From The Calvinistic Concept of Culture
The impact of Calvin’s ideas in the political sphere inaugurated a new era, giving a new character and direction to national existence in many lands. The Greek state had been totalitarian, in which religion served as means unto an end, namely, the glorification of the state. In the Middle Ages the roles were reversed so that we find a church-state, with supreme authority vested in the pope, who loaned temporal power to the earthly ruler for the service of the church. Calvin saw the church and state as two interdependent entities each having received its own authority from the sovereign God. In this conception, the state is never secular, nor are state and church separated in the modern sense of the word.
According to Calvin, church and state must live in peace and must cooperate together in subjection to the Word of God. Each is to have its own jurisdiction. The state has authority in purely civil and temporal matters; the church, in spiritual matters.
It’s obvious from the above that American government is modeled more along the lines of the Greek state, with religion being nothing more than “civic” with the only end of serving the needs of the state for orderliness and ultimately its own glorification. Imagine a politician today actually believing that the collective authority he or she exercises is not ultimate, but rather “ordained of God” for His purposes. Modern American politcians certainly never give thought to the notion that there is a Higher Law upon which our Constitution is based. Remove that foundation – which secularists and liberals have been doing now for most of my life – and you have no Constitution left. When Law collapses, “the collective will of the people” prevails, and man becomes sovereign instead of God.
In his ideas about the political order, Calvin’s basic principle of the sovereignty of God is determinative. For he was strongly opposed to every form of state absolutism, autocracy, and absolute monarchy. Kings and presidents ought to have their power limited by legislators and constitutional law. Calvin cites the concrete case from Scripture of Samuel recording the rights of the people in a book for future reference between them and the king. This differs in toto from the social contract idea of Rousseau, in which the collective will of the people is the highest norm. For Calvin the sovereign God is law-giver of the nations today as well as in the days of Samuel, and popular sovereignty is a figment of the deluded imagination of fallen man.