Hijacked?
Week of Monday October 11, 2004
Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C)
Jeremiah 31:27–34
Psalm 119:97–104 or Genesis 32:22–31
Psalm 121
2 Timothy 3:14–4:5
Luke 18:1–8
"It is the responsibility of every political conservative," insists Jerry Falwell, "every evangelical Christian, every pro-life Catholic, every traditional Jew, every Reagan Democrat, and everyone in between to get serious about reelecting President Bush." 1 Evangelicals must be listening to Falwell's advice, for polls indicate that some eighty-three percent of them will vote for Bush in this year's presidential election. Tony Campolo has complained that the movement has been "hijacked" by the Republican party.2
What about liberal Christians and their predictable partisan ideology of the last four decades? The precipitous membership declines in mainline, mainly liberal, denominations lend credence to the adage that Christians who marry the spirit of the age are destined to be widows in the next generation. What explains their steep drop over the last several decades? Sociologists debate the reasons, and "causation" is notoriously difficult to prove, but I suspect that left wing ideologues lost their distinctly Christian voice and no longer had anything very different to say than what liberal Democrats said. Right now, if that eighty-three percent statistic is indicative, the majority of Protestant evangelicals have ignored the failure of liberals and instead married the Republican party. This is a dispiriting development, not because these people will vote Republican, but because, like mainline liberals who married their liberal theology to liberal politics, these Christians don't seem to say anything different than a run of the mill conservative Republican.
When the Gospel is subsumed under or co-opted by any ideology, left or right, then the wine of the Good News has to that extent been watered down. For Protestant evangelicals the tragedy would be every bit as disheartening if eighty-three percent of them voted for John Kerry. It is deeply disturbing to walk into a church and, based upon whether its theology is liberal or conservative, know how most all of its parishioners will vote. Whatever the Gospel is, it has its own distinct voice, a unique grammar and narrative, a peculiar Story and inner logic that no ideology, especially a political ideology, can circumscribe.
In the lesson from the epistles for this week the aged Paul writes to the young Timothy, "You know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured...In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:10–12). Paul was persecuted by the political powers, not coddled and patronized by them. What happened to him in these three cities? In Antioch he was run out of town. In Iconium, Luke writes, "the people of the city were divided" about Paul's Gospel. Jews and Gentiles even joined forces to stone Paul and his companions (Acts 14:4–5). Paul's Gospel did not fit neatly into the ideologies of either Jews or Gentiles, and so in this instance he alienated both sides. Rather than "marry" a predictable ideology, in Iconium Paul was divorced by both of them. We also know there were occasions when he attracted people from both camps. His message had an unpredictable impact among his audience. I am waiting and praying for the day when Christian voting patterns will be entirely unpredictable.
Mark Noll, professor of history at Wheaton College, writes that this Election Day, as in years past, he will vote for "none of the above." Why? Because as a believer he holds strong views about seven important issues, each of which makes a uniquely Christian claim upon his convictions—race, life, taxes, trade, medicine and health care, religious freedom, and the international rule of law. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, of course, are willing or able to transcend narrow partisanship in order to craft a comprehensive and coherent stance on all of these compelling matters. Further, for Noll, the goal is not to elect a Christian president, but rather a president who would address as many of these issues in which believers have a vested interest.3 As Luther once quipped, "better a wise Turk than a stupid Christian."
Similarly, Jim Wallis of Sojourners reminds us that God is neither Republican nor Democrat, and that Christians should not be single-issue voters. Poverty, care of God's creation (environment), war, truth-telling by candidates, human rights, terrorism, an ethic of life, gender equality, the family, the global holocaust of HIV—all of these and more are, for a believer, distinctly religious matters about which we should care.4 Believers should evaluate all candidates by the standard of a broad range of issues.
Paul reminisced to Timothy about persecutions at the hands of both Jews and Gentiles, and assured him that all followers of Jesus would share similar disenfranchisement. Those persecutions of Christians, sometimes sporadic and local, at other times the formal policy throughout the Roman empire, lasted 300 years (until the conversion of Constantine). By that time, Christians understood that they dare not trust the state, nor in fact did they even need the state. Thus, as Bernard Lewis observes, we owe to Christianity the idea of a distinctly secular state, one that is separate from the unique concerns of the church and the kingdom of God. Whereas in imperial Rome the state was god, and in the theocracies of Islam and Judaism god was the state, Christians give the secular state its due ("render to Caesar" per Matthew 22:21), but not much more. Perhaps honor was due the state, but certainly not worship or any obsequious, craven posture.5
Early Christians simply did not fit in with their surrounding culture, especially with the persecuting state, and for that reason pagans derided them as a "third race" (genus tertium) behind Romans, Greeks and Gentiles, the first race, and Jews, the second. There is a touching passage in the Epistle to Diognetus from about the year 130 which captures the ambivalent space that Christians occupied in their society.
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners [or resident aliens]. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.
These early Christians lived very much in the world, loving their cities and their citizens, participating in the warp and woof of daily life. They demonstrated a "wonderful and confessedly striking method of life," one that could not be captured or co-opted by any reigning ideology (much less by the Roman government).
Does God take sides? I believe that He does, given a careful distinction. I believe that He cares about a broad spectrum of political issues that impact human life here and the world over, but not about party ideology that inflames divisive rhetoric. I believe that He favors all that promotes human shalom, both personal and communal, and opposes the contrary. I believe that God is not a Democrat; and He sure isn't a Republican, contrary to what Jerry Falwell might have you believe.
[1] The New York Times, July 16, 2004.
[2] http://www.beliefnet.com/story/150/story_15052_1.html.
[3] The Christian Century, September 21, 2004, pp. 8ff.
[4] http://go.sojo.net/campaign/takebackourfaith.
[5] Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford, 2002), pp. 96–97 .
