The Church and Political Action

MALCOLM NYGRENMalcolm Nygren is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Champaign, Illinois. He holds the A.B. from Hanover College and the B.D. from McCormick Seminary.

One Thursday at 8 P.M. ministers and laymen from two churches of the same denomination were meeting in separate places. They were moved by the same concern: racism and its results. But their purposes were quite different.

Leaders from Grace Church met with their counterparts from a black congregation to plan a tutoring program. Volunteers from the two churches would work together to help children who were being hurt by racial divisions. They know that the help they can give is small compared with the magnitude of the problem, but they do not let this discourage them. They are motivated more by compassion than by crusading zeal. Their model is the Good Samaritan, who helped the wounded man simply because his help was needed.

Memorial Church people have more ambitious goals. Their intent is not just to help a few people but to change the whole structure of the community. As one step they are meeting with black leaders to plan a demonstration at a city council meeting. They are convinced that political action is the only way the Church can count for anything in today’s society. They take their pattern from the fiery prophets of the Old Testament, not the compassionate Samaritan.

Two very different kinds of activism are open to today’s Church. Discussion does not end with the assertion that the Church must be in the world ministering to people. That only opens a new set of questions. What should the Church do in the world? The Church has historically made education, medical help, other ministries of compassion an integral part of its mission. Is political action the contemporary counterpart of this kind of Christian service?

Along with the distinction between political action and acts of compassion to individuals, another distinction must be made. It is between the Christian Church and the Christians who make up the Church. The Church is not a collective Christian. Acts that are appropriate for churches (administration of the sacrements, for example) are not always appropriate for individual Christians. Conversely, the responsibilities of Christians are not always the responsibility of their church.

There can be little doubt that Christians (or at least many Christians) are called to be active in politics. That is where large changes in society are made. The Good Samaritan didn’t make the Jericho road safe for travelers. Perhaps another man was beaten and left for dead within hours of his act of mercy. Political action would have been necessary to make the road safe. But is this responsibility of Christians also the responsibility of their church? Should the Church, which is involved in binding up men’s wounds, turn to political action to keep them from being wounded?

The answer is that it must not. When the Church tries to become a political leader, it harms both its own mission and the world it seeks to help. This is the more tragic because its acts are usually well-intended, and performed by devout and compassionate men.

The decision to feed someone who is hungry or to teach someone who is being punished by his lack of learning is relatively uncomplicated. More than anything else it requires commitment to God’s service or compassion for his children. Commitment and compassion are woven through the Church’s life. The Church has no life apart from them, and it has the full support of its Lord in expressing them.

A decision about admitting Red China to the United Nations, on the other hand, requires much more than commitment and compassion. It requires complex judgments about the effects of the act, whether it will be likely to increase peace and understanding among nations. What special ability does the Church have to make this kind of decision?

The Church can with confidence present what Princeton professor Paul Ramsey calls “middle axioms.” Political decisions aren’t made intuitively. They come at the end of a chain of decisions about what goals should be sought and what means will lead to them. The chain begins with an assessment of how things are. The middle step is a judgment of how they should be. The Church, in seeking to know and express the will of God, has an authentic word to offer about what the world should be. But in the final step, choosing and carrying out the means to make this kind of world, the Church’s judgment is no better than anyone else’s. Clergymen are not better statesmen than laymen, and church councils have no special abilities in statecraft that are denied to others.

The Church’s record in political action is altogether too mixed for anyone to believe it offers superior guidance. The American Civil War split the denominations into rival groups, each confidently announcing, “Thus saith the Lord.…” Presbyterians are likely to point with pride to John Witherspoon, the clergyman who signed the Declaration of Independence. They don’t mention those congregations that fled with their pastors to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Yet the descendants of those Tory Christians don’t view their ancestors as heretics who failed to see the political implications of their faith.

