Applying the Grandmaster Strategy

5 Suggestions for Political Engagement

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a framework for a way Christians can think about political engagement that enables us to stop idolizing politics as well as demonizing them by seeing Jesus’ work as relativizing the political order (rather than joining it or destroying it). Jesus doesn’t join the Roman political order of his day, but he also commands his disciples to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” In other words: give to him his due, but don’t give him the worship only due to God. 

That’s the exact opposite of the way we evangelicals tend to look at political engagement today. We love to totalize elections (if our candidate doesn’t win, armageddon is at hand!). Or, we take the anabaptist route and try to speak as though somehow, the church itself has replaced all political orders and made them irrelevant. 

I’ve already argued for this position, so I won’t do it again, but you can read my argument here. 

Today, I’m going to try and sketch out a few ideas of how that may look. Here are five suggestions for moving forward. 

First, Christians should seek to influence the political conversations themselves. 

In his book, “To Change the World”, James Davidson Hunter argues meticulously that evangelicals have their order of power entirely wrong. We believe that grass roots evangelism and Big Politics are the two ingredients for social change. But as a sociologist and historian, Hunter argues carefully that these forces in and of themselves have hardly any cultural pull. Big Politics in particular, he argues, is especially crippled from changing society. This is because, for one, everyone in national politics has already had their political views formed by the academy…and the academy has been largely abandoned by evangelicals (see Mark Noll’s “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”) 

Now, Davidson argues for this reason evangelicals should give up on being a cultural influence, since that is, for him, not the way of Jesus. And to some degree, I can agree with that. But I think he would also argue that Christians ought to be a “faithful presence” (his term) in the spaces where conversations about politics are being had: namely, the academy. 

Second, Christians should be at least as invested in local politics as national politics. 

A couple of points here. 

First, the national political scene is a bit of a straight-jacket, in a most blessedly democratic way. The influence a given president elect has on our country has been overblown by evangelicals, and the given influence of a politician in a local office has been way underdeveloped in our minds. Local politics tends to be far more agile, with far fewer checks and balances than national politics (both for good and ill!). Presidents tend to be shaped by the very system they’re placed into, like a giant political JELLO mold. 

Second, presidents tend to be representative of where the country is, rather than folks who are truly moving our country in any given direction. Local politicians, on the other hand, can speak to concrete, specific situations in their city where they have likely seen and experienced these things first hand. Another way of saying this is that presidential, or even congressional or senatorial, decisions tend to be “symbolic”, or even “cathartic” for the masses. But they do not often solve specific issues other than helping folks feel in a therapeutic way that they’ve been heard by the Big Folk. 

Third, Christians should be wary of Left and Right and “Centrist” as identity markers. 

I think it’s worth asking why it is evangelicals tend to be more interested in national politics than local politics. And I think at least one reason for this is that national politics tend to be a platform for us delineate the kinds of things we’re against. In other words, we’re just as shaped by our desire to be identified with (or against) a certain crowd when we’re casting votes for the president, whereas casting a ballot for a local judge isn’t going to have this kind of ‘identity statement’ aspect to it. 

Of course, it’s becoming increasingly popular to say the Christians should be neither Left nor Right, and I think on the whole that’s a very good thing, IF by that we mean that every political movement is going to idolize something, and Christianity subverts those idols by relativizing them back to their proper place. And IF we mean we reject the “moral packages” of these movements as such, but we’re willing to sort through each bag, piece by piece, and hold each item up to the light. But I’m not on board with this thinking if it means to see ourselves as the “Blessed Center of Everything”…which of course doesn’t solve anything, because being a “centrist” a. Could be a code for moral apathy, and b. Is almost always redefined based on where we place the goal posts (one author I’m reading is trying to call his progressive sexual ethic a “centrist” position, but that’s only because he’s placed himself between some wacko right wing folks and some wacko progressives. In truth he’s well outside the bounds of the global, historic church over the past 2,000 years. A truly ‘centrist’ position would be something between the Roman Catholic position and the Protestant position, but even this is only a center position from a western standpoint!) c. There’s no real moral value to being between two positions in and of itself, and in fact can be a kind of hubris.

Fourth, Christians should include the voices of the poor in their votes. 

