Is the church distracted from its mission by seeking to influence politics? Or has it not been engaged enough? Three leaders, from three generations, debate the role church leaders should play.
Homespun wisdom says that neither religion nor politics should be discussed in polite company. But what about religion and politics? This incendiary mix was the focus of a three-way discussion at the most recent National Pastors Convention in San Diego. While the conversation was polite, the panelist’s divergent perspectives made for an at times tense engagement.
Seeing Charles Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne together (p. 21) illustrates their differing positions on faith and politics. Colson, in coat and tie, is a model of establishment propriety. Boyd, in blue jeans and a blazer, is informally relevant. Claiborne, in frayed dungarees and dreadlocks, places himself on the social margins.
Here are excerpts from their conversation, moderated by Krista Tippett, host of “Speaking of Faith,” a program produced by American Public Media and broadcast on National Public Radio.
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Chuck Colson: The cover of Newsweek called 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.” The evangelical vote was actually decisive for Jimmy Carter in that election. Christians had been in the fundamentalist hinterlands through most of the twentieth century. They stayed out of the political limelight. They didn’t want to contaminate themselves, which was wrong. I don’t think you can leave your moral convictions behind when you enter the voting booth. It was the abortion issue among other things that suddenly riveted the attention of Christians onto the public arena.
But things dramatically changed from ’76 through the mid-eighties. I think now we’re maturing. I think we’ve gotten out of that adolescent stage of being a power bloc or a special interest group. We’re taking a much more sophisticated look at what it means to be a Christian in public life today.
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Greg Boyd: In the early nineties, I went to a megachurch celebration on the Fourth of July. They sang patriotic songs. They displayed a cross and a flag together, and then they showed a video with patriotic music and a military general describing how God had given the U.S. the victory in the first Gulf War. At the end, four fighter jets in formation flew over three crosses. It freeze framed there and “God Bless America” appeared. The crowd stood up and cheered. I started crying. Then before the 2004 election, I was getting an unprecedented amount of pressure, as I think most pastors of large churches were, to steer the flock in a certain way politically. So I did a six-part sermon series called “The Cross and the Sword.”
Wilberforce was fighting slavery in Parliament at the same time he was writing books about spiritual renewal and holiness.
I explained that Christians are not here to rally around America or any other country; we’re to rally around the kingdom of God. I told them why we’re not to jump on a political bandwagon. Good, honest, and Bible believing people can have the same values but translate them into politics in different ways. Our job is to focus on living out the kingdom. That’s our one bull’s eye, our one duty to God. And we should let the politics take care of itself. Some people were absolutely aghast. About a thousand people left the church, about 20 percent.
I believe we are to transform the world. Absolutely, that’s the call. Ours isn’t a privatized faith. But the way you do it from a kingdom perspective is very different from the way you do it from the world’s perspective. We’re to bleed, we’re to sacrifice, we’re to replicate Calvary.
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Shane Claiborne: Jesus had plenty of political options—to flee society and go into the hills or to fight with the zealots—but he was very peculiar in how he was political. In all of our hunger and drive to be culturally relevant, we can lose the distinctiveness of the values and upside-down rationality of the kingdom of God.
What if people looked at Christians and were like Wait. Why are they driving their cars off vegetable oil? And we say, “Because we love the Creator, and we believe that we should care for the earth.” We should be helping the poor. We should be working in prisons.
Colson: I’m listening to Shane and agreeing with everything he just said, particularly because he recognizes we need to be engaged in the moral issues of the day. Shane mentioned we should be working in the prisons, and that’s where I spent my life. What drove me there was the massive sense of injustice in the way we were treating a lot of people in prison. And I ended up addressing state legislatures across the country. Had I followed Greg’s advice, I would have just “tended to the kingdom” and felt good about my relationship with Jesus.
If Martin Luther King had followed that advice, we wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights Movement. I don’t mean to take harsh issue with you, Greg, but just “tending to the kingdom and letting politics take care of itself” is exactly what the slave owners said during the Civil War. Bonhoeffer stood against Hitler. Thank God he did.
Wilberforce stood up on the floor of Parliament against the slave trade in England and fought a twenty-year battle. He was fighting moral issues at the same time he was writing books about spiritual renewal and holiness.
