On Apolitical
Christianity
©2020 Thomas
Calnan Sorenson. All rights reserved. The Scripture quotations contained herein
are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
One of the most common complaints that church members make against
progressive Christian pastors is that they make the faith political, more
specifically that they preach politics from the pulpit. The idea that religion
and politics don’t mix is widespread across Christianity today. Most Christian
churches have told their people that religion and politics are two separate
realms of human activity and never the twain shall meet. Most Christian church
people today don’t want to hear sermons about peace and justice because they
don’t want to hear politics in church and certainly not from the pulpit. In the
United States many people understand our constitutional separation of church
and state as a separation of church and politics. Yet as widespread as that
notion is, in Christianity at least it is simply wrong. That error is what I
want to discuss here.
To understand the origins of the
common notion that Christianity is and must be apolitical we have to go way
back in the history of the Christian faith, first to Jesus Christ himself and
his teachings about faith and politics, then to a look at how his first
followers understood him, then to the most significant event in the history of
Christianity since the Resurrection, namely, the establishment of Christianity
as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. When we do
we find that Jesus wasn’t apolitical at all, that his earliest followers knew
that he wasn’t, and that Christianity became apolitical only after it became
the state religion of Rome.
To be Christian is to follow Jesus of Nazareth. The entire Christian
faith centers on him. We call him our Lord and Savior. We say he is the Son of
God Incarnate. We say that Rome executed him and God raised him from death to
new life. During his lifetime on earth Jesus had followers. They remained his
followers after his death. They spread the Gospel, the Good News Jesus had
preached and that Jesus was and is. The most important question we can ask in
connection with our discussion of apolitical Christianity is: Was Jesus
political or apolitical? To answer that question we have to start by defining
the word political.
Modern dictionary definitions of the word political focus on things
relating to government or the state. Thus the Google search “define political”
yields “relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.” The
Google search “define politics” gives us “the activities associated with the
government of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among
individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”
It seems to me that these definitions unduly restrict the meaning of
political to matters dealing with a state or government. The root of our words
political and politics is the Greek word “polis.” Polis means an
ancient Greek city-state. We see it in the names of some modern cities—Indianapolis,
i.e., the city of Indiana, or Annapolis, the city of Anne. We call a large
urban area a metropolis. Online definitions of polis define the word
quite broadly as in this definition from miriam-webster.com: “A Greek
city-state broadly; a state or society especially when characterized by a sense
of community.” That definition certainly broadens the term political beyond the
more restrictive definitions quoted above.
Then there is Aristotle’s famous
statement: “Man is by nature a political animal.”[1]
This statement is often quoted simply as “Man is a political animal,” but
Aristotle’s including the phrase “by nature” in his statement is significant.
In good philosophical fashion he tells us what he means by “nature.” He doesn’t
mean inherently or what we would understand by naturally. Aristotle defines
“nature” thus: “The nature of a thing is its end. For what each thing is when
fully developed, we call its nature.”[2]
A thing’s nature then is its goal, that which it strives to become. When we
include his phrase “by nature” in his statement and understand what he means by
nature we can understand Aristotle as meaning that when humans are fully
developed they are political. That is, when humans are fully developed they
live in a polis, in an organized community. Thus the word political
comes to refer to the ways humans live together in community when they become
fully developed into their goal, their end, their ideal condition.
Now let’s consider an important distinction, the one between political
and partisan. The Google search “define partisan” gives us “a strong supporter
of a party, cause, or person,” and “prejudiced in favor of a particular cause.”
Miriam-webster.com defines partisan as, among other things, “a firm adherent to
a party, faction, cause, or person” and “feeling showing or deriving from strong
and sometimes blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or
person….” In our current American context the references to “party” in these
definitions is particularly important. We refer to “partisan politics,” meaning
political activity directed by and intended to benefit a particular political
party rather than the nation as a whole.
Using these definitions we can say that Jesus was political, although
whether or not he was partisan is a more complex question that we will take up
below. Yes, I can already hear the howls from some of you: Jesus wasn’t
political! He came here so we could go to heaven when we die, and that’s not
political! Well, you’re right that knowing what to do so you go to heaven when
you die isn’t primarily political. It isn’t political at all if you think that
all you have to do is believe in Jesus. Here’s the thing though. Jesus was
hardly about getting our souls to heaven after we die at all. He was rather
about how God calls us to live this life for the sake of God’s people, not for
an individualistic goal of personal salvation.
