The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (or How Would Jesus Vote?)

On May 7, a widely respected cross-section of American evangelicals released the document entitled, "An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment."  The document, signed by people like Leith Anderson, Rich Mouw, Rick Warren, and many others, is, in my opinion, an exemplary model of identifying precisely what the heart of the gospel is (announcing the saving news of Jesus Christ for humanity) and the role of the follower of Jesus in politics (active, working for public ends consistent with the entire cross-section of biblical ethics, not merely one or two key issues historically associated with a particular party, but never counting on government to do and be what the church was called to do and to be).

This manifesto comes on the heels of two excellent, new books by authors of the evangelical center, defining themselves over against those whose main concerns sound too much like just the concerns of Republicans or just those of democrats.  One is Ron Sider's The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World, released in February by Baker Books; the other, David Gushee's, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, released in January by Baylor University Press.  By the way, if you associate Sider with the evangelical left (which was probably an accurate label in 1977 with the first edition of his Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger) then you haven't carefully read all the far more nuanced positions he has taken in his recent publications

Neither the manifesto nor either book is about the historical Jesus per se, so why this blog?  All three works struck me as capturing the identical center position against right- and left-wing movements that Jesus himself occupied in the midst of the first-century Jewish landscape in Israel.  On the one hand there were the Essenes, best known from their monastic group at Qumran that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, who were convinced that even the political conservatives of their day were too enmeshed in the inevitable corruption that engagement with the public world produced. So they retreated to the wilderness or to segregated neighborhoods in cities to recreate utopia, pray for God's salvation for their nation, and model scupulous obedience to the Law.

On the other hand, there were the Zealots.  Not yet organized into a  coherent movement in Jesus' day, they nevertheless encompassed periodic "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" (depending on whose side you were on), convinced that violent revolution against Rome and Roman supporters was the way God would help those who help themselves, so to speak (not a biblical concept but one that polls in the U.S. have shown many Americans think actually is in the Bible!).

In between, the historical Jesus adopted what many authors have called the prophetic option.  He spoke out bluntly about theological and ethical issues that he believed impinged on the public scene.  He called his followers to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, not to hide in the (metaphorical) darkness but to arrest corruption and decay.  He did not retreat from the public square.  But he refused to take up arms to support his cause.

D. A. Carson's new Christ and Culture Revisited, just out from Eerdmans in April, reviews Richard Niebuhr's classic taxonomy of Christ against culture, in culture, above culture, transforming culture, and so on, convincingly arguing that there is a time for each of Niebuhr's models depending on the issue or circumstance.  But N. T. Wright equally convincingly has pointed out (in a lecture on church and state at the November Society of Biblical Literature meetings in San Diego) that the model that most consistently fits Scripture is that of the church functioning toward the government as prophet to king.

In the Old Testament theocracy, prophets were undoubtedly the greatest human safeguards against monarchs wielding absolute power and/or not taking God's revealed will into proper consideration.  The king might repent (as David did after Nathan confronted him of his sins with Uriah and Bathsheba) or he might be persecuted (as Ahab did with Elijah).  But it is not surprising that the little New Testament letter of James, which most directly confronts the economic sins of the wealthy in first-century Jewish-Christian circles, alludes to no less than four dozen teachings of Jesus, almost half from the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, that particularly echo key themes of Old Testament prophetic rebuke of leadership gone awry.

Gushee's book appropriately suggests that a good way to determine if an individual, congregation or entire wing of the church has lost its biblical moorings is to ask how many issues they can identify where they would be conscience-bound to go against their political party.  There are plenty to go around for everybody, because Jesus, like Scripture more generally, was extremely concerned to help the poor, to bring justice for the marginalized, to treat the illegal alien in the land the same as the local citizenry (after all, in OT times, since the land had been given exclusively to Israel, all residents aliens were technically illegal, yet OT law repeatedly insists on equal treatment for them).  Republicans have not historically distinguished themselves well on such issues.  But Jesus was also pro-family (though not always in ways that some modern political rhetoric is), pro-heterosexual monogamy, and pro-life.  Democrats have not historically distinguished themselves well on such issues.

Will the rest of this year's political campaign be business as usual with each party's members who are also churchgoers and perhaps even true Christians simply aligning themselves with their typical political concerns ? Or might we find a centrist coalition emerging that echoes the historical Jesus, like the prophets before him, in cutting right across all of the conventional political boundaries, barely even considering the option of voting a straight ticket, taking each candidate and issue one-by-one on their own merits and evaluating them in a truly Christian fashion, immersed in the whole counsel of God's word?