Christians may have all the right political answers and still be mean… We can learn to disagree well.
Boyd: It’s not an issue of whether or not we should engage moral evil and politics, but is it our primary job? It’s not the main job of the church to be running the government or to influence legislation. The main job is to live out the kingdom. I feel like some Christians put the political cart before the kingdom horse.
Christians in America differ very, very little from the broader American culture. We’re almost indistinguishable. I’m focused on getting my congregation to live out radical kingdom principles 24/7. If we get that done, I think we’ll have a lot of clarity about how to engage the culture, including politics.
Augustine told an abbot one time, “Love God and do what you please,” because if you love God, everything else is going to follow. I would say, love God and vote as you please. Because if you’re really loving God, your politics will take care of itself.
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Claiborne: What I love about Jesus is he wasn’t just offering a political platform or agenda; he embodies what he values. He’s born a baby refugee in the middle of a genocide. He lives struggle. So I think we need new political heroes and she-roes. Mother Teresa is one of those for me.
I worked with her in Calcutta. She’s done so much toward decreasing abortions and honoring life from the cradle to the grave, but it wasn’t because she went around wearing a prolife t-shirt. She lived it. Like she said, “If you don’t want your baby, you can give it to me.”
I’m prolife, which is why I don’t want abortions and I don’t want war. But that also means that I have an obligation to figure out what to do when a 14-year-old girl on my block gets pregnant, which happened. You can have all the right answers and great rhetoric, but what we’re really hungry for is a Christianity that has substance, that embodies the gospel.
Colson: There is a fine balance that no one has articulated better than Augustine in The City of God. He would be the last one to say we shouldn’t engage in politics. He would say our first task is to build the kingdom, but in the course of building the kingdom, we care deeply about the moral condition of the society in which we live. Christians have always done this. Women’s rights were pushed by the church in Rome in the third century, which is one reason the church grew so rapidly. They elevated the role of women in the church, and Roman culture followed. As you go back through the centuries, Christians have always engaged the political process when human rights and the sanctity of life have been involved.
Boyd: You’re right; they were for life and women’s rights, and the church did grow. But they did it by being the kingdom, not by being political. In fact, for the most part in the early church, they discouraged believers from serving in government. They saw it as of the devil. It was after the church acquired political power that Augustine authorized the state to start persecuting heretics. And that was the first time violence started being done in Jesus’ name. That’s when Christian history started getting ugly, and it brought defamation to the name of Christ.
Colson: That was a mistake. We’ve made many mistakes, and we correctly repent of those mistakes. But that doesn’t mean you don’t keep trying to get it right.
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Claiborne: I’ve got a great friend and teacher named Tony Campolo out in Philadelphia. And one of the things that he always says is mixing church and state is like combining ice cream and horse manure. It may not do much damage to the manure, but it’s sure going to mess up the ice cream. And I think that’s what we’ve seen. Christianity is at its worst when we fuse it with the state.
George W. Bush on Ellis Island in 2002 said, “The ideals of America are the hope of mankind. This light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.” That’s very dangerous theology. But to be fair, Barack Obama on The David Letterman Show this year said, “This country is the last great hope of the planet.” And that’s very dangerous theology too.
I think we know what the hope of the world is, and it’s much better than any presidential candidate.
Boyd: [To Claiborne] I don’t know where you got the title of your book, Jesus for President, but I love the title because what I find is that Christians confess “Jesus is Lord,” but we don’t have lords anymore. So the word gets packed with whatever meaning you want to give it. But we do have a president, and as kingdom citizens Jesus is our only president.
We ought to quit confessing Jesus as Lord and start confessing Jesus as President. Whoever may be president of this country doesn’t matter; my real President is Jesus Christ, and I’ll take my marching orders from him. So great job on the title.
Claiborne: It’s just as radical to say “Jesus is my Commander-in-Chief” today as it was to say “Jesus is Lord” two thousand years ago.
Boyd: You owe me on that book endorsement. (Laughter.)