I think one of the biggest problems evangelicals tend to have in the voting booth is how our votes tend to be cast from echo chambers of folks like us. It’s easy to dismiss government help as a “hand out” and to talk about “welfare queens” so long as you don’t actually know any single parents trying to support kids on a non-livable wage. I’m in full agreement on the abortion question, but there’s a huge gap between how evangelicals have shown care for fetuses and the kind of thought we’ve put into why folks pursue abortions in the first place. Yes, sometimes it’s a convenience of the rich. But other times it feels like a necessity for the poor. So we need to include those voices and situations in our vote. How can we make abortions feel less necessary, given the complications of lower class life in America (and yes, the baby in the womb is certainly one of those voices. I’m not saying we should change our mind on the abortion issue, but that we need to also include other holistic measures of support for those who are trying to nickel and dime their way through American life)?

Fifth, Christians should be aware of government’s desire to be a totalizing force.  

I think there are a few implications to this. 

First, I actually agree with the evangelical suspicion of Big Government. But I think we need to be equally suspicious of the totalizing narratives we have surrounding politics. In his book “Political Visions and Illusions”, David T. Koyzis argues that conservatism, fascism, progressivism, libertarianism and socialism all have what he calls gnostic biases against certain aspects of humanity. Conservatives tend to idolize history while shunning historical development (effectively demonizing time and process, two aspects of creation). Fascism idolizes culture while shunning diversity. Progressivism shuns community while idolizing the individual. Socialism shuns difference while idolizing equality. Libertarians idolize freedom while shunning government. That’s an oversimplification, but I think his argument merits some thought, because I think it’s not wrong to suspect that political theories themselves can be totalizing forces. 

Second, I said above that in our country, the president is in a bit of a straight-jacket. But that’s been rapidly expanding over the past century, and I think it’s prudent to make the limits of presidential power at least one major (if not THE major) priority in how we think about future election cycles. For lazy political thinkers like me, this will be top of the list: “Which candidate do I think is most interested in democracy, and least interested in expanding the role of the POTUS?” If government is like a great consuming dragon or a seducing mother figure (see John’s Revelations), then we should expect strong men and women to rise up and try to assert that kind of authority, and we should also expect that there is some disordered feature inside of us that actually wants government to be that for us. So we need to be wary of that.

Third, and maybe most controversially, I think it’s wise to embrace political secularism, as well as a politic of religious pluralism. I’m not saying it’s *the* Christian way to do things. But I think it is not worth fighting against, as such. That might seem counterintuitive. The way to subvert secularism is to…embrace it? Well, there is secularism and there is Secularism. Secularism as a totalizing worldview is deeply flawed. But secularism and pluralism as political ideals are, at the very least, not incompatible with a Christian view of politics. That’s because government’s resolve not to endorse any state religion is, in fact, aligned with Jesus’ reproach of government as a religious entity. “Give to Caesar to Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” means, in part, that Caesar has no right make religious claims. And that is just what a secular government, and a politic of pluralism, affirms. I’ll leave it there for now, but for more on this, see Jon Inazu’s “Confident Pluralism” or Justin Dyer’s “C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law”

Fourth, we need to expect moderate goods from the government, not ultimate goods. We need, in other words, to stop apocalypticizing what government can and can’t do. When we have an “all or nothing” attitude toward government, we’ve already ceded the case to secularism. Government can’t save Christianity. It can’t destroy Christianity. It can produce modest goods, and the more we’re willing to “relativize” politics in this way, ironically, the less likely government is to become a destructive force…either for or against Christianity. So perhaps Christians should be most attracted to candidates who promise modest goods, moderate results, and realistic expectations, rather than want-to-be saviors or heralds of the new order. I’m not going to weigh in on whether it’s wise to vote for these candidates, but I do think they should be our ideal candidates, at the very least.

Finally, I think Alexis de Tocqueville was right in seeing “mediating institutions” as the virtue producing force in American life. He’s talking about the church, and other little self-gathering societies, which in the American tradition become the true cultural forces that shape and guide us. The interesting data that’s recently come out on de-churching has shown a strong correlation between folks with extreme political views and folks disconnected from strong, smaller institutions. So in a sense, the church and organizations like it are a great political force. They free us to expect only limited goods from government (see my professor’s examples of evangelicals wanting government to be an all-or-nothing unit), because we have a space where higher goods can be pursued and embodied. These institutions also throw us into the mix with  (ideally) the poor single Mom, the folks who cast their ballot for “that guy”, and people from various industries who see the way politics affects city life from their vantage point. And on the whole, it’s these institutions that enable us to strip away our idols, and enable us to see that it’s the church, ultimately, which promises the kind of moral and social transformation we most long for. Not national bureaucracies.