Election-Year Musings: Part Two

Phone calls, advertisements, and visits from candidates have heated up in my state, Colorado, and I’m sure we’ll get a steady barrage from now until November. Here are some further thoughts about Christians engaging the broader culture through politics.

3) Christians should fight their battles shrewdly.  Evangelicals do not exactly have the best track record.  On one occasion an engineer working for the Christian Broadcasting Network used satellite-transmission equipment to interrupt the Playboy Channel during its broadcast of American Ecstasy with this message: “Thus sayeth the Lord thy God. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand!”  He was later indicted by a federal grand jury. His boss Pat Robertson has made several outlandish statements over the years, including an infamous quote about the Equal Rights Amendment: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, antifamily political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

To gain the hearing of a society already skeptical about religion will take hard and careful work. We must, in Jesus’ words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues—in short, our lack of grace—may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs. Such tactics, let alone comments about hurricanes and terrorism as acts of God’s judgment, undermine the credibility of Christians engaging culture.

Meanwhile, out of the media spotlight other Christians have found creative ways to fight moral battles.  For example, Prison Fellowship International has had such success in caring for prisoners (another biblical mandate) that several governments have asked them to take over entire prisons. Another organization, International Justice Mission, tackles sexual trafficking overseas by working with local authorities. An I.J.M. representative learns about a corrupt mayor and visits his office. “We know what you are doing, getting kickbacks from a prostitution ring. And we both know that your own laws forbid that. We can handle it one of two ways. We can bring in cameras and expose you to the press. Or we can make you a hero, letting you partner with us in a public campaign to break up this ring. Your choice.”

In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. devised a creative strategy of engagement that has since been adapted to many causes.  He fused together the power of love as described in the Sermon on the Mount and Mahatma Gandhi’s method of nonviolent resistance. “Prior to reading Gandhi,” he said, “I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships.” Gandhi showed him that a movement on behalf of a moral cause could be expressed in a loving way. “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

In another shrewd tactic, Protestant Christians have recently formed alliances with Catholics, Jews, and Muslims on some issues.  All these groups share a belief in one God who has revealed moral principles we ought to live by, and in engaging culture each group has something to contribute.  Even the self-described fundamentalist Tim LaHaye agrees that “we have more in common with each other than we ever will with the secularizers of this country.”  It has become common to see Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, and evangelical pastors linking arms in protests outside abortion clinics.  These religious leaders are willing to set aside their differences in common cause because they sense a desperate need for a coherent moral vision.

4) In engaging with culture, Christians should distinguish the immoral from the illegal. Whatever his personal failings, former President Bill Clinton tried to make that distinction. As a Christian, he said, he sought guidance on moral issues from the Bible. As President of the United States, though, he could not automatically propose that everything immoral should therefore be made illegal. A well-known national columnist seized on that comment and devoted an entire column to attacking Clinton’s “situational ethics and false religiosity.”

Yet Clinton was surely right. “Thou shalt not covet” is a moral issue that ranks as one of the Ten Commandments; what government could enforce a law against coveting? Pride is a sin, perhaps the worst sin, but can we make pride illegal? Jesus summed up the Old Testament law in the command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”; what human authority could police such a commandment?

Christians have the obligation to obey God’s commands but it does not automatically follow that we should enact those moral commands into law.  Not even Calvin’s Geneva would dare adopt the legal code of the Sermon on the Mount.  The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But—often with tears in their eyes—they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

An Alabama Supreme Court chief justice made headlines a few years ago when he defied authority by installing a 5,280 pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. The Ten Commandments constitute a bedrock on which laws should be based, he explained. As a Christian I too accept the Ten Commandments as a God-given rule for life, especially since Jesus repeated all but one (the Sabbath). Yet as I stared at a news photo of the judge standing beside his monument, it struck me that only two of the ten (“You shall not murder” and “You shall not steal”) are illegal. The other eight, regardless how important, no pluralistic society can codify into law.

Christians are currently debating the pros and cons of gay rights—a moral issue, as both sides would agree. A few decades ago the Church of England debated an issue with close parallels: divorce. The Bible has far more to say about the sanctity of marriage and the wrongness of divorce than it says about homosexuality.  C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large.  Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

5) The church must use caution in its dealings with the state. Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. Society needs the restraint offered by religion, and the state welcomes it as long as it can call the shots.

In Russia, Stalin required the church to grant the state full control over religious instruction, seminary education, and the appointment of bishops. In China today the communist government pays the salaries of official Three-Self pastors, a way of keeping them under its thumb. However, the church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm’s length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

In contrast to the world’s normal pattern, Christians exalt individuals but view institutions warily.  Jesus left his followers the command to make disciples from all nations.  We can baptize, teach, and hold accountable individuals, but not a government, school, or court system. We have no mandate to “Christianize” the United States or any other country—an impossible goal in any case.

Reinhold Niebuhr drew a contrast between the individual and the institution. Institutions cannot really express love; justice is as close as they come.  While in medical school, a doctor friend of mine heard an address with the memorable title “The Doctor, the Clergy, and the Prostitute.”  All three, said the speaker, have in common a commitment to value the individual above the society.  The prostitute honors her client’s desires despite the stigma society puts on her; the doctor treats venereal disease and gunshot wounds no matter how they were acquired; the clergy bars no sinner from the confessional booth.

A news event in 1995 shocked both sides in the culture war controversy. Norma Leah McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” in the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case of 1973, converted to Christ, got baptized, and joined the pro-life campaign. Most astoundingly, it was the director of Operation Rescue who assisted her.  Yet as she tells the story, the change came about when that director stopped treating her like an antagonist and treated her like a person.  He apologized for publicly calling her “baby-killer” and started spending time with her on her smoking breaks. Later, McCorvey accepted an invitation to church from a seven-year-old girl whose mother also worked at Operation Rescue. Pro-abortion forces had dismissed McCorvey—her dubious record of drug-dealing, alcohol and lesbianism made bad public relations—but Christian leaders took the time to counsel her in the faith, keeping her out of the public spotlight for half a year. “Ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts,” says McCorvey now. “A Christian witness is the biggest tool in effecting change.”

When the church accepts as its main goal the reform of the broader culture, we risk obscuring the gospel of grace and becoming one more power broker.  In the process, the gospel itself changes, for civil religion tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. “To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion,” cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Civil religion would never elect as its leaders a cowardly traitor and a violent human rights abuser, but those men, Peter and Paul, are the ones God chose to carry the message of grace to the world.  Civil religion invites us to share in a nation’s military glory; the gospel calls us to take up a cross. Civil religion offers prestige and influence; the gospel calls us to serve. Civil religion rewards success; the gospel forgives failure.  Civil religion values respectability; the gospel calls us to be “fools for Christ.”

During the Brezhnev era at the height of the Cold War, Billy Graham visited Russia and met with government and church leaders. Conservatives in the West harshly criticized him for treating the Russians with such courtesy and respect. He should have taken on a more prophetic role, they said, condemning the abuses of human rights and religious liberty. One of his critics said, “Dr. Graham, you have set the church back fifty years!” Graham lowered his head and replied, “I am deeply ashamed.  I have been trying very hard to set the church back 2,000 years.”