“For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.”
― Walter Brueggemann
This is the second in a series of blog posts following up on a Q+A I did on Sunday, July 3rd about the intersection of faith and politics. In the first, I answered questions about a Kingdom-first theology. Here I will delve deeper into civil engagement, how we interact with the political sphere itself.
As I said in the last blog post, there is no single approach to politics from a Christian standpoint; what I’m doing here is presenting ideas I have found most helpful with some resources for you to continue the journey.
When society seems to become beast-like, what does political resistance look like for the family of Jesus? How do we, in a nonviolent, loving manner, tell society, “I will not go along with you”?
As we have already established, human institutions are allowed by God in order to maintain a sense of order in society. Insofar as they do that, we are obligated to submit to governing authorities. However, when institutions cross the line and violate our primary allegiance to King Jesus, or they use violence to coerce or oppress image-bearers, we have an obligation to speak up and act.
The verses preceding the infamous Romans 13 passage give us insight into Paul’s qualifiers for our relationship to government. In Romans 12:9-21 he encourages us to love sincerely, choosing good over evil. He says, “if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone”. Peaceableness, then becomes our central ethic in all things. It’s the line we are not to cross. Peace-making is quite different from peace-keeping however.
There is a rich tradition in the Christian household of pacifism, or nonviolence. It is a way of demonstrating our highest ideals that challenges those in authority to reckon with the humanness of the overlooked or oppressed without resorting to violence ourselves. As Jesus tells us, “those who live by the sword will die by the sword,” because violence against violence is uncreative action that keeps us in oppressive cycles. Peaceableness is hard precisely because it requires of us imagination and bravery. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which should be required reading for all Christians, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:
"One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.’
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust."
The first thing we must do is develop self-awareness skills to notice when we fall into the traps of beast-likeness. When we dehumanize others, even if they are the ones with power. This means carefully examining the content we take in through social media or the news, understanding the angles they might be coming from that can enrage us and prompt us to verbal violence. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5:21).
Peace-making shapes our political engagement. It can be the driving force behind how we vote, what it looks like to show up and protest, the petitions we sign, the organizations we offer our time and energy, and how we treat those with whom we don’t agree. It’s important that we are more informed by the politics of the Kingdom as we are delivered from partisan divides, or else we’ll just become pawns for some other agenda. We might join similar causes to others in a pluralistic society, but our reasons for showing up are rooted in Jesus. A robust theology of human value and peaceableness is required. We need to be betters readers. We need to know why we have certain opinions on various cultural issues, because every opinion we have stems from our beliefs about God.
We engage in reconciliation and rehabilitation. This is the -making part of peace. There are many resources out there for proactively bridge-building between divided communities and seeing people restored rather than merely punished for doing wrong. Christians have always been found in those spaces.
Is it possible that many of our current social/racial issues have arisen as the result of the church abdicating too many of her responsibilities to the government? Like we basically said, here’s my money (in the form of taxes), go do my job for me. If so, how do we begin to unwind that? If not, how do we do our job well (caring for the least of these) within in a society that is looking to the government - not the church - to be the agent of change?
This is based on the fallacy of being a “Christian nation”, which one might assume is the purview of conservatives, but actually falls across the political spectrum. Whether we realize it or not we want the government to take up a Christian moral bearing; for the Right it tends to be personal morality (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) and on the Left it tends to be a social morality (immigration, welfare, etc.). Although western culture is vaguely based on Christian morality in some cases, you are absolutely right in seeing that too often we abdicate our responsibilities to be the Church to the US government.
I think there is something to advocating for a groundwork of human dignity and rights in a pluralistic society like ours, but the problem is when we think the only solution to the very real problems of the day comes through government. We cannot legislate the way into the Kingdom. And we must acknowledge the government will do the work with less of a conviction than we will.
NT Wright made a powerful point recently when addressing some Christians’ apprehension about the Black Lives Matter movement. He said we should expect others to take up the causes of justice in the world if the Church sits on the bench, but we can’t expect that they will perfectly align with our theology. Rather than being an indictment of BLM, it was a challenge for the Church to get active and involved.
Similarly, the recent critique of pro-life Christians only caring for a child before they’re born has a lot of merit to it when we ignore the surrounding conditions that lead to abortion, and the quality of life for children once they are born, not to mention gun violence or the death penalty or what-have-you.