There is a lot that could be said in support of the contention that Jesus
is about this life not some next life, but for the sake of brevity I’ll say
just a few of them. In the Gospel of Luke, after his time of temptation in the
wilderness, Jesus goes home to Nazareth. On the Sabbath he goes to the
synagogue. Someone hands him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he reads
this:
The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the
poor.
He has sent me to proclaim
release to the
captives
and recovery of sight to the
blind,
to let the oppressed go
free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor. Luke 4:18-19.
Some
scholars call these lines Jesus’ “inaugural address.” They state what Jesus is
all about. Notice both what they say and what they don’t say. Jesus comes to
preach good news to the poor, to release the captives, to give sight to the
blind, to let the oppress go free, and to proclaim something called “the year
of the Lord’s favor,” that is, according to scholars, the Jubilee year from
Leviticus when all property reverts back to its original owner. See Leviticus
25:8-12. All of these things focus on this world. Jesus doesn’t say a word
about anybody going to heaven, or not. He’s about this world not some other
hoped for world.
Then there’s the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16. I
suspect that many Christians love quoting this verse because they think it is
about how you get your soul to heaven when you die. It isn’t. In the NRSV it
reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone
who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” There are several
issues with this verse, including that the meaning of the word translated as
“believe” doesn’t mean what most of us think it means. I want to focus here
however on another phrase in the verse, the phrase “eternal life.”
Most people, I imagine, think that “eternal life” means life in heaven
after death and would cite this verse to show that Jesus was about getting us
to the next life rather than about how live this one. They’d be wrong about
that. The phrase “eternal life” doesn’t mean afterlife in heaven, and John
tells us quite explicitly that it doesn’t. At John17:1-3 we read:
After Jesus had spoken these words, he
looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so
that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all
people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is
eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom
you have sent.
Now note
this crucial thing about these words. They don’t say “this is how you get
eternal life.” They say “this is eternal life.” (Emphasis added.) John’s
Jesus is telling us what eternal life is, not how to get it. The eternal life
that John 3:16 says we get through believing in Jesus is this life in the
knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. John 3:16 supports rather than contradicts
my contention that Jesus was how we are to live this life not about how we get
to some other life.
I’ll give just one more example of how people misunderstand what Jesus
was all about. We find it at John 18:36. There Jesus has been arrested and
brought before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate asks Jesus what he has
done that the chief priests have handed him over to the Romans. Jesus, in a bit
of a non sequitur as is typical of him in John, says: “My kingdom is not from
this world….” You may well have heard this line as “My kingdom is not of this
world” rather than not “from this world.” That rendering of Jesus’ words has
led people to believe that his kingdom isn’t located in this world but in heaven.
The problem is that “of” is a bad translation of the Greek here. The Greek word
that the King James Version and the New International Version translate as “of”
is “ek.” Ek doesn’t mean of. It means from or out of. A person
walks “ek” a room when she leaves it. Jesus refers here not to his
kingdom’s location but to its origin and the source of its power and authority.
Those things come from heaven, but the kingdom isn’t located there. It’s very
much located here. So let’s be done with the mistaken notion that Jesus wasn’t
political because he was about getting us to a next life rather than about
living and showing us how God wants us to live this life.
So did Jesus want us to be political or apolitical in this life? Look
again at his “inaugural address” in Luke quoted above. He came to preach good
news to the poor. Not the poor in spirit, the materially, financially poor. Now
that their souls may go to heaven when they die would be good news to the poor,
but that’s surely not what Jesus meant here. In Jesus’ world almost everyone
was poor. Subsistence level poor. Jesus preached against unfair practices that
made them poor.
In his inaugural address he refers to “the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Scholars tell us that that phrase is a reference to Leviticus 25:8-12 as I
noted above. There we read that the people are to proclaim every fiftieth year
and shall “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” and
“you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to
your family.” The text requires the people not to reap all of the food they
grow so the some will be left for the poor people without land to glean. The
price of property sold and purchased shall reflect where the people are with
regard to the Jubilee year. See Leviticus 15:13-17. Every single thing about
that fiftieth year is perfectly secular. It is about aspects of the way people
are to live together in community. They are therefore political.