Colson: Let me add one thing to that. C.S. Lewis wrote a wonderful essay about Christian patriotism. He said it is not wrong to love your country, because God has called you to love your neighbors. Aquinas said the same thing about military service. He said someone who serves to defend the innocent is acting out of Christian love. So I don’t think you can simply forget the fact that we live in a kingdom and a state. Our job is to make the state as righteous and as conformed to God’s standards as possible. But you can love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and also love your country as a way of loving your neighbor.
Boyd: [To Colson] This is a real fundamental difference between us. In your book you speak a lot about our dual commitments, our dual allegiances to God and to country. I just don’t know where in the New Testament you get that. I can’t imagine Jesus or Paul saying such a thing. God tells us to obey the laws of the land as much as possible and to pray for peace. Those are our two engagements. But I don’t feel we have any kind of duty to love or defend our country.
Colson: The New Testament is pretty clear that you render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and render to God what is God’s. It’s also clear that you are to respect the authorities because they are appointed by God to wield the sword in order for us to live peaceable lives. So government has a role biblically. A military man takes an oath to support the Constitution because it’s God’s ordained instrument to preserve order. And without order you’ve got chaos.
Claiborne: Dorothy Day once said, “If we’ve given to God what is God’s, there’s not much left for Caesar.” It’s easy to miss the point of what Jesus is saying here. I think he’s spinning everything on its head and calling into question what really is Caesar’s. Caesar can imprint a piece of metal with his picture. Fine, give it back to him. But I think Jesus is saying, “God made humanity; humanity bears God’s image. Caesar has no right to that.”
Boyd: With regard to Romans 13, it’s important to realize that the chapter divisions weren’t in the original, so we have to read it in the light of Romans 12. And there Paul says never return evil with evil. If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat. If he’s thirsty, give him something to drink. Never exact vengeance. Two verses later God uses government to exact vengeance. But he expressly forbids us from ever doing that. And therein lies the separation of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world.
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Colson: When I first came to Christ, a small group of five men discipled me. One of them was Harold Hughes. He was a liberal Democrat, anti-Vietnam War, an opponent of Richard Nixon. He heard me give my testimony one night. He said to me, “I’ve just listened to you. You love Christ; I love Christ. We’re brothers. I’ll stand with you anywhere.” He embraced me. All through Watergate and the years that followed, he helped me get started. We were best friends. Yet we probably never voted for the same candidate.
Christians don’t march lockstep into the ballot box. But certain issues demand that we get involved. Now there is a respectable tradition that says we should just stand back, be an alternative community, let the world see a better way. That’s an honest difference of opinion that’s gone on for hundreds of years. I happen to belong to more of a Niebuhr school that says we are to make an impact for Christ in how we live our lives in challenging the political systems. But you can still be an evangelical and come from either one of these traditions.
Claiborne: If there’s anything I’ve learned from both conservatives and liberals, it’s that you can have all the right political answers and still be mean. And nobody wants to listen to you if you’re mean. One of the things that we can do is learn to disagree well. I think there is a new conversation happening within evangelicalism in post-religious-right America that is much healthier. We can actually learn to disagree well.
Boyd: What’s really amazing in the Gospels is that Jesus chooses Simon, a zealot, as one of his disciples. Zealots were political revolutionaries. They used violence when necessary. Then he chooses Matthew, a tax collector, a defender of the status quo. The difference between those two is greater than that between Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh. In fact, zealots sometimes assassinated tax collectors. But Jesus calls them both to be his disciples, and we don’t hear one word about it. That tells me that having Christ in common is to render inconsequential all the opinions we have about politics. When Jesus is President, those things become of secondary importance.
Charles Colson has a long history of political involvement dating back to his role serving President Nixon and later serving seven months in prison for the Watergate scandal. He is a strong proponent of Christians engaging the political arena, and the author of God and Government: An Inside View on the Boundaries Between Faith and Politics (Zondervan, 2007).
Gregory Boyd is pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’s leery of Christians who indiscriminately synchronize their faith with any political ideology—a viewpoint articulated in his book The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church (Zondervan, 2007).
Shane Claiborne is a founding member of The Simple Way, a new monastic community in Philadelphia. With an emphasis on seeking justice for the poor, Claiborne advances an incarnate form of political engagement that is embodied in one’s local setting. He is the coauthor of Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (Zondervan, 2008).
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