I remember my answer to his question jumping out of my mouth before I knew where it came from or really what it meant: "If the Christianity has nothing to say about Civil Rights, then I don't want to be a Christian."
That statement came from a sense of justice rooted somewhere deep in my gut, but it's not something I have believed for most of my life. I have much more often taken the stance that faith informs our politics, but it does not dictate them. The church teaches us the way of Jesus, and we bring these teachings with us wherever we go, even into the voting booth. But it is not the church's place to tell us what God believes about school vouchers or the estate tax or agricultural subsidies. Certainly Jesus' teaching did not focus on issues like these.
Case in point, I once sparked a long email exchange with a former pastor of mine about a sign explaining "why we buy fair trade coffee" which hung in our church. I felt it was inappropriate for us to endorse something that was tinged with political activism, something that not everyone agrees is an effective means of helping the poor. My pastor was thoughtful and open, and his textured response included this: "I believe we Christians must strongly resist an abstract faith, an abstracted faith, a faith that is spiritualized and removed from the concrete situation of the world and its attending social realities." I chewed on this for a while, but ultimately I rejected it.
With this background I moved to DC in 2009, and somewhat haphazardly stepped into an inter-denominational church community with Mennonite roots. There I found a melting pot of people with views on social justice and the political implications of the Christian faith that I had never encountered before. I heard America's military actions and Arizona's controversial immigration law decried from the pulpit. I met people who are passionate about the ideas of Jim Wallis, John Yoder, N.T. Wright, and Wendell Berry. I was introduced for the first time to the idea that the evangelical emphasis on the cross as Christ's ministry's sole purpose has robbed the church of his ministry's fuller meaning: a radical revolution of the social structure of Jesus' day. Whereas the tradition I grew up in focused on Christ as teacher and eternal Saviour, the tradition I stepped into focused on him as healer and instigator of God's kingdom on earth (with a great many present, active implications for the culture, justice, and yes politics of our age).
As a result, my faith is once again bending. Each week I am challenged by this community to hear Jesus' teaching in different ways, to scrape off the old, comfortable interpretations I have of scripture and read it anew again. I'm not about to go out tomorrow and start preaching liberation theology (I am often surprised by how little this community focuses the teachings of Paul which are so crucial to the Presbyterian convictions I am familiar with), but I know I have much to learn from the social justice tradition. I'm reading, asking, listening, debating (sometimes arguing) my way through it, and I can feel my perspectives shift as I do.
So should churches openly support the Civil Rights Act? Compassionate immigration reform? Isolationist foreign policy? Fair Trade coffee? I don't know. All I can say is my answer used to be "no," and now it's not. But my answer to the bigger question—"Who is this Jesus?"—continues to gather complexity, nuance, texture, and I hope, truth.
At the very least, it's nice to have a counterweight to the more common view of churches (and Christianity in general) as being solely pro-Capitalist, anti-gay/abortion organizations. Even if one doesn't fully buy into the Jim Wallis approach, it's good to be reminded that Jesus' teachings are much more wide-reaching than we often see in our political discourse.
ReplyDeleteVery thought provoking. I've recently been thinking more about the possibility that our doctrine, religious or political, isn't as important as who we are becoming. It is much easier to disagree with Christians who clearly believe what they believe out of compassion and humility. When our actions are only a reflection of that kind of heart, it seems acceptable to try to live out justice and mercy in a real way. What becomes hard to stomach is when faith is used as some sort of justification for pride and quarreling.
ReplyDeleteAmen to both you guys!
ReplyDeleteI don't have any answers, but this was an awesome post.
ReplyDeleteThanks, friend.
ReplyDeleteAwesome honesty Justin. It's interesting though, I think I've been moving in the opposite direction. The more I think about social justice the less I think Jesus cares about it. Social justice certainly matters. I think the Civil Rights movement in America gave a road map for the exciting things happening even in the Middle East today. But freedom of speech, racial equality, even immigration reform matter significantly less than a humble reliance on Jesus.
ReplyDeleteI think we should engage in civic life. But even thought we are in this world, we are not of it. Though you might need hear that if you just read my blog :)
I hardly think spreading justice is being "of the world."
ReplyDeleteGreat Post. Remember Chip Sweeny? He just published a book called A New Kind of Big that has been getting a lot of attention. It's not quite on this subject but you ought to check it out.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it is. But I think that being the main focus of a church is. The Gospel should be the focus, with social justice being an extension of that. I think we agree and are just talking past each other on this one.
ReplyDeleteJustin, thanks for sharing another part of your journey. You hold your convictions so strongly, but with enough humility and desire for truth that you bend them as you see clearer a picture of God.
