The Anti-Manichaeist

I am thankful for my old friend Steve Knight, who initially launched me into the blogosphere, for bringing to my attention the working draft of
“Evangelical Call to Civic Responsiblity”. I’ve commented some at his blog on specific policy-issues(gay-marriages, abortion) at his blog. Now, I am going to focus in the commentary below on the political concepts in the document. To this end, I took extensive notes on the original document and then wrote the below based on my notes. It doesn’t deal with everything in order and sometimes I rewrote stuff in my own words. As such, it may not be crystal clear what exactly I was referring to at every point.

I believe it is a good thing that they are writing and publicizing this, since it will get debate going and help lead to changes in the voting habits of “evangelicals”. I particularly like the stress on the importance of Christians developing better habits of political deliberation. It is important to remember that past great Christian thinkers inspired us to creative engagement in policy prescription, not agreement on what political changes should be made.

I myself in my Christian Pragmatic Progressive Party(CPPP) platform wrote the following…

The CPPP party will be based on the premise that an active involvement in politics can be glorifying to God if done in an ethical manner that is not dogmatic and seeks to widen the range of interests that potentially can be served by the government. It will generally view political parties as pragmatic institutions that seek to sustain their own viability and which, while necessary, can choke the access to the control of Government.

The CPPP endorses a Stephen Carter-style view of the relationship between the Church and State, particularly as he writes in “The Culture of Disbelief.” The separation of Church and State implies not that their spheres are completely separate but their autonomy with all parties agreeing to accept the importance of democracy and compromise in the determination of laws. It will encourage social moderates to conservatives to be more independent and pragmatic in their voting.

(The platform also champions the need to formally work towards reconciliation between Christianity and Islam, with possible conversions by either side being left to individuals. )

Instead of centering on somewhat vague concepts like Justice, or improving international well-being, the focus is on politics as a sphere of perpetual conflict of interests and how engagement in politics on the behalf of the other’s as well as our own interests is part of our public witness to others. This difference may stem from how theologically, the paper borrows some from traditional reform theology. I am “not-so-reformed” and consider myself to be more aligned with the swedish-baptist-pietist heritage(the swedish part testifies to a history of economic and religious discrimination of some of my swedish ancestors prior to their arrival in the US. I also have “un peu francais huguenot” ancestry as well and tend to be suspicious of all concentrations of ecclesiastical authority or when church-state relations lose their autonomy as a result.). I would suggest that the NAE could also include the reasoning of the African-American Christian, John Perkins, in whose book, “Let Justice Roll Down”, offered the analogy of Jesus’ ministry to the woman at the well in John 4 for why Christians would get involved in politics. Jesus approached the woman through her felt need for water as a way to get her interest so he could ultimately address her true need for salvation.

“Evangelical” Christians should dedicate their time and resources to following/deliberating/acting about politics, time and resources that could be otherwise devoted to reading/studying the Bible or evangelizing others, not because we are less fallible in discerning justice or right political conduct than others or are called to change/transform both individuals and institutions. Instead, we are called to civic responsibility because economic-political-social institutions are important parts of the fallenness of the world and are continually subject to conflict-ridden alterations that need to be worked out one way or the other. Helping to advance or protect the interests of the less powerful in this process, or neglecting to do so, inevitably lowers or raises barriers to the sharing of the Gospel with others. This supplements the biblical/theological basis set out with a historical consideration of how experience has shown that the way Church(es) has related to State(s) has proven to be an important part of Christianity’s public witness. One can account for why Christianity has remained stronger in the US, while it faded in Europe in part by how the Church remained far more autonomous in the US from the “powers that be” than it did in Europe, especially after the catastrophic, 30-years war that followed the Protestant-Catholic Schism.

Also, biblical faithfulness maybe over-emphasized as a criterion for what policies the NAE’s Pacs should support. I say this because one can make the Bible say almost anything and when we over-emphasize the Bible as being authoritative that can lead for us to conflate our fallible traditions with what the Bible “actually said” and lead to serious schisms among Christians on “non-essentials”. Protestants have traditionally tended to conflate their distinct “traditions” with scripture and this has caused much division among Protestants.

