Our Only Witness Is a Political Witness

We don’t know how to be Christian without being political.

We’re reading through To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. To catch up, read part 1 and part 2 and part 3.

Photo by Cody Otto on Unsplash (edited)

I grew up in a faith community where everyone voted the same--at least that was the assumption. To follow Jesus was also to follow the GOP into a world where taxes were low, terrorists lived in fear (or didn’t live at all), and families of faith were given every financial and social advantage to flourish. If you’ve been paying any attention at all since 2015, you’ll know that many millennials have been working to untangle themselves from the fusing of our political and spiritual identities and from what has colloquially come to be known as “Christian nationalism.”

The result, for many of our peers, has been a realignment with political positions usually associated with the Democratic party, including support for greater social safety nets, tolerance for higher migration levels, higher taxation of businesses and the wealthy, stricter gun control, and efforts to reduce abortions without outlawing them. Whether suddenly and violently or slowly and steadily, for many millennials their political pendulum has swung to an opposite pole.

• “We are as responsible for how we vote as for how we use our money… political apathy is a sin.”¹

• “The simple act of voting is one of the most empowering actions you can do…”²

• “Would Jesus register to vote? Would he go to the polls? Or would he stay home? … For a Christian not to vote is a sin.”³

Can you tell if these statements are from Christians on the political left or right? Drill down a bit and you’ll find that whether “Christian nationalists” or “progressive Christians”, a lot of what they say sounds the same. The issues are different, but the methods are the same. We don’t know how to be Christian without being political.

Such is James Davison Hunter’s argument in Part II of To Change the World.⁴ As we saw in Part I, Christians in America have sought to “change the world” in three primary ways: evangelism, political action, and social reform. Now, Hunter contends that “in response to a thinning consensus of substantive beliefs and dispositions in the larger culture, there has been a turn toward politics as a foundation and structure for social solidarity” (103). This politicization has been no less true for Christians than for any other sector of society.

Hunter spends the bulk of this section of the book introducing the reader to three main “political theologies” or political positions that American Christians typically adopt: the Christian right, the Christian left, and neo-Anabaptists. While delineating the uniqueness of each position,⁵ Hunter also directs our attention to their similarities.

First, all three positions define themselves politically, in relation to the state. Both the Christian right and the Christian left seek to gain and/or maintain influence and power in political discourse, law, and policy, while neo-Anabaptists define themselves largely by their distrust of the state and its use of power. However, even for neo-Anabaptists Hunter claims that “the language of politics still provides the meaning for the public witness of the church” (163).

Second, all three positions are characterized by “ressentiment”, a “form of political psychology… grounded in a narrative of injury or, at least, perceived injury, a strong belief that one has been or is being wronged” (107). All American Christians, regardless of their political theology, seem to “participate fully in the discourse of negation” (169).

It seems, more and more, that our only witness is a political witness. And yet, Hunter says “For politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere. It depends on moral criteria, institutionalized and practiced in the social order, that are autonomous from the realm of politics” (172). By hitching all our horses to the wagons of politics we have forfeited our unique ability to form and strengthen the values which we claim to fight for in the political arena. Hunter goes on:

“The irony, of course, is that no group in American society has done more to politicize values over the last half century, and therefore undermine their renewal, than Christians… the consequence of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, in effect, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology…” (172).

My childhood faith community would have been concerned if one of our members registered as a Democrat, but he or she might be able to explain how their new views had come from a new understanding of Scripture. But if someone announced that they had chosen to no longer vote in national elections, to avoid consuming the news and instead to devote the time they used to spend researching candidates and policies to prepping Sunday school lessons or volunteering at the local food bank, they would more likely be given up as a lost cause who had forfeited their influence and forsaken their God-given civic duty.

We are so committed to our political efforts to change the world that attempting to mold the nation into a shape that some of our fellow Christians disagree with is still deemed more acceptable than wondering if we should be leveraging politics to change it at all.

But what if politics was seen as just one realm in which faithful Christians might have influence over our culture and communities, instead of the lens through which we see every other realm? What if politics was one passion or interest or “calling” a Christian might pursue, instead of the flavor imposed on every other interest? What if a Christian could write, or teach, or buy a car, or conceive children without having to make some political statement by doing so? What if this was the way in which we were truly “counter-cultural”? What if, like Truman,⁶ we woke up one day, stepped off this hamster wheel that grinds our faith into an unrecognizable political sludge, and found a door out into the wide, wide world of full Christian witness?

In pursuit of Beauty,

1. From a pamphlet published by the Southern Baptist Convention.

2. From a pamphlet published by Sojourners.

3. Rick Scarborough quoted in a program called God’s Christian Warriors.

4. This is an affiliate link. That just means if you choose to buy the book this way, I get a few pennies to support my own reading habits.

5. A key difference I noticed between the neo-Anabaptists and the other two positions was their focus on the church, rather than individuals, as the primary agent of social change. The chapters on the Christian right and the Christian left contained almost no mention of the church as a whole, which is alarming and something I’d like to dig into more.

6. See The Truman Show.