Why Christians Disagree About Politics
Transcript
Rick Barry: How many times has someone told you that, “I vote the way I vote because I’m a Christian?”
How many times have YOU said something like that?
If this is the way you think, I get it. It’s the model that’s been offered to us the most by the culture around us, and the church has adopted it pretty hard in the US. But it’s an awful, thoughtless, clumsy way of navigating the massive responsibility of representative democracy, and saying things like this makes Christians look like easy, gullible marks.
Today, we’re gonna look at just a few of the ways that Christians end up disagreeing about politics and partisanship, but still remain Christian.
And then next week, we’re gonna look at why living with these kinds of disagreements is actually really important for us and for our churches.
Our Politics Don’t Come Straight From Our Faith
Christians in the US like to think that our politics come straight from our biblical faith, but the truth is that there are a LOT of mediating factors between our faith and our politics—and there’s actually no way around that. They aren’t standing in the way of some mythical, purer, platonic, unmediated version of Christian civic engagement. There’s no way for a to relate to politics in the US without them. They’re facts of life that we’re always gonna have to live with, acknowledge, and make room for.
Today, I’m gonna list just a few of them. This isn’t a complete list. These are just a FEW of the LEGITIMATE factors that lead Christians of the same faith to different sides of a political divide.
Creation/Fall Emphasis
First, and we’ve covered this one in a video before: Are you more sensitive to the doctrine of creation or the doctrine of the fall?
A while back, we talked about the Christian story in four chapters: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.
Until we learn about Jesus’ sacrificial redemption, we’re all wandering around the world with our hearts and minds torn between creation and fall. Either we see that the heavens declare the glory of God, or we get that all of creation is waiting and groaning for something better.
And whichever one we’re quicker to recognize actually helps inform our partisan disposition.
If you’re more inclined to celebrate the glory of God’s image as it’s reflected in the world around you, you’re probably more inclined to respond to the way progressives in the US craft policy and messaging.
If you’re more inclined to lament the brokenness of the world around you, you’re probably more inclined to respond to the way conservatives craft policy and messaging.
This doesn’t determine your partisan leanings all on its own. But just like everything else we’re talking about today, it’s one of the things that goes into it.
Principle vs. Strategy
Next, Christians who disagree about politics might actually agree in principle, but disagree about strategy.
Moral principles are distillations of biblical values. Political strategies are blunt, fallible efforts by fallible people to put those values into action.
Abortion is a prime example here.
Lots of Christians across the political spectrum agree that humans are made in God’s image, and God’s image is so precious that it must be protected whenever possible, even in the womb.
Some Christians respond to that by pushing for blanket bans on abortion.
Other Christians respond to that by working to address the problems that leave women feeling like abortion is their best option. Things like paid family leave, universal pre-natal and post-natal and pediatric care, and housing policy are all pro-life issues for many Christians.
They share the same principle of wanting to protect the image of God, but have very different strategies bout how to accomplish it.
Can you think of another example where there are two positions that seem very different from one another might actually have a shared principle at heart? Let me know in the comments!
Christian Tradition
Next, which Christian traditions have had the biggest influence on you?
As we’ve talked about before, the biblical authors didn’t have to wrestle with representative democracy, so Christians living in democracies have had to use our best wisdom to figure out what our relationship to representative government is supposed to be. Different Christian traditions in the US have come up with different models for relating to government, and which traditions have most influenced you in your discipleship plays a role in how you understand and view your own relationship to government.
If you want to learn a little more about some of the major traditions of political theology in the US, you can pick up Five Views on the Church and Politics, from Zondervan’s Counterpoints series.
Regional Culture
Each region of the US has a slightly different set of expectations of government. These regional cultures are often something we end up either unconsciously carrying with us or consciously rebelling against.
A lot of people who grew up in the northeast, like in most of New England or in upstate New York, look at government as a sort of publicly-owned nonprofit—the tool we use to address problems that are too big for private entities to handle or that can’t be fixed through market enterprises.
