Christians and politics
My friend and colleague Richard Beck did me the honor of writing a seven-part series in response to a post I’d written last May, itself a reply to a previous post of his a few days prior. I told him I’d find the time to write about the new series, but I haven’t found it until now.
There’s much to say. As it turns out, Richard and I are not far apart here, but our instincts lead us in slightly divergent directions. Let me see if I can summarize his own views before laying out my own.
Richard begins by taking my point: In a liberal democracy, it can be an all-or-nothing proposition for Christians; namely, electing (or not) to be politically active and engaged. He allows that perhaps his hope for a kind of holy ambivalence, to use Jamie Smith’s phrase, is unrealistic. Democracy saps the energies of the electorate, Christian or otherwise. Be that as it may, Richard wants a certain baseline for Christian thought and practice with respect to political witness, in this or in any context. In ten theses:
The powers that be are always already at war with the kingdom of God.
The church, therefore, ought always to be on the side of God’s kingdom over against the kingdoms of this world.
It follows that the first and enduring political vocation of the church is prophetic criticism. Whatever else the church does, it begins and ends with the prophetic task.
Because the powers are fallen, our view of both the state and the arc of history should be deeply Augustinian: not tragic, but pessimistic. We are not going to bring heaven to earth, or establish God’s kingdom here and now, or proclaim peace in our time. Utopian dreams, including the Christian variety, are false and dangerous.
Because the powers are created, though, Christian pessimism need not write off the state altogether. This isn’t pure Anabaptism. Not only does the state have a divinely ordained role to maintain a modicum of peace and relative justice; Christians may—within limits, with modesty and caution—participate in and contribute to governance and other forms of political action in the wider society.
Such modest involvement does not lead to Christendom, however. Christendom is a dead end, precisely because it is not pessimistic enough about either the powers or the perduring sinfulness of Christian communities, projects, and institutions.
Together, these commitments repudiate any and all nostalgia for or attempts to “reclaim” a lost Christian past, pristine in innocence or even supposedly preferable to the present. Whatever one thinks of the middle ages, they aren’t coming back and Christians in America should not try to resuscitate an erstwhile medieval order. Stop working toward your imagined American Christian Commonwealth. Not only is it not happening (being a fool’s errand), it’s not worth the effort: it’ll blow up in your face like all the other attempts.
In a word, Christian politics should begin wherever we are, not in some other time or place where we most decidedly are not. Given the Augustinianism (or Pascalianism) of the foregoing, then, there is no One Right Way for Christians to approach politics. It’s piecemeal personal discernment all the way down, based on context, temperament, local conditions, prayer, opportunity, and other similar factors. Some Christians in the U.S. will “get involved”; others won’t. Realists will vote, march, and advocate, thereby getting their hands dirty; radicals will find themselves unable to do so. Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of prudence. We should stop duking it out to see who’s the victor between the Augustine of Niebuhr and the Yoder of Hauerwas.
The political challenge for American Christians today is thus an odd one: emotional disengagement via recalibration. American Christians have to find a way to stop caring so much, to stop finding their identity in politics, to stop investing the totality of themselves in winning or losing the latest (existential) political fight. Even if this borders on the impossible, it’s what’s called for in our situation.
To illustrate the point, suppose Christians in America stepped away from politics entirely for the next decade. From 2023 to 2033, no one in this country heard from a single Christian about political matters. A ten-year silence from the church. Christians kept living their lives, going about their business, seeking to be faithful, following the Lord—but without commentary of any kind (personal, public, digital, media, pulpit) on political affairs. Richard asks: “Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?” He believes the answer is yes. The church needs a political detox, and it would be good for all involved.
I hope I’ve done Richard justice. Let me make one major point before I try to unpack a few more minute ones.
I take my original challenge to be this: Democracy is a genuinely new challenge for Christian political thought, because democratic involvement makes comprehensive demands of citizens. Self-governance is an exacting affair. Even prior to matters of identity, democratic action has the potential to be all-consuming. Because it is the business of life, our common life, it soaks up the whole of one’s attention, energy, and emotion. The most successful democratic movements in American history never could have happened if their adherents had been half-invested. Richard makes this observation a premise of his response, rather than a point of disagreement. The upshot as I see it, then, is twofold.
On one hand, it seems to be the case that democracy is a problem for Christian discipleship. Democracy wants your soul. But no servant can serve two masters. So how can politically engaged Christians also be disciples of Christ alone? I’m far from the first person to ask this question. Roman Catholic political thought has had anxieties on this score for two centuries and more. But it’s worth highlighting outright because it’s something of a taboo for American Christians to see democracy per se as a problem. To say it is a problem is not to say it should be dismantled or replaced. Only that it shouldn’t be assumed to be unproblematic from a Christian perspective.
On the other hand, Richard’s series left me thinking that we find ourselves where we started (or so it feels to me): that is, with the BenOp. Or in Richard’s words, from a post written six years ago, a progressive version of the Benedict Option. But the overall picture is the same. The American imperium is at odds with Christian witness. Don’t make the error of shoring up the imperium, much less mistaking shoring it up for the mission of the church. Instead, withdraw your heart, mind, voice, and labor to what is before you: the local congregation in its surrounding community. Attend to that. Think little, as Wendell Berry puts it. Stop thinking big; stop selling your soul to politics, only to be shown a fool for the umpteenth time.
In my view, this is where Richard lands: at a theologically orthodox, socially progressive version of the Benedict Option. A soft Anabaptism that doesn’t scream Nein! to politics so much as ignore it with a shrug before turning to love one’s neighbor—whose face and name one knows, living as one does in a flesh-and-blood neighborhood, not on Fox News or CNN or Twitter or TikTok.