John Calvin is a remarkable example of both a Christian intellect and a political activist. Yet it is in his political statements that he is most clearly the creature of his time. He identified three forms of civil government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. His judgment about them seems strange to us now. “I am far from denying that the form which greatly surpasses the other,” he wrote, “is aristocracy.” Although his statement is understandable in the light of his time, it doesn’t encourage us to believe that he knew God’s mind about the mechanics of government.

The German church of the 1930s is sometimes cited as an example of the dire results of political inaction. “If only the German church had opposed Hitler instead of remaining quiet,” the argument runs, “how much better the world would have been.” It is a compelling argument, but it has two flaws.

First, it assumes that if the German church had been politically active, it would have opposed the Nazi movement. That is an enormous assumption. Churches have often in good conscience supported evil political movements. The czars were supported by a church. Their Communist successors receive the same support from the successors to that church. It won’t do to dismiss such Christians as self-serving. They are likely no more or less so than other men. Because churches lack political omniscience, there is no more reason to believe that the German churches saw through the Nazi lie than to believe that the German people as a whole did.

The second flaw in the argument is its childishly simple view of the whole Nazi event. Hitler was the product not of a moment of madness but of a decade of anarchy. By the time he seized power, the question was not whether Germany would have a dictator; rather, it was which dictator it would have. For years the country had endured the agony of lawlessness, rioting in the streets, burning, and sabotage. Life had become almost unbearable. No nation can tolerate anarchy for very long. It always chooses order in the end—any kind of order. Anarchy inevitably leads to tyranny.

If we are to put the burden of failure on the German church, then the reason must be not only that it did not actively oppose Nazism but also that it took no active role to prevent the anarchy that resulted in Hitler. But this is a political question with which the Church is poorly equipped to deal. The Church has always had trouble distinguishing between freedom and anarchy.

Indeed, it may well be that there was little hope of interrupting the chain of events that led to the rise of Hitler once the Versailles Treaty had been signed. That treaty stripped Germany of both its economic security and its self-respect. After that, the opportunities for averting the slide into anarchy that led to the terrible events of the thirties were limited. But who could hope that the Church would clearly have seen that danger, or have been able to do anything about it?

If political decisions are complex and difficult, they are no more so for churches than for others, of course. Nor are they decisions that must be left to the experts, or avoided because they may be made wrongly. Christians must make responsible political decisions and take the risk of being mistaken. But should the Church intervene in these decisions? This in no way lessens the risk. The Church has no special competence to offer; it will not make the decisions more accurately than individuals. And there are valid reasons why responsibility for political action lies with Christians but not with their church.

Between the Church that expresses its concern for the world in its acts of compassionate service and the one that chooses political action, there is a wide difference in opinion about the Church as a servant. Political leadership casts the Church in the role of master. The fear that the Church and its leaders may not count for much in the world is no doubt one of the sources of the longing for political leadership.

The temptation is the one Jesus faced when on a high mountain he was offered the world’s kingdoms. He warned against the longing for power when he told his disciples, “You must be ready to wash one another’s feet.” When the Church seeks political power, it puts itself in grave danger. More than once the Christian Church has held political power, and the result has always been disastrous for the faith. From medieval times until the Reformation, the political activism of the Church was at its zenith. Bishops and abbots ruled as nobles, and the Church had the power to humble kings. No one would pretend that these were times of which Christians should be proud. Whenever the Church seeks power, it pays for it. Whether it is a congregation forcing its will on a city council or a national church able to dominate a country, the Church buys its power by selling its faith.

Political action in the Church provides a useful disguise for hostility. It gives sanction to anger by disguising it as righteousness. Strangely, in a day when ecumenism is so much in fashion that no man would question another’s religious beliefs, it is quite acceptable to denounce his political ones as unchristian. When the Church becomes a political force it inevitably divides Christians from one another, for it labels as unchristian whoever will not espouse its particular cause.

The Pharisees used every possible device to put Jesus in just this position. Jews were deeply divided over the Roman occupation. When Jesus was asked about paying taxes to Rome, his enemies were trying to get him to choose one side and alienate the other. With great adroitness he refused to do so. He would not judge a man’s faith by his politics.

