI reminds us in Deus Caritas Est, “The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable”(para. 25). These objective practices provide the common good by which the Spirit sanctifies a congregation and thereby individuals within it to experience the perfect love that casts out fear. A communal pilgrimage, a trek for holiness, re-places a social contract for the fulfillment of therapeutic needs "in community."

Within this understanding, the central practices of a congregation are not open to negotiation according to the perceived needs of the group who decide to gather together for their own constructed common good. Activity is objectively ordered for the congregation by the Scriptures as lived out in the Christian tradition. As MacIntrye argues, objective activity has a common end of “universal worth” so that individuals who make this end their own “are able to achieve something of universal worth embodied in some particular form of practice through cooperation with other such individuals. The relationships required by this type of end are such that each individual’s achievement is both of the end and of what has become her or his own end” (p. 225). For the church this end is love of God and in God, love of neighbor. Only certain practices are conducive to this end, and these are objectively given in Scriptures. The "obedience of faith" becomes required in the journey to our true end in God.

Thus in the congregation as a school of virtue, the end comes first before the need, as the need must be defined in terms of the internal and external end of the activity. Such objective activities are antecedent and independent “of the desires of the particular individuals who happen to engage in it. Individuals discover in the ends of any such practice goods common to all who engage in it, goods internal to and specific to that particular type of practice, which they can make their own only by allowing their participation in the activity to effect a transformation in the desires which they initially brought with them to the activity” (pp. 225-26). Committing to such a congregation means committing to allowing one’s desires to be reshaped at their most basic level, thus requiring a moral transformation at the core of each and every person – with no bifurcation between the “managers” and the “managed.” The whole congregation must walk together, not to meet needs, but to reach the end of holiness, the love of God and neighbor, an end that comes only by the work of the Spirit as one engages in the objective practices of the gospel. Such a congregation requires attention, not to the current needs, but to those who have gone before us, Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints, as our educators: “This type of educator in respect of knowledge of the good with the activity involved in quite another kind of practice, one such that those engaged in its transform themselves and educate themselves through their own self-transformative activity, coming to understand their good as the good internal to that activity” (p. 231). The congregation’s authority lies in the office of the pastor/priest whose authority arises from fidelity to the gospel and the central practices of the congregation by which the Spirit can cleanse and sanctify its members to achieve the common good shared by all humanity, the Good that is the Triune God who is Love, through experiencing the internal good of love of God and neighbor that comes with the external, objective practices. “Thus in the course of doing whatever has to be done to achieve those goods, they also transform themselves through what is at once a change in their desires and an acquisition of those intellectual and moral virtues and those intellectual, physical and imaginative skills necessary to achieve the goods of that particular practice” (p. 226). The life of a congregation becomes an adventure in which God brings forth witnesses as members become able to participate more deeply and receive more profoundly the kingdom of God that comes to us only as gift.

This is a radical congregation, for it goes to the roots of living the gospel outside the mal-formation of the modern liberal democratic society that produces artificial entities like “civil societies.” From the outside, such a congregation might look like a civil society – or perhaps a cult because of the commitment of its members to have their desires completely reshaped by participation in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the works of mercy! But those outside cannot gage what is going on, nor those who are committed to the church as a type of civil society. As MacIntrye writes, “What the objectivity of moral and other evaluative standards amounts to is to be understood only from within the context of and in terms of the structure of certain types of historically developed practice, in which the initial interests of those engaged in such practices are transformed through their activities into an interest in conforming to the standards of excellence required by those practices, so that the goods internal to them may be achieved. These are types of practice socially marginalized by the self-aggrandizing and self-protective attitudes and activities characteristic of developing capitalism, types of practice alien to the standpoint of civil society. But they are the types of practice within which moral thinking is put to the relevant practical tests and achieves objectivity” (p. 233).