The Christian Witness to the State
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…
The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part III: Separation Philosophical Breakdown
By Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
The Final Installment
Part III: Separation Philosophical Breakdown
(Or: Oh snap! My own historical argument doesn’t make sense!)
I have to be honest, I knew I was painting myself in a corner all along. In fact, in many ways, my frantic pleas for help while surrounded by wet paint are the endpoint I have been trying to illustrate. And to continue my honest streak, I really don’t know how to get past the incongruity of some of my beliefs.
I hate civic religion. I find it dangerous and insulting to both history and faith. When Sarah Palin and her followers use faith as a selling point, my faith tells me to run away as fast as I can. Yet under a little self analysis, I really am no better. ALL of my political views are informed by faith in Christ. If I had my druthers, my faith and state would be congruent, despite my aversion to using God as justification. Galatians 3:28 tells me there is no male or female, which is the basis for my firm belief in the equality of men and women and the necessity for political advocacy for women in order to make this world more like the kingdom of heaven. Furthermore, the same verse, in my heart, justifies advocacy for more controversial gender issues and the full rights of transgendered individuals. Similarly, Micah 4:3 is the basis for my firm spiritual and political opposition to war as a diplomatic tool and the exorbitance of the nation’s military spending. Finally, as mentioned in my previous post, I would argue that the civil-rights achievements of the middle of the 20th century would have been impossible without the aid of strong biblical language. No complaints from me.
So philosophically, how am I different from Sarah Palin or the rest of the religious right. Yes, obviously faith in Christ has led me to very different political opinions, but am I philosophically different?
At this point, I cannot see how the individual can conceivably separate faith and politics. And this is where perhaps we need to abandon our allegiance to the thoughts and political theories of the Founding Fathers. According to them, if one could not argue in favor or opposition of a political action using reason alone, then the argument was invalid. But how can we continue to maintain this litmus test of feasibility when we live in an age where we admit that there are no spheres of thought wholly separate from one another. If my faith is holistic, then it follows that all of my opinions and causes will be informed first by faith. So I have, as I see, a shortage of attractive options. I could abstain from political discourse altogether, as the most traditional of Anabaptists do. But politics are too important, the consequences of my non-participation too great. I could vote and support only “Godly” politicians and their causes, as the religious-right does, and try and make the church and government become congruent. But then I would be alienating not only practitioners of other faiths along with those without faith but a great many Christians as well, just as the religious-right would alienate me and the Christ I have come to know. Or I could exist in this space of philosophical and ethical tension, where I am upset by the intermixing of faith and political dialogue, despite the fact that there are many instances when I am comfortable with it, and run the constant risk of being a hypocrite, if I am not one already.
So there I go, undermining all of my historical arguments against the Tea Party and their tendency toward faulty memory and civic religion.
The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part I: The Founding Fathers
By Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
This is the first part of a three part critique of the Tea Party movement from a historical and philosophical perspective.
Part I: The Founding Fathers
The Tea Party Movement is a political expression rooted in the mythology of the nation’s founding moments. (Fear not, I am fully aware of the obviousness of this statement.) Starting with its very name, moving through its shouted slogans, and ending with the Gadsden flag, the philosophical aim of the movement is that of a proverbial reset button. The nation, according to the movement’s members, has just seen all of the work started during the Reagan years disappear, leaving them to stare lividly at Obama’s “Blue Screen of Death.” Newt Gingrich, Reaganomics, private enterprise, and limited government, all gone in an instant. With all of that work lost, all that is left for Tea Partiers is to cram the nation into Bill and Ted’s phone booth and ride the lightning back to 1776, when taxes were evil, God had a voice in government, everyone had a musket, and black people knew their role.
Unfortunately for them, I seriously doubt they would like 1776 as much as they seem to think they would.
Let us put aside for a moment that the seeds of abolition and equal rights were already being sown, or that most hard evidence seems to indicate that guns were not so omnipresent as many care to believe, or even the fact that by 1787 any political thinkers with half a brain realized that a centralized taxation system was essential for national security. (Alexander Hamilton is on the ten dollar bill for a reason.) Yes, even despite these glaring historical pot-holes on the Tea Party’s golden highway, there is no more pervasive historical untruth at the forefront of the faulty Tea Party memory banks than the assumption that the Founding Fathers were any more comfortable with the role of religion in politics than the Democratic Party. Yes, there were some old-timers who still held dearly to the memory of the Great Awakening, but by and large the Founders of this nation were philosophers worshiping at the altar of the Enlightenment. And the central tenet of the Enlightenment was the belief that rational thought, infallibly logical and devoid of the influence of human passion, could lead to an efficacious system untainted by the failings of human faults. In layman’s terms, our Founding Fathers were aspiring Vulcans.
Thus we arrive at the great failing of the Tea Party’s mythological narrative. Yes, the Founders often made mention of God, but this was not a God of divine action bringing about salvation through the washing of sins. It was a theopomorphized conceptualization of reason, the antithesis of the passion of humanity and the God of the Great Awakening. It was this God of reason, as described by the pseudo-religion of deism as practiced by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, that the Founders sought guidance from in order to create a constitution immutable in both word and deed by the hands of humans with such fetid drives as power and pride. The failings of the British constitution (the amorphous, unwritten concept that sought to protect Britannia from the even greater failings of French absolutism) were the inspiration for a concept of governance that neither had room for the voice of the Church or any person with any semblance to Tea Partiers. The government that Washington et al. sought to create was designed to eliminate the opportunity for another Charles I to lay claim via divine right, a government where no man or woman from any state, especially one due east from Russia, could bolster their credentials with the assumption that God had chosen them. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife.
This is the tragedy of the civic religion with its “holy” mythology that our nation has created. It lumps Common Sense with The Federalist Papers, despite the fact that John Adams hated Thomas Paine just as much as he hated George III. It makes the Founders out of be saints, writing ideas about governance in the margins of their sermon notes taken at Philadelphia’s First Presbyterian Church. It tells stories of Paul Revere and Ethan Allen galloping around New England, heroes of freedom shouting “Don’t Tread on Me.” It paints a picture completely removed from any sort of historical scholarship. Heck, even the History Channel, which no historian would ever be caught watching, would never try to pass off such a simplistic picture of the Revolutionary period.
Yet this is the peg that the Tea Partiers are hanging their collective hat upon. And I guess at the end of the day, they have every right. Just don’t call it history.
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