So are the other things Jesus mentions in that inaugural address. He says
God sent him to proclaim “release to the
captives.” In his world being a captive of some foreign power or a slave owner
was a very real, worldly thing. Jesus isn’t talking here about any sort of
spiritual captivity that prevents souls going to heaven. He’s talking about
lived realities in this life. In other words, he’s being political.
He says he was also sent to proclaim “recovery of sight to the blind.”
There are several stories in the Gospels of Jesus restoring sight to blind
people. See for example John 9:1-12. It’s easy enough to read these stories as
metaphors for Jesus opening all of our eyes to the evils of the world and the
wisdom of God, and it is perfectly legitimate to read them that way. Yet even
when we read them that way they are still about things that happen in this life
to benefit people in this life. They’re about the benefit of recovering sight
in this life not some future life.
Jesus also says he was sent “to let the oppressed go free.” Now surely we
can understand Jesus as meaning that all people are oppressed by the power of
sin. He certainly can and does get people free from that oppression. In his
world, however, and in ours, social and economic oppression are realities of
life for an enormous number of people. People are oppressed by poverty,
discrimination, lack of freedom, and far too often by actual slavery. All of
these things are political realities, and Jesus came to show us how evil they
are. He came to call us to overcome them, with God’s help of course. In other
words he was being political.
Finally, let’s look at the terminology Jesus used in his preaching and
parables. In the Gospel of John he talked about something called “eternal
life,” the meaning of which we have already considered. It was about this life
not a next life. In the other three Gospels he talks a lot about something
called “the kingdom of God.” In Matthew he often calls it “the kingdom of
heaven,” but he means the same thing as what occasionally in Matthew and
throughout Mark and Luke he calls the
kingdom of God—and he doesn’t mean it’s located in heaven.
So what sort of thing is a kingdom? It is precisely a type of political
structure. There is no way to make the term kingdom apolitical. Every political
structure Jesus could have known about was a kingdom, so that’s how he talked
about political entities. By kingdom of God he meant the way things would be if
people truly acknowledged God as their sovereign rather than the kings or other
rulers of the world. Language doesn’t get more political than that. There simply
is no doubt that Jesus was political.
There is however another question we must address. Jesus was political in
the broad sense of the word we’ve been using, but was he partisan? In the past
I have found it useful to say that Jesus was political but not partisan. Does
that contention hold up upon closer examination? Well, yes and no. Whether
Jesus was partisan or not is a more complicated question that whether he was
political. That’s because the meaning of the word partisan is a bit vague. It
can mean zealously committed to a person or party. It can even indicate a
blind, unthinking commitment to something. It can mean a zealous commitment to
a cause. So it seems that whether a person is partisan or not depends on just
what it is to which a person is committed and the nature of that commitment.
We can say without reservation that Jesus’ commitment to anything was
neither blind nor unthinking. He didn’t hold onto an idea no matter what, as
when he learned from the woman he’d called a dog. See Matthew 15:21-28. We can
say that he was never blindly committed to any person, only to God. In these
ways Jesus was not partisan at all.
In Jesus’ day there were no political parties, but we can be confident
that today Jesus would not be partisan in the sense of being blindly committed
to any political party. All political parties are human institutions, which
means they all make mistakes. No political party ever has been, is, or will be
perfectly committed to the ways of God. So Jesus would never be partisan by having
any political party as a primary commitment.
Jesus was, however, partisan in his commitment to God and to God’s ways
of peace and justice. About those things he was as zealous as they come. He
didn’t do anything blindly, but nothing could dissuade him from preaching and
living out what he knew to be the will and ways of God. He shows us that God
calls us to be political and even to be partisan about the right things.
Political parties are not the right things about which to be zealous. They are
all fallible. God is the right reality about which to be zealous. That’s what
Jesus was. It’s what he calls us to be.