The paper also emphasizes that recent Christian political organizations have had insufficient depth, breadth and consistency. I’m not sure what they mean by consistency. It sounds more like agreement/solidarity to me. But, given that the level of theological agreement among “evangelicals” is tenuous, it seems less likely there would be substantial agreement on political issues given its less “essential” nature and the conflicting economic/political interests that inevitably sway us politically. But on the other hand, organizations like the NAE are supposed to inspire us to consider more than our self-interest in how we act politically, anyways.

The paper also mentions how Christian political action committees(PACs) have produced access without influence and much discouragement, leading to an ambivalence over our commitment to civic engagement. I see this discouragement/frustration in the recent sermon series,“the Cross and the Sword”, by a professor of mine from my undergraduate days, Greg Boyd. I would argue that the lack of a commitment to civic engagement is not due solely to the failures of recent Christian PACs to make significant changes in law. I.e., a more pragmatic NAE whose biblically balanced platform unifies more Christian groups will not remove the ambivalence over civic-engagement. I think the ambivalence also stems from some aspects of many evangelical theologies. The emphasis on personal holiness tends to stress avoiding all hints of sin and, well, political activity has long, and somewhat correctly, been viewed as a shady business. Therefore, devout Christians would avoid politics or the political power that tends to corrupt so as to remain holy. Likewise, a pre-millenial fascination with the rapture tends to distract one from caring about this-worldy issues. Instead, what matters is getting as many people saved as possible before the rapture happens.

The NAE’s paper does not directly deal with the end-times issues. Its focus is more in the here and now, as would be consistent with a post-millenial or an amillenialist mennonite position. Traditionally, post-millenialism has been prevalent in the US as how Christians justified political activism. The position I articulated above is also a-millenialist.

I liked how the paper spoke of the need to cross racial/ethnic/economic and national boundaries, but this doesn’t leave settled the perennial question of “whose interests exactly we should support in political conflicts.” In practice, there are always winners and losers with any legal change and there is a ubiquitous necessity of choice about whose ox should be gored or fed. We should care about more than just our own economic interests, but whose interests we consider and to what extent need to be worked out. I’m not saying the paper shouldn’t have the statement, but I am saying that it isn’t going to decisively settle future, in-house conflicts.

As a social scientist, I welcome the acknowledgement that many political issues deal with stuff not discussed explicitly in the Bible and that there is a need for detailed social, economic, historical, jurisprudential, and political analysis for us to be able to engage in politics faithfully and wisefully. I also welcome the importance of both normative vision and factual analysis as being critical for political judgements. There is a need for more careful, precise Christian thinking about both. However, the paper does not deal with how they will work out conflicts in normative ideals or discernment about what are the “facts”. The “facts” are perennially in dispute and there is much room for their manipulation.

I do like the emphasis on the need to transform both individuals and institutions. Of course, the dichotomy is not so clear-cut in real life since institutions affect who we are as individuals and individuals do impact the nature of institutions. However, we are still ultimately called to go and make disciples of all nations and disciples are people, not institutions.

I think championing a “biblically” balanced agenda is an unfortunate word-choice. This is because how we should balance how we spend our political capital on the many different issues is not something that the Bible directly addresses and so ascribe the balance that is ultimately worked out to the Bible obfuscates the governance issues within the NAE, itself. Ultimately, there will be a need to work out compromises between different groups and for others to accept the decisions made for the group to make any difference, but how this is acheived is not set out by the Bible and should be open to alterations.

Likewise with its acknowledgement of the need to focus on imperfect solutions that take into account entrenched power-groups and the limitations of political activism and the uncertainty of the effects of policy-changes, this is all true but how such considerations are taken into account isn’t, persay, an exact science and so the nature of the NAE’s governance will likely make a difference in what is determined.

