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# The Church Was Never Private
- URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/the-church-was-never-private/
- Published: 2026-08-03T17:44:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-04T19:42:36.000Z
- Author: Logan Martin Isaac

Somewhere in American civil religion, "separation of church and state" quietly became "separation of church from 'politics.' " Those are not the same claim, and the difference matters more than we've let it.

## **The word itself is political**

*Ekklesia* didn't start out as a churchy word. In the Greek cities of the classical and Hellenistic world, it named the sovereign assembly — citizens gathered in person to deliberate and decide the business of the polis. It's a civic noun before it's a religious one. So when the translators of the Septuagint needed a Greek word for Israel's [*qahal*](https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h6951/esv/wlc/0-1/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) (the assembly of the Lord gathered at Sinai, summoned to receive covenant and law) they reached past the neutral, all-purpose word for "gathering" ([*synagōgē*](https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g4864/esv/mgnt/0-1/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com)) and chose the loaded civic term instead. Whatever else that translation choice did, it refused to let Israel's assembly before God be read as merely devotional. **Ekklesia named Israel's covenant-gathering with the same word Athens used for its own democratic sovereignty.**

Three centuries later, when Psaul wrote to house-churches scattered across Roman colonies and Greek cities — Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Thessalonica — he kept that word. He didn't invent new vocabulary for a private club meeting quietly over dinner. He called them, and they called themselves, *ekklesia* — the same word the city used for its own governing assembly. In Ephesus, Luke uses the word in the same breath for a Christian gathering and for the actual civic assembly rioting in the theater over silversmiths' profits. Same word, same chapter. The earliest church did not pick an apolitical term by accident, and its first readers didn't miss what the word claimed. **An *ekklesia* is a body that gathers to decide something, under some authority, in public.** That's what the name has always said.

## **What the wall was actually for**

Which is why "the wall of separation between church and state" — Jefferson's phrase, not the Constitution's, from an 1802 letter reassuring Baptists in Danbury that the federal government would neither establish a national religion nor police their conscience — has drifted so far from its own purpose. It was built to keep the state's [fasces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) out of the sanctuary, and the sanctuary's dogma out of governing statutes. Somewhere along the way we let the wall become a curtain: church stays inside, state stays outside, and whatever the church says about justice, war, poverty, or power gets waved off as "getting political" — as though the *ekklesia* forfeits its own name the moment it speaks to the public order it was named, from Sinai forward, to address.

## **Where Christian nationalism gets the diagnosis right and the prescription wrong**

Here's the harder thing to say out loud: Christian nationalism looks at that domesticated, privatized church and correctly senses something's missing. It's not wrong that a church which has agreed to be merely interior has lost something real. But then nationalism reaches for the one tool a privatized church no longer trusts itself to have: state power. **If you've been told your assembly isn't really public unless it holds the sword, you'll eventually go looking for the sword**. That's not a recovery of what *ekklesia* meant — it's a capitulation to the very premise that produced the privatized church in the first place: that a gathering isn't really "political" unless it aims to control Caesar's "office."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/2026/08/victor-1.jpeg)

No sacrifice, no salvation 🤷

Psaul's Corinthian *ekklesia* never tried to become the colony's governing council. It didn't need to. It was already a *rival* assembly, already public, already making a fundamentalizing claim on its members' allegiance — without borrowing a single magistrate's seal to make that claim real.

## **The fork isn't where we've been told it is**

The choice in front of us was never silence or the sword. An *ekklesia* doesn't need to conquer the assembly next door to be one. It needs to be what its own name has always said it was: a gathered public, answerable to a different Lord, making its claims in the open — without asking the state's permission, and without ever asking to borrow the state's sword to enforce them.