The Jesus movement didn’t die with its founder and leader. His followers
proclaimed that his tomb was empty. Somehow they knew that he was still with
them though the Romans had most definitely executed. They knew what he had
taught, for they’d heard it from him themselves. For around the first three
hundred years of the Christian faith after Jesus’ death his first followers and
their successors in the faith tried to live according to his teachings. At
first they didn’t call themselves Christians. They called themselves followers
of “the Way.” By the Way they meant the way Jesus had taught them to live. We
see them doing that in at least three respects. First, their leaders were often
women. Paul mentions many women as leaders of the churches. Second, they lived
out his commitment to God alone. They refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods or
to worship the emperor. They got away with that one as long as the Romans
thought they were Jews. Once it became clear that at least most of them weren’t
Jews and that Christianity had evolved into something other than a Jewish sect
their refusal to do what they considered to be idolatry sometimes cost them
their lives. Third, they understood Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. They
refused to serve in the Roman army. They did not fight back violently against
Roman oppression and attempted suppression of their faith. They would fight
neither for Rome nor against it. Christianity’s eventual rejection of Jesus’
teaching of nonviolence and its commitment to what it came to consider a
Christian Roman Empire mark the beginning of the transformation of Christianity
from a faith that understood the political nature of its call into one that did
not.
That transformation began under Roman Emperor Constantine I, ruled
306-337 CE. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the
empire, but he converted to the faith himself (though he wasn’t baptized until
he was on his death bed because he thought that getting baptized then would
wash away all the sins he had committed during his reign). He removed
restrictions on the faith and encouraged people to convert to it. He called and
presided over the First Ecumenical Council of the church at Nicaea in 325 CE. At
least some of the bishops who attended the council were powerfully impressed by
the presence of the emperor and were wowed by all the imperial pomp and
circumstance that accompanied him, actually a very un-Christian response to a
secular ruler. Christianity was drawing closer and closer to the empire that
had executed Jesus, had only recently persecuted it, and had made martyrs of at
least some of its members. I’ve heard it said that Constantine has a lot to
answer for. By beginning the process that led in 380 CE to the faith becoming
the official state religion of the Roman Empire he may have preserved it, but
he also caused it to lose much of its original character. One of the first
things the faith lost was its commitment to nonviolence.
By the late fourth century CE Rome was being periodically attacked by
so-called pagan peoples from the north. Roman Christians knew that Jesus had
taught and lived nonviolence. They knew that killing is a bad thing. They must
have known that earlier generations of Christians had refused to fight in the
Roman army. But now they thought things had changed. The Roman Empire was now
supposedly a Christian empire, never mind the fact that the phrase “Christian
empire” is an oxymoron. Some Christians began to think that surely it must be
permissible to fight to defend a Christian empire. After all, there was no such
thing in Jesus’ day, so he said nothing directly about fighting or not fighting
for one.
To justify using violence to defend Christian Rome they concocted
something called just war theory. Classical Christian just war theory holds
that a war is just and participating in it is permissible if five criteria are
met.[3]
Three of them deal with the cause for the war, two deal with how a war is
conducted. These criteria say that to be just a war must:
1.
Be defensive only.
2.
Be declared by a legitimate state authority.
3.
Be a last resort.
4.
Use the minimal amount of violence necessary to
achieve the war’s defensive objective.
5.
Avoid inflicting casualties on noncombatants.
In the late
fourth and early fifth centuries CE most Christians became convinced that
Christians could kill and main other human beings as long as these five
criteria were met.
Notice what an extreme departure just war theory is from Jesus’ teachings
on nonviolence. About violence Jesus just said no. Later Christians weren’t
willing to live with that absolute no to violence. So they convinced themselves
that they didn’t have to, at least not under certain circumstances. In doing so
they turned their backs on a core teaching of the one they called Lord and
Savior. Over the next many centuries the result of the just war theory was that
the door to the use of violence, once opened just a little, blew wide open
enough for whole armies, navies, and air forces to march through. The
limitations of just war theory were as forgotten as Jesus’ original teachings
on nonviolence had been. Christians somehow managed to convince themselves that
it was permissible to participate in any war their particular nation happened
to have undertaken, even one against other Christians.
