No. The impression arises from two sources: from a sentence that does not come from Hegel in that form, and from a word that means something other in him than in everyday use.
The sentence
„The state is the march of God through the world“ does not stand in the Groundlines. It is the abbreviated circulating form of a sentence from the Addition to § 258 – that is, from the compilation that Eduard Gans put together from lecture transcripts after Hegel’s death. And what stands there is: „it is the march of God in the world that the state is“. What is said is that there are states at all is not merely a human arrangement – not that some particular state is divine. The circulating form turns a statement about there being a state into a statement about the state. More on this under Does this sentence come from Hegel at all?
The word
Where Hegel calls the state „divine“, he means the same as with „rational“. For him the rational is the divine – he says it bluntly in Homeyer’s transcript: „Everything that is divine is rational; and so conversely.“ Whoever makes a deification of the state out of this has read the sentence in the direction in which it is not meant.
What Hegel actually says – and what follows from it
In § 257 the state is called „the actuality of the ethical Idea“. That is a determination of the concept, not a distinction conferred on any existing state. Since actual means, in Hegel, corresponding to its concept, the sentence holds of no single state unexamined, but only to the degree to which it is what a state ought to be.
Conversely, the thesis of deification runs aground at the point where Hegel treats religion. In the note to § 270 he expressly holds that religion, like cognition and science, has „as its principle, a distinctive form of its own, different from that of the state“. The state rests, in Hegel, on reason and not on articles of faith. A state that appeals to God instead of to grounds is for him not a higher one but a backward one.
And finally: the state is not, in Hegel, the highest thing at all. Above objective spirit stand art, religion and philosophy – three stages in which spirit knows itself and which the state does not overtake. Whoever takes Hegel for a deifier of the state has not read the last third of the system.
Sources. Franz Grégoire, „Le mythe de l’État divinisé“, and the critique of Jacques Maritain, both reported in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends, 1996 · Walter Kaufmann, „The Hegel Myth and Its Method“, 1959. – In the edition: § 257, § 258, § 270. – In the glossary: The State, State and Religion, Absolute Spirit.