Christians Should Be Active Citizens
Two common approaches to the faith-and-politics question are to either let our faith pull us out of politics completely (separatism), or let our faith drive us to dominate the political process at any cost (tribal nationalism).
At Christian Civics, we think both of these approaches miss the mark.
Occasionally on our YouTube channel, we’ll be looking at some of the arguments for these approaches, and offering quick explanations for why they aren’t the Christian Civics approach.
This week, our Executive Director looks at four reasons we might feel tempted to withdraw from civic life.
Transcript
Objection One: Jesus is the Only Head of State
Rick Barry: I wanna start with the argument that Christians are people who recognize Jesus as king, and so can't or shouldn't engage with any government that doesn't place Jesus as the head of state.
One of my favorite passages early on in my Christian life would seem to support this argument.
We see in the book of Luke the tax collector Levi, who was sitting in his tax booth collecting taxes. And when Jesus saw him, he said, “Follow me.” And Levi got up, left everything and followed Jesus. He appears to have renounced his political power completely. He was engaged with a government that did not recognize God as having a place in the state, and when he began to follow Jesus, he left that entanglement behind.
But he's maybe the only example that the Bible gives us of somebody doing that.
In scripture, most people who have some kind of responsibility in a government, even in a theocracy built around a different God, don't get called to abandon that responsibility when they start to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Most people throughout scripture actually continue working with the responsibilities they have, they just start handling those responsibilities differently.
One of my favorite people in the Bible today is actually another tax collector, Zacchaeus. He was one of Levi's colleagues, and in Luke 19, Zacchaeus experiences the good news and he responds to it by remaining a tax collector. But he changes the way he approaches his work. He starts making personal sacrifices to not just undo the damage he had done by abusing his power, not just paying back what he defrauded, but he makes sacrificial reparations, giving back four times more than he defrauded.
The New Testament also shows us the faithful Centurion who was a military commander. We see Joseph of Arimathea, who is a member of the local council. We see Nicodemus, who is a member of the Pharisees.
And this happens in the Old Testament, too. We have Naaman from 2 Kings, who serves the king of Aram. Naaman was sick, and he goes to Israel to be healed, and he's healed by God's prophet Elisha. And he gave up his foreign gods to worship the God of Israel out of gratitude. But the King of Aram was physically feeble, and Naaman's job was to literally go with the king into the temple of his foreign God put his arm around the king's shoulders and physically bow down before the foreign idol with the king, and then help the king stand back up again. He was kind of like a human cane or a human exoskeleton for the king. And he said to Elisha, can I keep doing this? And Elisha told him, don't leave your job.
So if you're a Christian in the United States trying to figure out what to do with these powers and privileges and obligations and responsibilities, and even vulnerabilities of being a citizen in a representative democracy that you share with a lot of non-Christians, and you’re looking to the Bible for some kind of precedent that can help you figure out how to move forward, the vast majority of biblical examples of people in similar situations, of people who have some kind of tie or obligation to a non-Christian governmental entity, from Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament to the faithful Centurion and Zacchaeus in the New Testament, is to not just wash your hands of that responsibility, but to continue taking it up, living in tension with the world around you, but approaching your work as a citizen, as a tax collector, as a centurian, as a governmental advisor, in a more honorable, more compelling and even more generous way.
Objection Two: Power Corrupts US
Another objection people of faith might have to getting involved with politics, government, and civic life, especially after the last few years is that so much of politics is about jockeying for power. And power just inherently corrupts and absolute power corrupts Absolutely.
People say that so often, it is such a deeply embedded truism in our broader culture, that it's easy to forget that it is straight up heresy. It is almost completely at odds with a Christian understanding of God.
Corruption cannot be an inevitable aspect of power or an inevitable consequence of power. It just can't. If power corrupted and absolute power corrupted absolutely, God would still be able to be omnipotent, but he would never be able to be good. The only one with absolute power is a also absolutely beyond corruption.