Ministers are under this same kind of pressure. One temptation is simply to choose the majority side and get along without the others. But the minister’s other temptation is to feel virtuous about having offended nearly everyone. One can even be proud of failure as a pastor if it is possible to believe that it is the price he must pay for superior righteousness.

Not long ago I went to lunch with three other ministers. One of them said his church had a fund that would pay for our lunch. (That’s remarkable enough by itself to make the story worth telling.) Another responded, “You must not be preaching the Gospel if your church has any money.” It was said as a joke, but only partly as a joke. Behind it was the thought that a real church was one that had cut itself off from all but a handful of people. And this from a pastor whose church had only shortly before said that its mission was reconciliation!

It is unfortunate when a man is unable to accept a church’s creed and must be cut off from the company of Christians. It is tragic when the creed he can’t accept is not a religious statement but a political one. The dimensions of the tragedy become dreadfully apparent when we realize that the political statement that excludes him is no more likely to be right than anyone else’s political statement.

The charge is often made today that the Church is irrelevant, that people don’t see anything important in what it says. The truth may be quite different: not that the Christian Gospel doesn’t matter to modern man, but that modern man simply doesn’t believe the Church.

Although people talk far more about other things, the questions that trouble them most deeply are theological questions. People are searching for a sense of identity. They are anxious to know who they are. Many are unable to find a purpose for living. The very foundations of ethics and behavior are in question. These are not new questions to the Christian faith. They are the things that make up the New Testament. The question is not whether these questions matter but whether the Church’s response can be trusted, whether its word is credible.

The credibility of the Word is always weakened when the Church extends it beyond its intended bounds. Earlier in the century the Church was shaken by Darwinism. The Bible had been presented as an infallible geology textbook, and when the claim was called into question everything else in the Word was questioned too. Pope Paul’s statements about birth control have done more to shake the faith of Catholics in the credibility of the Word than anything else in this decade. Darwin could indeed be wrong and Pope Paul could be right, but many responsible Christians think otherwise. If the Church is wrong about this, they ask, can we believe what it says about anything? The credibility of the Word should not be tested on such uncertain ground.

When the Church ventures into endorsement and activism in specific political programs, the credibility of the Word rests on the church’s judgment in these matters. Is it any wonder that people wonder how much that Word can be believed?

Not only do political activism and active ministries of compassion entail two different views of the Church; they also look at men differently. Compassion looks at suffering individuals. Political action deals with masses of men. The political church is the child of our age. It correctly senses that political power and mass action are the order of the day. It fails in compassion for men who long to be treated as individuals.

The most agonizing fact about contemporary society is that it is a mass society. A great deal of student rebellion is a reaction to the sheer size and impersonality of our universities. Students and faculty are shuttled about as though they were goods in a warehouse. But that is not their plight alone. The friendly store-owner from whom our fathers bought goods has been replaced by the vast merchandizing complexes of today. One result is an abundance of goods, cheaply priced and readily available. A less welcome result is that men and women have become that faceless creature, the consumer. We know that the goods are made not for us but for an average derived from a survey. The art of politics has changed, too. The voter increasingly casts his ballot for a face on a television screen and a handful of press releases.

We don’t want to be lost in the teeming hordes of men. It bothers us when someone mispronounces our name. Perhaps we half fear that we may not really exist: that there is only society, and not us.

Is the Church also to treat us as though we didn’t exist? To act as though the word “relevant” did not mean, important to you and me, but only, important to society? Will religion be one more dehumanizing force in a world where men and women are being crowded out of existence?

The combination of Church and politics always makes bad politics and bad religion. Bad politics because it gives the force of “thus saith the Lord” to judgments no better than anyone else’s. Bad religion because it appeals to men’s pride and hostility, because it undermines the credibility of the Word, because it fails to understand our need to be treated as real people.

A Christian bricklayer may find his attitude toward his work changed by the Church, but he shouldn’t expect it to tell him how to lay bricks. The Church shouldn’t tell him how to vote, either, nor present political programs to him as though they were the will of God.

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