In the development of just war theory we see a prime example of how
establishment resulted in radical changes in the Christian faith, changes that
led to the mistaken notion that Christianity is not political. Establishment
produced another change that is actually even more radical that the change from
Jesus’ nonviolence to established Christianity’s just war theory. It relates
directly to our issue of apolitical Christianity, but its origins are a bit
harder to pin down. It is the change from Christianity as a way of life to a
Christianity all about how our souls get to heaven when we die.
To understand that change we must examine the differences between what
Jesus taught and the ways worldly states operate. Jesus’ teachings are all
about justice for all people achieved through nonviolent resistance to the evil
actions of those worldly states. He lifted up the poor and condemned the unjust
rich. He called us to make our ultimate concern not some political entity like
the Roman Empire or a modern nation state. He called us to live God’s ways of
peace, nonviolence, and justice for the poor and the oppressed. He embraced the
outsider and condemned society’s established leaders. He took virtually every
social, economic, religious, and cultural convention of his day, and of ours,
and turned them on their heads.
Nations have no use for the teachings of Jesus. The Roman Empire didn’t
in his day. The American Empire of our day, while perhaps not quite as bad as
Rome, doesn’t either. Empires and nation states see the application of violence
to a whole range of issues to be a primary means of attaining their chosen
ends. They are almost invariably run by and for economic and social elites at
the expense of most of the people. Empires in particular exploit the people and
resources of foreign lands for their benefit perhaps all the while claiming to
be agents of civilization, peace, and perhaps even democracy. In the world’s
nations for the most part the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Jesus
Christ will have none of that, and anyone who truly understands him and claims
to believe in him can likewise have none of that.
Yet by the end of the fourth century CE Christianity was the state
religion of the most powerful empire the western world (to use an unfortunate
but useful Eurocentric term for it) had ever known. The church cozied up to
empire, supporting its aims and its means. Especially in western Europe it
organized itself on the model of Rome and adopted all of the trappings of
Imperium. What, after all, does St. Peter’s Basilica, as artistically and
historically important as it is, have to do with an itinerant first century
Jewish preacher and the Galilean fisherman it honors? Not much. From the fourth
century onward official Christianity transformed itself from the institution of
people truly seeking to follow the teachings of Jesus into an arm of empire. In
western Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere it has remained the de jure or de
facto established church of nations ever since. Note for example how the monarch
of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the titular head of the Church of
England.
It could not and cannot be the support of the status quo that it became
without changing what it is fundamentally about. That’s precisely what it did.
It began to preach not social, economic, and political transformation but
eternal salvation of the soul after death. It’s not that people don’t need
spiritual consolation or that Christianity can’t give it. We do, and it can and
should; but in accommodating itself to empire Christianity abandoned most of
what Jesus has been all about. It told, and tells, people that their
existential crisis is sin and salvation in the afterlife not injustice and war
in this life. It came to divert the people’s attention away from the causes of
suffering in this life to how to avoid eternal suffering in a next life. So the
human rulers of the earth embraced Christianity with enthusiasm and joy. The
established church across the world told the poor and oppressed to look not to
transformation in this life but to salvation in a next life as the solution to
their problems. Let me give you just a couple of examples.
In the early sixteenth century CE Martin Luther was a German Augustinian
monk. In good established church fashion the Roman Catholic Church, essentially
the only church there was in western Europe at the time, had drummed into this
head that he was a horrible sinner faced with the prospect of an agonizing
eternity in hell. He was thoroughly convinced that his existential issue was
sin and the damnation he believed was its necessary consequence. His church had
told him what he needed to do to avoid that horrific fate. He had to confess
his sin, fast, deprive himself of all earthly pleasure, pray constantly and
accept the teachings of the church. He did all that, but he could never
convince himself that he had done enough to expiate his sin, whatever he
thought that sin was. Then one day he reread Paul’s letter to the Romans and
discovered that we are justified by God’s grace through faith not by our works.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Luther was mortally concerned about the fate of his soul after death. He
was also concerned about the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, but
consider for a moment what he was not concerned about. He was a horrible
anti-Semite, never mind that Jesus and all of his first followers had been Jews
and that Christianity is inconceivable without its Jewish roots. He was on the
wrong side of a major justice issue of his time. When German peasants rebelled
against their oppressive overlords he sided with the landowning elite and
savaged the peasants not because they were violent but because they were resisting
the existing oppressive social and economic order. He sided with the oppressors
against the oppressed, something Jesus would never have done. We see the
deleterious effects of the establishment of Christianity on the Christian
faith. Worry about the eternal fate of your soul. Don’t look at unjust and
oppressive conditions here on earth. Look up. Look beyond this life. That’s
what God wants of you, never mind that it was never what Jesus wanted of you.