Instead, in the world around us, I think it looks like power corrupts when what it's actually doing is giving the people who have it new opportunities to reveal and exercise and express the corruption that's already there. We’re made in God’s image, and we’re subject to the fall, and that means we’re all fallible. Power gives the corruption *that we all struggle with* an outlet. But the corruption is already there.
Power can also look like it's corrupting because accumulating power can foster a status quo bias in us. It’s easy to be generous when being generous doesn’t cost you very much. But power or comfort or status (which is really just social or cultural power) gives us something we can lose. When we're happy with the way things are, when things are ordered in a way where our needs are met, where we're in some kind of position of comfort or privilege (or at least relative or comparable comfort compared to some of the other people around us), then suddenly we might not be as quick to change things for the sake of people who are suffering more than we are, or who suffer in different ways than we do.
That's not power creating corruption, that's power giving our corrupt hearts, our self-interested hearts, something to lose.
Objection Three: Politics Will Corrupt Our Faith
Another reason we might be tempted as Christians to withdraw from the civic process or from the governmental process, from partisan politics, is that it just seems like it's dirty business and it will somehow compromise our faith or dirty our hands. There’s no way to do anything good in such a bad place.
But if we let that drive us away from the public square, then we are tacitly telling the people around us that God's power to redeem is no match for man's power to corrupt. That man is more powerful than God.
Objection Four: We Should Spend Our Limited Time on God, Not on Worldly Things
And the last objection I want to get to today is really just a practical one: Being engaged in civic life takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of effort. The kind of work that goes into investing in the governmental process, the kind of work that goes into exercising American citizenship or participating in the American public square, that goes into learning about our neighbors and their needs and their concerns, and figuring out how we can use whatever powers or privileges or responsibilities we might have to address those concerns, that takes time. And it takes energy. And it takes research and it takes commitment. And we are all busy, we're tired, and if we have any free time, shouldn't we just be spending that on things that have to do with God instead of things that have to do with government? Things that are transcendent instead of things of this world?
But that is a false dichotomy.
If Christians in the US are following Christ and if we make obeying him and imitating him our highest priority, then we are going to end up back in the public square. The Old Testament tells us that God was planning to send us a redeemer because he heard our cries. He heard humanity crying into the void.
The way we responded to our brokenness and our suffering got his attention. And when he heard our cries and looked at us, that brokenness and that suffering that made us cry out provoked his sympathy. And those things that provoked his sympathy are more than just the things we tend to think of as spiritual or religious.
Jesus says that all of scripture is about him, and when you read through the prophets, yes, you do see them talking about how people order their worship and their devotional lives, but you also see the prophets talking about prejudice, about abuse of social, political, or cultural power. You see them talking about public health, about just and unjust economic practices, about judicial processes and legal protection, food distribution and economic inequality.
These things are all part of the deep painful cry for salvation that the prophets articulated on behalf of humanity—and they are also the things that push our neighbors into the public square. These are the things that push our neighbors into pursuing proximity to government or influence within government.
So if we're following Jesus, we cannot be above understanding, talking about and even getting involved in these things that might, at first glance seem worldly if we grew up with some kind of sacred secular divide. They should be important to those of us who call Jesus the author and perfector of our faith.
If we tell ourselves that investing in the systems and institutions that shape our neighbors' lives, that learning about and doing something about the kinds of things that hurt the people around us is somehow inherently a distraction from knowing, loving and following the God of the Bible, we are fooling ourselves and our actions make us out to be lying about Jesus to the non-Christians around us.
At a time when civic life is the site of so many conversations about things that frighten, frustrate, or hurt the people around us, withdrawing from civic life sends a message to our neighbors that we either don't care about the things that are troubling them, or that we think our faith somehow places us above sharing in their brokenness and their suffering, when our whole faith is built around the one who actually was above our brokenness and suffering, not considering himself above it, but subjecting himself to it alongside us for the sake of giving us a foretaste now of the even greater relief and hope that will be coming in the future.