The call for civility, integrity by politicians and not equating the Christian faith with partisan politics is most welcome.

I’d like to make some quick comments on the “Structures of Public Life”.

The paper sets out three structures as prevalent.

1. the concentration of governance.

2. the prevalence of complicated problems that do not yield straight-forward solutions.

(I have no problems with these two, except that the degree of concentration of governance is subject to modification and that one can usually delineate possible solutions to problems and their likely consequences so as to better inform the more or less concentrated governance/decision-making that ultimately gets made.)

3. God has ordered human society with various institutions and set in place forms of gov’t to maintain public order, to restrain human evil, and to promote the public good.

(I have to disagree with this statement. Our received institutions are fallible and not God-given and our notion(s) of the “public-good” is itself a combination of God-given normative ideals and our fallible human ontological constructs. God may have established the ideal of marriage, but our received marriage institutions are not God-given and can be altered. Likewise, we may share the responsibility for the creation of a healthy society, but God has not exhaustively laid out for us what is a healthy society.)

As for the importance of a representative democracy and the establishment of a just gov’t and ensurance of fundamental liberties. These are all important, and the article sets out well the historical defenses for them. However, I think it is important to temper its idealism with the fact that governance in our gov’t is in fact due to a combination of democracy, aristocracy and plutocracy(freedom of $peech). And NAE’s governance itself will likely also be due to a combination of democracy, aristocracy and plutocracy. And there are reasons why all three should have some influence in both spheres of governance. Acknowledging this can put in focus how the exact combination of the above may be altered.

To frame the issue as God having both legitimized and limited the state’s authority obscures the extent that us humans have exercised our free-wills in making and remaking political laws, often in the service of our own self-interests, in the past. It also neglects the interrelations that exist between private and public governance in the determination of what rights and regulations should exist for private parties. At issue is not how much gov’t should there be, but whose interests will gov’t/law ultimately serve. Gov’t regulations/welfare have often provided services to people that were analogous to services that have been provided for a long-time to corporations.

I don’t have time to delve into the principles of Christian political engagement. I already detailed my objections to the treatment of the politics of abortion and homosexuality at Steve Knight’s blog. I would just like to point out that under the human-rights section, the paper associates the imago-dei with us being endowed with rights and responsibilities. (This seems a little insensitive to the people of the under-developed world who don’t have (much) rights. ) It then segways into how for us to fulfill our God-given tasks, all people need private property. Legal personhood is equivalent with having rights/property protected by gov’t. I think Catholic Social Thought, as elucidated by Thomas Aquinas, dealt with the issue of private property, differently. Private property was deemed a necessary evil due to the sinfulness of human beings. And since it was affirmed only because of our sinfulness, it was not to be made into an absolute. I.e., all private property was potentially subject to regulations in protection of the interests of others. I, obviously, prefer the CST conditional affirmation of private-property.

Additions:On further reflection, neither the CST nor the NAE’s take on private property are ideal for me. Private-property is first and foremost the decentralization of governance/decision-making. If there isn’t a platonic ideal, correct way to do things then it makes more sense to permit autonomy, variation. The fact that we are fallen and capable of abusing both private and public governance is a given and entails that there needs to be rules and the effective concentration of the right to the legitimate use of violence in the state, as well as a competitive system for the redetermination of who will control the state.

Unlike Locke and others, rights do not preexist the state. The state inevitably chooses who will be given its protection and for what. What the state protects constitutes the specific systems of rights that exist. So the choice that faces “evangelicals” is how we form agreements about what legal changes we should support and how do we go beyond just defending and expanding our own interests. This goes well beyond whether one is for private-property or not, or for or against capitalism or socialism. What is at stake in particular policy debates is not capitalism, the influence of the democracy of the dollar on the process is a given that is unlikely to go away, but what should be the rules of the game, the means by which the influence of the democracy of the dollar is mitigated and popular democracy may play a more significant role in governance.
dlw