Here's another one. With the European conquest of Central and South
America, mostly by the Catholic powers Spain and Portugal, Roman Catholicism
became the established faith of the ruling powers and the faith of most of the
people in those parts of the world. Most of the people were miserably poor while
the wealthy elite lived in luxury at their expense. The Church said never mind.
That’s not what you should be concerned about. You problem isn’t poverty and
exploitation, it’s sin. Do what we tell you, don’t resist the powers, and
perhaps you’ll gain a blessed afterlife as compensation for your suffering in
this life. Yes, in the late nineteenth century the Roman Catholic had issued
social teachings that call for justice for working people and the poor, but as
they say, Roman Catholic social teaching is one of the best kept secrets in the
world. The Church in Latin America taught establishment Christianity. It taught
what claimed to be apolitical Christianity. (On its claiming to be rather than
being apolitical see below.) The Church diverted the people’s attention from
this life to the next life.
Then starting in about the 1950s some of those poor people started to
read the Bible for themselves, something the established church never wanted
them to do. Some parish priests worked with and supported them. When they did
they made a remarkable discovery. Jesus had hardly talked about saving one’s
soul for a blessed afterlife at all, but he’d talked an awful lot about caring
for people like them in this life. They read “Truly I tell you, just as you did
it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me”
and “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these,
you did not do it to me.” Matthew 25:40, 45. They read “Blessed are you who are
poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” and “But woe to you who are rich, for
you have received your consolation.” Luke 6:20, 24. They knew he was talking
about them and about the rich people who kept them down. They saw that he was
talking about this life not some future life. They formed “base communities (comunidades
de base), relatively autonomous religious communities where they could
study the Bible themselves or with sympathetic Catholic priests. Out of that
movement grew liberation theology, mostly Catholic, that returned to Jesus’
actual teachings about social and economic justice.
The established Roman Catholic Church, at first anyway, reacted entirely
against the movement of the base communities and liberation theology. Those
things threatened the Church’s authority, they thought. They threatened the
established powers with which the Church had been in bed for ages. Eventually
Rome more or less coopted the movement. Latin American Roman Catholicism in
more recent times has produced great leaders who get it. Pope Francis, after
all, is an Argentinian Jesuit who wants the Roman Catholic Church to be a
church of and for the poor. Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated as he
presided at the Eucharist because he spoke out against the atrocities of the
rulers of El Salvador in favor of the people, almost all of whom were poor.
Latin American Roman Catholicism produced other martyrs for justice e as well.
Yet the Church’s first response was the typical response of established
Christianity. Try to redirect the people’s attention back to where the powers
want it, on how to get to a blessed next life not on the justice issues of this
one.
Our theme here is apolitical Christianity, and one powerful way that
established Christianity has worked to preserve its power and the political,
social, and economic status quo is precisely to convince Christians that their
faith is apolitical. When church people object to what they consider to be
political preaching they are objecting to faith concerned more with this world
than with the next, more with justice than with individual sin, more with the
very worldly Jesus and less with a transcendent, otherworldly Christ, more with
salvation in this life than salvation in some next life. They are clinging to
what Christianity became when it became established as the faith of empire.
It is important to realize that while established Christianity claims to
be apolitical it isn’t. Diverting the people’s attention from this life to a
next life may not seem political on its face, but it has profound political
effects. It props up and preserves the existing order of things. It blocks the
transformation of the world that Jesus called the kingdom of God. In the
presence of injustice and oppression one cannot be apolitical. If we say
nothing we support the oppressor. If we say nothing about it we accept
injustice. So no, my fellow Christians, our faith is not and cannot be
apolitical no matter how often the church has told you that it is.
I said at the beginning of this piece that the complaint about politics
in church is one church people make against progressive pastors. There are a
couple of reasons why I put the matter that way. One is that I am (or was
before I retired) a progressive Christian pastor, so progressive pastoring is
what I know best. There is however a more important reason for that limitation
that I need to address here. I freely admit that I know progressive churches
much better than I know conservative ones. What I say about the conservative
ones here is based mostly on how they present themselves in public, on what I
have seen them doing in the public sphere.
