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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Questions of faith in a political season Andrew C. Thompson, Jan 22, 2008
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
People around the country have watched the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary with great interest. Super Tuesday is just around the corner, when the presidential candidates of both the Democratic and Republican parties will run the gauntlet of primaries held all over the country.
Intriguing candidates, from Barack Obama to Ron Paul, have made this presidential campaign more interesting than usual by generating bi-partisan and cross-generational interest.
The presidential campaign has also focused on how faith and politics intersect in public life. Some candidates, of course, have to deal with these issues more than they’d like. Mormon Mitt Romney faces distrust from many Christian voters because of his faith. Others think Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee lets his faith influence his policy positions too much.
But the intersection of faith and political views is something that all Christians are called to examine closely, if only because ties to both church and country run so deeply. And of course, both God and nation have certain claims on our lives.
Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was one of the most articulate voices in the 20th century arguing for Christians’ primary allegiance to Jesus over everything else—including nation.
In his book, The Priestly Kingdom, Yoder wrote, “if we claim for democracy the status of a [unique] social institution... we shall inflate ourselves and destroy our neighbors through the demonic demands of the claims we make of our system and we shall pollute our Christian faith by making of it a civil religion.”
Those words, written well over 20 years ago, seem prophetic in light of our misadventures in Iraq over the past few years.
Christians of goodwill in our church can disagree over the best course of action to take given the present circumstances in Iraq, but few of us thought about the invasion back in 2003 in terms of what would be the most Christian course of action to take. Most Americans then were concerned with our national interest, which Yoder regards as a wholly different moral value from anything you find in Christian ethics.
Yoder is no opponent of democracy as a form of self-government. If anything, his Mennonite faith has a more democratic history than our Methodist one. His critique of most American Protestants comes not on whether they should advocate for democracy, but rather on whether they should advocate for their country over their Savior.
A friend once wrote to me with the question, “Why can’t it be God and country?” And that’s a fair question. The difficulty for us in the church is that there are inevitably issues where allegiance to God and country come into conflict. So if our patriotic duty and our Christian faith make contradictory claims on us, who must we regard as Lord?
That, of course, is a question you won’t see the presidential candidates going near.
The issue of allegiance does not represent either a liberal or a conservative position. On a daily basis, most of us—liberal or conservative—typically put our practical adherence to nation over that to God. Our deep desire that the two should never come into conflict causes us to gloss over those issues where they do.
Still, Jesus’ radical call of “Come and follow me” is not designed to make living in the world easy on Christians. We ought to be uncomfortable with much of what goes on around us, and we should be seeking to live lives of holiness and compassion.
That means that self-described liberals and conservatives absolutely have to examine how their social and political assumptions match up with their faith. Because our first allegiance is to Jesus and his church, and the rest of our lives should conform to that.
The notion that politics and religion should be kept separate is impossible for Christian believers. Jesus calls us to a new way of life in the world, and that means that our faith and our politics intersect each and every day.
Andrew C. Thompson