The first task is to get the Christian household in order. We must learn how to think like Christians, firmly planted in a kingdom politic, and work our way out from there. We have to root out our selfishness and passivity that makes us cast our responsibilities squarely on the shoulder of the government. Once we have a firmer grasp of the tasks God has called us to as God’s people, then we can shape our engagement in seeing the American government address issues of human dignity as well, knowing we won’t get everything we want to see.
How should followers of Jesus approach the ballot? How does the OT/NT, written during monarchies, inform Christian though about electing government representatives, a rather new form of government in world history?
How should Christians even vote? Choosing a lesser evil doesn’t feel right.
In a way, it’s a profound and terrible responsibility we have to get a say in how our government runs. When Jesus was preaching, when Peter and Paul were writing, there was absolutely no way for Christians to shape the Roman Empire or the local Jewish government. However, we do see evidence of Paul appealing to his Roman citizenship as a way to get out of sticky situations, as he has certain rights that weren’t to be infringed upon in his dedication to preaching the Gospel.
There are good and bad reasons to vote, and there are good and bad reasons not to vote. Why we make the choices is what ultimately matters. The Catholic ethicist Alasdair McIntyre advocates for not voting as political resistance, while the theologian Miroslav Volf accepts the “lesser of two evils” argument and suggests voting for the candidate who advocates the most for the disadvantaged and vulnerable. There are also rationales for voting third-party, or vote-swapping (as long as it’s done legally). I share these perspectives only to show how there is a diversity of opinion from deep thinkers in the Christian household.
I do think it’s important to note that disengagement from politics in general and voting in particular is often an indicator of privilege; if you avoid it altogether it may be because the systems as it stands already favors you. So perhaps, as a privileged person, it’s less about voting for your personal interests and benefits, and more about voting on others’ behalf. Think creatively about what we mean by “the common good”. This is the posture I have taken since I became a citizen three years ago.
Ultimately, our hope and confidence comes from Jesus, not the government. We cannot live and die by our vote. We cannot celebrate our preferred candidates taking office as if it’s the coming of the Kingdom. We cannot be expected to align with candidates on every single plank in their platform; in fact, I would put forth that Christians should not agree with every platform our political parties take. Hence, the lesser of two evils justification. Conversely, if you do support every position one party takes over the other, you may need to do some introspection about where your allegiances lies.
Do you think the Lord leads people into different political views? If yes, how can we do that a healthy way? Is it ok that two followers could have different views?
I want to parse through these questions separately, because I think what the Lord puts on our hearts and the convictions we come to on our own might be slightly different.
If we believe that the Church is one body made of different parts (1 Cor. 12), then it stands to reason we all have diverse perspectives and passions. No single Christian can embody the full heart and will of God, this is why we need the Church. So I think God can place certain convictions on each of us as our particular contribution to the larger discussion on what is good, what is God’s will. We need people who advocate for personal responsibility as much as we need people who care about support systems for the collective. We need people to champion differentiation as much as people who strive for unity. The choice before us is to allow tensions to be creative in that opposing views sharpen one another, rather than what we often see where tension is a threat that must be eradicated via purity and conformity.
So I think it’s quite okay for followers of Jesus to have different views. It requires humility to recognize none of us have or are capable of a fully-developed political worldview, but only one angle to any number of issues. It requires genuine curiosity to seek to understand why others might have different views that balance our own, or offer something to the conversation that keeps us from becoming too dogmatic. It is a tragedy to me when people settle into uniform conservative or progressive churches, because we rob ourselves of the opportunity to learn and grow and be challenged, and we elevate political views to the level of salvation, who is “in” and who is “out”. Echo chambers are not God’s will for us.
I remember in my previous church how my pastor always talked sadly about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful at killing Hitler, but certainly there’s some heavy logistical flaws to that idea right?
Bonhoeffer is often introduced as the counterargument for Christian nonviolence/pacifism/peaceableness. For those who may not be familiar, he was a founding member of the “Confessing Church”, a group of German clergy who resisted the rise of the Third Reich prior to and during World War II, who was eventually captured and executed by the Nazis for a plot to assassinate Hitler.
This is a good reminder that there is no single theory of how Christians engage with government or respond to evil. If it were obvious, we would have sorted out such question 2000 years ago. It’s important to note that even Bonhoeffer understood the heaviness of his convictions: "When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.” His resolution was to trust in God’s mercy rather than justify his possible action.
This is where a conviction of nonviolence has to be carefully thought through and understood as something not to be taken lightly or nonchalantly. There are real-life connotations for how we answer these questions in theory. The best thinkers will be ones who look fully into the face of such troubling questions and answer them truthfully.
Read:
The Peaceable Kingdom by Stanley Hauerwas
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.