RSS Feed
Facebook
twitter
Jim Wallis has described his religious-political view with a phrase I largely agree with: “religion is personal, but never private.” The idea is that just because Jesus is our “personal savior,” that doesn’t give Christians an excuse to live a double life, with one aspect being a personal belief system and another, sometimes contrary, lifestyle of do as we please. Our faith matters publicly, even if that faith is deeply personal. “Privately held faith” is a sort of oxymoron.
But I think Wallis wishes to go further down the road of “never private” than many Christians (or non-Christians, for that matter) should be comfortable going. It’s one thing to live our faith externally for all to see, mock, criticize, or embrace. It’s quite another to our energy on the correct political action and governmental involvement for our social agenda we have for everyone else.
Many so-called progressive Christians are politically active and engaged in changing the culture through political or legislative methods. Whether it be supporting a mandate for health insurance or placing upon some persons a tax burden inordinately large, for them, building for the Kingdom of God means using all means possible, and political means is one of those means.
Others of us like to point out that using the kingdom of the sword to do the task of that squarely belongs to the Kingdom of the Cross was not part of the mission of Jesus. Doing so legitimizes violence, disrespectfully requires others who may not share our ethics to live by them, and delegates personal stewardship and responsibility to an entity which has little incentive to steward that which has been entrusted to it.
But the retort goes something like this: “Yeah, but Jesus context was different from ours. He lived under a caesar, and we live in a democracy.” The apparent disparity in the comparison—a totalitarian caesar versus the people in a democracy—is supposedly the reason why Jesus didn’t employ political methods: Jesus simply didn’t have the opportunity to use ethical political methods. In our day, the assumption is, democracy is ethical because it is not imposed from a particular top-down authority, but rests within the people.
At first glance this may be a legitimate explanation to conclude that Christians can and should be involved politically. After all, we are part of a society that is generally involved in our own political processes, whether it be locally, regionally, or nationally. Progressive Christians believe that when they are advocating for justice by invoking government involvement, they are doing so ethically because “we are the government” or “this is our government.” Democracy becomes the back-door excuse for social control. If most people can vote a certain way, or if most people can get politicians to vote a certain way, then society will be better off.
The problem, however, lies in the fact that whatever political system we live within, political solutions are always accomplished by the use of force. However nice and ostensibly beneficial the law seems to be, at some point, there’s a gun backing up the law. Last I checked, making others do what you would rather them do was immoral. That goes for authoritarian implementations as well as democratic ones. Getting more people to agree with your social agenda is no less tyrannical on the rest of us than one person forcing us to follow it.
It’s one thing to get as many people as possible to follow Jesus. It’s quite another to twist the intention and meaning of “follow me” into compulsory and mandatory behavioral modification through the law.