For at least the last fifty years or so conservative Christians have not
objected to their pastors preaching politics as long as they preached the right
kind of politics. The right kind of politics for conservative Christians seems
to come down to conservative positions on three issues, namely, abortion, gay
rights, and a common identity between Christianity and the United States of
America. I’ll consider them in that order.
At least since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973
which holds that women have a constitutional right to an abortion conservative
Christians have loudly proclaimed that life begins at conception and that
therefore all abortions constitute the murder of an unborn child no matter how
early in a pregnancy the abortion is performed. Abortion is of course first of
all a moral issue for the woman contemplating one. I won’t go into the morality
of it here. I’ll just say that it is also a political issue among us. Many
states still have statutes on the books prohibiting it. Roe v. Wade made
it a legal issue, indeed a constitutional one. Conservative Christians are more
likely to object if their pastors don’t preach against abortion even if the
reason they don’t is that they’re trying to avoid preaching politics.
On the issue of abortion conservative Christians demand that their faith
be political, that their churches speak out against it and do everything they
can to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade so that state laws
against abortion can again go into effect. Although most of them claim to be “Bible-believing
Christians” it seems to bother them not at all that there isn’t a word in the
Bible about abortion or that there are legitimate issues around when an embryo
or fetus becomes a human being. On the issue of abortion these folks’ faith is
vociferously political.
Again for the last several decades at least conservative Christians have
demanded that their churches be actively political against the equal rights of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Like abortion same gender
sexual acts are first of all a moral question. I won’t go into that issue here.[4]
The cluster of issues that we can call for convenience gay rights is, however,
a political issue among us. Some states and some smaller jurisdictions within
states have enacted statutes and ordinances that include sexual orientation and
perhaps gender identity in their broader civil rights laws. Conservative
Christians worked actively against such laws. The U. S. Supreme Court made gay
rights a legal, constitutional issue at the national level in its decision in Obergefell
v. Hodges in 2015 which holds that same gender couples have a
constitutional right to marry. Conservative Christian preachers continue to
insist that all same gender sexual acts are sinful, never mind that Jesus said
not one word about them. If these preachers would limit their work on the issue
to the morality of homosexual acts they would not be talking politics from the
pulpit, but so many of them don’t limit their work in that way. They and their
people have engaged in political movements against gay equality and have worked
to have their political representatives oppose gay rights legislation at every
turn. As a result our federal civil rights law still does not protect LGBTQ
people against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, or
in any other area. On this issue as with abortion conservative Christians
demand that their churches be political.
Then there’s the way conservative Christians equate Christianity and the
United States of America. They insist that our country was founded as “a
Christian nation” and should therefore favor Christianity over other faiths.
They turn a blind eye to the truth that most of our nation’s founders were
Deists not Christians and that they founded the country quite intentionally as
a secular state. They embrace the American flag as a Christian symbol, never
mind that it is no such thing. They participate enthusiastically in the
American military, something Jesus would never have sanctioned. It is members
of churches with more progressive pastors who object to the faith being
political. On at least some issues members of more conservative churches insist
that it be precisely that.
Of course people have spiritual needs. Of course people need and can find
consolation and strength by turning to the love of God that we Christians know
in and through Jesus Christ. In nothing I say here do I intend to deny that
reality or the power and importance of Christianity as a spiritual discipline. I
am after all a Christian pastor albeit a retired one. My point is only that
when Christianity became the established faith of the Roman Empire in the
fourth century CE it changed its focus in an unfortunate way. It came to
function as a bulwark of the status quo rather than as a champion of peace on
earth and justice for all people. In doing that it betrayed the one it calls its
Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. It is way past time for us to return to him
and to his teachings. May it be so.
[1]
Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, Section 1253a.
[2] Id.,
Section 1252a.
[3]
See Sorenson, Thomas C. Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to
Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp.
165-166.
[4] For
a discussion of why progressive Christians support equal rights for LGBTQ
persons both in the church and in society see Sorenson, Liberating
Christianity, pp. 182-190.
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