I think this is wise counsel. For individual believers, I think it’s good advice, and especially for those most in need of a detox, i.e., folks who can tell you in detail what happened yesterday in D.C. but not the names of a neighbor in any direction, or the problems facing the city they actually live in.
So that’s that. Now let me turn to some larger thematic or architectonic matters that Richard’s series raised and about which I think we disagree.
First, while the “ten years of silence” proposition is an instructive thought experiment, I don’t think it works on its own terms. What it reveals, after reflection, is how it is impossible to live as a Christian without doing politics. For example, there are a lot of school-age children in Abilene (where Richard and I live) who are homeless. Christians here rightly see this as a pressing problem that calls for their involvement. But issues like family breakdown, poverty, nutrition, abuse, schooling, and homelessness are all political matters. Christians can’t be part of the solution if they forswear politics. Moreover, the call for silence overlooks the fact that speech is a part of action, indeed is a form of action. “I have a dream” is far more than a set of words. It’s a public political performance. It’s a world-shaping deed, expressed verbally. Words get things done. We know this from the Bible. That’s what prophecy is! Words that do things, words that make things happen. In short, Christians can’t follow Christ without doing or speaking about politics. That means ten years of silence is a nonstarter—even if we all (as I do) understand what Richard has in mind.
Second, I am very wary of framing the question of Christians and/in politics by present conditions and possibilities. Doing so results in ahistorical assumptions and parochial answers. Twenty-first century American liberalism sets the terms of the debate. But why should we let it? The church has two millennia of reflection and practice on these matters. If we allow ourselves to listen to it, not only will we expand the horizons of our imagination (the proverbial Overton window); we will see that the status quo to which we are so accustomed is far from necessary or immutable. It is contingent, like all social and political arrangements. We need not take it for granted.
Third, I am equally wary of issuing judgments in the present that entail wholesale indictment or repudiation of past Christian teaching and practice. It may well be true that American believers need not advocate for Christendom in 2023. That is not the same as saying Christendom is and always was an error. Whatever seems given in the moment appears inevitable and right to those living in it. I don’t want to fall for that temptation. To see all past political forms endorsed by Christians as fundamentally wrong, because they had not yet arrived at what we, now, endorse and inhabit, seems to me undeniably myopic, anachronistic, and uncharitable. To be clear, I doubt Richard would endorse that view, but it is all too common in modern Christian political thought. I want to avoid it at all costs.
Fourth, some political questions are existential. Granted, most political questions are prudential and still others can be disagreed about by reasonable people (Christians included). But some are matters of life and death, or of ultimate, or at least penultimate, significance. Chattel slavery is one example from our history. Civil rights is another. War and capital punishment are perennial. Abortion and euthanasia are relatively newer, in terms of laws and technology. If, for example, prenatal life is human life created and beloved by God, then it would seem to follow that political regimes should protect it and, to the extent that they do not, Christians should work to persuade them to do so. If the vulnerable, the poor, the unhappy, the lonely are finding themselves ushered by a medical bureaucracy to allow themselves to be killed rather than to be cared for, then Christians’ obedience to the command of Jesus would seem to require their active political involvement, precisely for the sake of the least of these. “Lord, when did we see you a victim of MAID and intervene…?”
Fifth, we should not presume to be more Augustinian than Saint Augustine himself. Augustine saw that, all things being equal, a polity that pays homage to Christ as Lord and seeks to do justice in accord with Christ’s teaching is a polity to be desired, to be sought, and to be received with gratitude. Personally, I want to live in a city and a state whose laws and social norms run with and not against the grain of the Word made flesh. Now, is that easier said than done? Yes. Does it open up leaders, of the church as well as the state, to abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, and dissimulation? Yes. Has such an approach failed before? Yes. All granted. I fail to see, though, that these admissions automatically and in all circumstances render the question moot. Christianity has never taught that one form of polity is ordained of God: empires, city-states, nation-states, monarchies, republics, democracies, and others have been led and supported by Christians. All I want to add is that I see no reason to rule out, on principle, the possibility of a genuine Christian commonwealth, whether in the past, the present, or the future, here or elsewhere.
Sixth and finally, there is no way banish God from politics. That’s true for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, because God is one, and his claim to allegiance is total. That allegiance cuts against the claims of the state but also makes inroads on the state. For example, if the state is grinding the faces of the poor, followers of Christ know this is wrong. More, they know whose side God is on in the struggle. And they therefore know what to say to the state as the word of the Lord. This is exactly when prophetic criticism enters into the equation. My only point is that prophetic criticism is not a distancing mechanism; not a way to keep church and state separate. It’s a way of holding the state’s feet to the fire—that is, the consuming fire of God’s judgment. And if God is both the judge and the desire of the nations, then we are never going to be free of the entanglement of faith and politics, church and state, discipleship and governance, prophecy and law.
That indefinite entanglement suggests to me, in conclusion, that the sort of emotional and psychological disengagement (and recalibration) for which Richard is calling is a dead end. I too want Christians in America to call cease-fire in the infinite culture war and to stop letting tribal identities overwrite their baptismal identity in Christ. I too want Christians to worship God and love their neighbors and to worry less about Washington. In general, arguing over Christendom and Commonwealths and Integralism and Christian Nationalism (Lord help us) can easily become a distraction from the command of Christ to me, here and now, to do his will within the limits and opportunities of my life, not another.
Nevertheless, the command of Christ also, as we’ve seen, necessarily includes the realm of politics, a realm from which Christ is by no means absent. Finding him there, following him there, obeying his will there is not for the faint of heart. It takes much wisdom. It usually ends in one form of failure or another. But it can’t be avoided. And Christians are right to want to succeed there, and to care about the results. For the results bear on the lives of their neighbors—lives of great concern to the Lord.
