of religion, does not yet profess it in the form of the State,
for its attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not
yet the actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it
still operates upon the unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this
human kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State,
and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the
redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its
instrument, and it is the State of hypocrisy. The so-called Christian
State needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a
State. The democratic State, the real State, does not need religion
for its political completion. It can rather do without religion,
because it represents the realization of the human basis of religion
in a secular manner. The so-called Christian State, on the other hand,
adopts a political attitude towards religion and a religious attitude
towards politics. If it degrades the State form to the level of a
fiction, it equally degrades religion to a fiction.

In order to elucidate these antagonisms, let us consider Bauer's
construction of the Christian State, a construction which has
proceeded from contemplating the Christian-Germanic State.

Says Bauer: "In order to demonstrate the impossibility or the
non-existence of a Christian State, we are frequently referred to
that pronouncement in the Gospel which it not only does not follow,
but cannot follow without dissolving itself completely as a State."
"But the question is not settled so easily. What then does this Gospel
text enjoin? Supernatural self-denial, subjection to the authority of
revelation, the turning away from the State, the abolition of secular
conditions. Now all this is enjoined and carried out by the Christian
State. It has absorbed the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not
repeat it in the same words as the Gospel expresses it, the reason is
only because it expresses this spirit in the State form, that is, in
forms which are indeed derived from the State of this world, but which
are degraded to a sham in the religious rebirth which they have to
undergo."

Bauer goes on to show how the people of the Christian State are only a
sham people, who no longer have any will of their own, but possess
their real existence in the chief to whom they are subject, but from
whom they were originally and naturally alien, as he was given to them
by God; how the l