ReplyDeleteTo enter the conversation with you and Harrison, I think you can't separate the two. The Gospel centers on Christ's death as a propitiation for our sins, but concludes with His resurrection as the inauguration of His kingdom, and if we are agents of His kingdom, shouldn't we work for truth, and justice, and against prejudice -- all built on the hope of the Gospel -- that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us? I believe the danger comes when swing too far either way, either only caring for people's physical needs and forgetting their ultimate need for a savior, or we neglect compassion and forget that God couldn't be more concerned with physicality, that He sent his very son to earth as flesh and blood.
Justin, this post reflects what is so great about your blog and why I enjoy reading. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI think Austin's remarks cut to the central point: what exactly is the gospel? If the gospel is only about our future domain, then perhaps engagement with the social orders and ills of the world as it is are secondary. However, if the gospel is (as Dallas Willard puts it so well) "entering the kingdom of God now," then the gospel concerns itself with everything the kingdom of God cares about. The gospel includes the wide terrain of everything that was ruined by the Fall and everything that God intends to refashion in New Creation.
Of course, this does little to help answer the question of exactly when and where and how the Church engages particular questions. I think this is trickier, and we need to walk circumspectly so that our gospel witness is not merely co-opted by the spirit of the age (i.e. if you're conservative evangelical, the political issue of abortion is the imperative but if you're mainline liberal, the political issue of war is the imperative, etc.). However, I don't think we have the option of simply relegating ethics to a secondary matter and suggesting the gospel's only prime concern is about where souls end up when they die. My hunch is that navigating this requires time and discernment and wisdom and history and the acknowledgment that we are most often looking through a glass darkly and recognizing that we'll make some massive blunders, yet praying all the while that indeed the Spirit really is guiding the Church. Also I think local communities will make local decisions that need not rise to the bar of "thus says the Lord..." but are simply concrete attempts to reflect a Kingdom value in this moment. (Perhaps the fair trade coffee deal fits in that category).
Great post, Justin. Thank you.
Good words. Thanks guys.
ReplyDeleteI thought about my comment this morning, and I want to be clear that I'm not saying a strong conviction on abortion or war is "the spirit of the age." I'm not keen on either. I was suggesting that most all of us have certain political convictions that we consider imperative implications of Christian teaching. This is both (1) true - I think there are necessary ethical implications of the gospel, and (2) cause for careful thought and action, asking ourselves if the gospel is driving the cause or the cause is driving our "gospel."
ReplyDeleteI like that these ideas cut down to: do Christians all have to believe the same basic things (especially politically), and how verbal should they be about those things? In our 8th Grade Bible class I remember the "You will know them by their fruit" lesson. Since then, I've often felt that Christians have used that verse as a free pass to start deciding who are Christians and who aren't, using political views as the "fruit". For example, can the very devout Anne Lammott be accepted into the club when she is so clearly liberal? I am challenged by (and attracted to) the notion that God can be speaking and working with and through groups of people whose beliefs seem so diverse as to be irreconcilable; yet they are bound together by their love of Jesus. I like the idea of churches supporting the causes they believe are right, as long as they are ok with the fact that the church down the street may completely disagree. Diversity in the body of Christ keeps us questioning our convictions in a good way.
ReplyDeleteEmma, I think you've cut to one of the most difficult things about faith and politics for me: I despise it when people feel God has endorsed their particular political platform over others'. The twisting of the fruit passage you mention, from a call to action into a call to agree with someone's politics, is a tragedy in my opinion. But this is the conflict I was trying to get at in this post; if as a result the church avoids political questions and implications altogether, we end up a with an "abstract" faith like my pastor suggested. And in the opinion of many Christians who I currently live and worship with, this is a corruption of the Gospel, which they see as possessing a present, active, and crucial social and political message.
ReplyDeleteJustin, I really loved this post. Thank you for sharing your journey.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! Glad you enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteWhen a church as in a denomination with buildings and deacons and pastors making decisions like "First Presbyterian likes fair trade coffee!" are they taking a congregation-wide vote? I think part of the problem (and I hope this isn't being redundant) is that churches making political statements are making assumptions about the beliefs of their congregations. If the real church is the messy bunch of Christians themselves, I'm not sure how any one can make such broad (non-bible based) assumptions unless they are very homogeneous.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I suppose the sign was more of an explanation of why the church's leadership made the decision to buy Free Trade coffee, as opposed to church-wide endorsement.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe that I've waited this long to read your blog. I guess self-absorption or busyness or something else bad could be my excuse. No matter. I really enjoyed reading your thoughts today from "God's Politics". I can say that my working theology - on many fronts - is very different than it was 40 years ago... something about which I am glad. I suspect to experience a great deal more internal change before I take my last breath. My eyes are on the horizon of 'being ruined for normal by the really, really good news of Jesus Christ' and that may take me places I never suspected. But thanks for sharing your thoughts...
ReplyDeleteGreat to have you here, Mr. M! I fully expect my theology to change until I die.
ReplyDelete