People who grew up in the deep south grew up in an environment where a lot of people thought of government as either the security guard or the jailkeeper, the thing that exists to protect us against other peoples’ worst impulses, or the thing that’s being used to keep some people stuck behind others.
Some regions of the country view government as the moderator of our cultural norms. Other regions view it more as the referee, keeping everybody playing fairly so that we can all be our most creative and productive selves.
In his book American Nations, Colin Woodard proposed looking at North America as a collection of eleven distinct regional cultures, and that’d probably be a good popular level book to start with for anyone who wants to dig into this idea a little bit more.
Family Culture
The next one we’ll touch on, and we’ll only touch on it briefly, is family culture.
Your home environment growing up also helps shape your vision of government—how it should function, and how other people should relate to it. Your vision for authority, what kinds of legal or moral transgressions are the most serious, what a healthfully functioning community looks like.
Passions
Next, people might have different passions from you.
Or, if I can translate this one into some pretty common “Christianese” language…
Some people have a heart for issues that you don’t have a heart for.
When we see someone dedicate their time to volunteering at a women’s shelter, we talk about how they have a heart for people who are vulnerable or hurting.
When we see someone dedicate their career to developing new medical treatments, we talk about how they have a heart for healing and public health.
But somehow, when it comes to politics, we have a hard time letting people have a heart for something different than we do.
We start trying to get other people to conform themselves to our image, instead of remembering that the point of Christian relationships is for each of us to help the other conform more to God’s image.
Differing Experiences
And lastly, experiences.
Two people can have a heart for the same issue, a passion for the same issue, and start working on that issue from similar directions but still end up with very different takes about how that issue needs to be addressed.
Let’s use pediatric cancer as an example. Let’s say two people both want to do something hands-on about pediatric cancer.
They go to the same medical school, get the same grades, all that fun stuff, and the world is open to them when it comes to where they’ll work.
One of them goes to work at St. Jude in Memphis, one of the most prestigious, best-funded, most ambitious pediatric cancer centers in the world.
They’ll end up helping kids through some of the most cutting edge, experimental treatments available.
The other doctor looks at some maps and some statistics and they find a small regional hospital somewhere in Ohio in an area that has higher-than-average rates of pediatric cancer and a lower-than-average number of specialists, and they decide that that’s where they can make the biggest difference.
After a few years in the field, those two doctors are gonna have really different takes on what we need to do about pediatric cancer.
They’re gonna have different ideas about where money needs to be directed, about what kinds of awareness campaigns need to happen, about what upstream preventative measures are the most urgent.
And that’s…actually okay.
If we believe the Bible when it tells us that God orders our steps, then we believe that both of these doctors were SUPPOSED to have the exact experiences that led them to see different problems as most urgent.
It would be wrong for their God-given experiences to NOT shape their perspectives.
Who Benefits From Christians Over-Simplifying Our Politics?
We like to think that there’s a straight line, a one-to-one relationship between our faith and our political commitments, but the truth is, it’s much more complicated than that. we just covered, what? Six or seven different things that help shape our approach to politics. And here’s the thing: Everyone who has the kinds of jobs I used to have, working on political campaigns to drum up support for our bosses, knows that there are even more than that.
Ignoring them, and just going along with the kind of over-simplified, dumbed-down way of thinking about the relationship between faith and politics that we hear from people who are trying to get our votes or our money is only helpful to people who want to find as many shortcuts as they can to get as many people to commit to voting for them as possible with as little work as necessary.
And for people who follow the one who told us to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, for people who are told that wisdom is more valuable than money and jewels, letting ourselves get manipulated like that is spiritual malpractice.
Next week, we’re gonna talk about how these kinds of differences actually make it EASIER for each of us to grow in Christ, and how they make it a LOT easier for our churches to witness coherently to our neighbors.