The Overton Salon

By Austin

Drew’s post this morning on his philosophical breakdown in his critique of the Tea Partiers is interesting. He points out that faith informs us no matter what, so what’s the difference between his view of transgendered rights based on Galatians 3, and Sarah Palin?

Obviously a lot. But what? In two of my posts (here and here). I’ve begun to think about this, but Drew has provoked me: what is the Christian witness to the state? How ought faith and politics work together? I noted in those posts that “faith” or “belief” cannot merely be compartmentalized, as if the were free-flowing ideas picked and thrown into a soup of “political ideas.” They holistically inform us, as Drew says. So what’s appropriate?

One of Drew’s implicit insights is that everyone has a theology. Everyone. Atheists politicians and Christian politics alike. Everyone has that end-point where they can do nothing but worship, whether that be some god or science, some document (like the Constitution of the Tea Partiers) or an ideal of progress.  Clearly there is a continuum – we hedge against too much theology in our politics, like that “wall of separation,” but we can’t but help ourselves. In Calvin’s words, we are a factory of idols.

If this is the case we must find an appropriate way to relate to the state. Fortunately for Jews and Christians, there are some very pressing internal criteria for this relation. It should not be:

a. Idolatrous. The state’s goals and being cannot be conflated with God. Almost all states in history have somehow or other claimed the authority of God (especially over life and death), and implicitly or explicitly identified themselves with God. The Tea Party’s rituals during the health care protests divinize a mythic “America,” as do progressives who in the 60′s and 70′s saw secularism as the answer to the world’s political prayers.

b. Our Primary allegiance. Let’s state this clearly: our primary allegiance is not to our country, but to God’s nation. “Citizenship in heaven” does not mean our citizenship is “spiritual.” This passage talks about the transformation of the body. We are put in the midst of a world that is broken and hostile, a sleeper cell called witness to the coming reign of God in the middle of all this hate and violence, loving our enemies when others won’t, preaching God’s all-inclusive when our nation preaches an exclusive love based on soil.

To state this all positively: we worship the one God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who is also the head of our country. Yet this reign is not fully here, and in the in-between time we are empowered through the Spirit to bring his policies – justice and peace, healing and community, reconciliation and love – into this present evil age.

So Drew is right about “civic religion.” For the Christian, that would be idolatrous. The U.S. is not nor ever has been a Christian nation. The kingdom of God is a Christian nation, with Christ as head. The Christian’s witness takes off from this fact.

Yet this doesn’t mean you can’t see certain characteristics of God’s kingdom in nations at times. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to traditions in American thought that are certainly congruent with the kingdom of God, like equality (no wonder – he was a preacher!).  The theologian John Howard Yoder called these “middle axioms”, places where the kingdom of God and the world meet. As citizens of this kingdom, these axioms enable us to communicate the policies of this kingdom to the nations, or as Drew says, practitioners of other faiths or non-faith.

In summary to this rather long response to Drew: faith and politics are always together, but as Christians our primary allegiance is to the kingdom of God, not to our country. We participate in our country’s politics because that is one place where we can advocate for the policies of this kingdom (but there are other places too!), and we will often do this through “middle axioms.” When this becomes a problem is when our nation (whether current or more a mythological “America”) usurps the place of God.

Yet as long as we realize who we worship, and where our allegiance lies, our faith empowers our politics. In future posts, I’ll talk more about some political axioms…