In Search of a New Politics

Blog Entry #2 – Monday, Sept. 8, 2008 – Faith 4 Tomorrow

One of the things that has made it really difficult for me to be a Christian in the last decade is the American political climate, particularly when a presidential election is at hand. We’ve become such a highly politicized nation, divided into red and blue states, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, proponents of the surge and proponents of troop withdrawl. And to make matters worse, we’ve all used religious language to bolster our various positions, sides, and stands. Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw put it this way in Jesus for President: “One of the things that’s so troubling when Christianity and America become so fused together is that what becomes at stake when things like Iraq happen is not just the reputation of America, but the reputation of what it means to be Christian, because it’s been totally baptized in Christian language and the blessing of God.”

We Christians have been way too quick to claim God’s blessing upon our positions and political views. I’d love to be able to tell you that I have never fallen into this dangerous trap, but I’m just as guilty as everyone else. Say, for example, that I am one of those folks who look at the George W. Bush years as an unmitigated disaster, as the nadir of American history. Say that I happen to believe, as Jim Wallis does, that a right wing fringe of Evangelical Christians has hijacked my faith and turned it into a narrow, two-issue concern, robbing Christianity of its long-standing commitment to fighting poverty, hunger, and all forms of injustice. And then, along comes Barak Obama, preaching a message of hope, of change, and of repairing America’s relationships abroad and our divisions here at home. How easy and tempting it becomes to anoint Obama the candidate for whom “we Christians” must vote. And once we do that, the inevitable next step - for those on my hypothetical side – is to begin to put all our eggs of hope in the Obama basket. We begin to feel that if “our candidate” doesn’t win, all will be lost, and it will be time to move to Canada. And once we’ve taken those mental steps, are we really any different than the Bush Republicans we’ve come to despise, due particularly to their linking of their candidate and party with Christ himself?

The deeper truth and hope for change lies in all of us, in average Americans. It does not lie and cannot lie in our political system, nor even in the outcome of our elections, no matter how high the stakes may seem. Again, Claiborne and Haw are right when they say, in an interview in Relevant Magazine (Sept./Oct.08) “The world is going to change when we begin to change, and when we begin to change our neighborhoods… Figure out how we can vote for the people who Jesus voted for or spent His life with. Let’s vote for the poor. Let’s vote for the immigrant. Let’s vote for the people who are hurting.” Haw concludes, “What is more important than how we vote on November 4 is how we live on November 3 and November 5.”We must never forget that. Never.

As I continue to concern myself with what communities of Christ’s followers will look like in the future, in a post-Church age, I hope I can find a way for those of us who want to be a part of those communities to, on the one hand, be political in the sense that Jesus was political, but on the other hand, not wed ourselves to either side of a system that is, at its root, corrupt and incapable of the transformational change and establishment of justice that we crave in the name and spirit of the one we call Lord. I hope we can find a way to live our politics, whichever side on which they fall, in a way that honors the God who is so much bigger than our small-minded and reductionistic stands.