James Davison Hunter has this to say about contemporary Christian political involvement.
“These qualifications notwithstanding, the reality is that politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world . . . It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness” (To Change the World, p. 12).
Yeah, but. An important qualification has to be added to this. Before offering that addition, however, let me say that I acknowledge that there are evangelical Christians out there who are political wonks and junkies in a way that is not spiritually healthy. That said (in order to demonstrate that I am as even-handed and as balanced as can be), let me proceed to add my qualification.
Think about this for a moment. The “most dominant public witness” of Christians has been political. Assuming this to be so (and I believe it is), there are different reasons why it might be so. One reason could be that Christians are the ones with the problem. They have politics on the brain. They rush to the mechanisms of the state (which were modestly hiding in a distant village), in order to advance their public faith with the politics of coercion. In other words, these Christians have lost faith in Jesus their Savior, and are trying to use the political process as a sort of savior’s-little-helper.
Another option, and one that I consider far more likely, is this. The political state in our day is swollen and overgrown, and has gotten into everything. Politics, the great secular idol of modernity, has virtually filled up every public space. This means that it is not possible to go into any public space in order to have a public witness of any kind without it resulting in some kind of political confrontation.
To this extent, to blame public Christians for being “too political” is like blaming Noah’s ark for being “too wet.”
Abortion and sodomy were sins long before they were constitutional rights. If a minister preached against them a thousand years ago, he was preaching against moral failings, and he was not being political. He was being public, but not political. When I do it, I am preaching against moral failings also, but I am also being political. What changed? It wasn’t the Decalogue. It wasn’t the history of the church, or the history of preaching. It wasn’t the nature of the gospel. It wasn’t me. Rather, it was the nature of the idol being challenged — and this idol aspires to omnipresence.
We are told, ad nauseam, to keep our morality out of politics. It would be more to the point to tell the idol-mongers to keep their politics out of morality. Public morality need not be political, in the sense we are discussing. Public morality need not be a matter that concerns the legislature. But if the legislature concerns itself with everything, then any faithful Christian expression will immediately be concerned with the political.
The secular polis is an in-your-face polis. The polis tells me what kind of light bulbs I must have, how far apart my sheetrock screws have to be, whether or not I can smoke in a restaurant that wants to let me, whether or not I can remove that tag from my mattress, and whether I can say that sodomy is a sin from the pulpit, whether or not it is in my text. In short, if I step into any public space in the name of Jesus Christ, I will be indignantly told, almost immediately, that this space is taken, and not to be a claim-jumper. I may (for the present) believe in Jesus behind my eyes and between my ears, but if it goes any further than that, I am clearly out of control. I am meddling with politics.
C.S. Lewis says somewhere something to the effect that the world says to us that we may have our own thoughts to ourselves when we are alone — but then adds, “and we will see to it that you are never alone.” This is the kind of thing we are up against.
Our task as Christians is therefore not to jump on the back of this monster politics, in order to tame it so that it does what we want, instead of what our opponents want. Politics, in its current manifestation, is a fire-breathing dragon — and we are called to play the part of St. George, and kill this thing. And what would St. George say if he were upbraided for being too focused on the dragon, for being too interested in the dragon issues of the day? He could say, if he had his wits about him, that he was only going to be focused on the dragon issues until it was dead — which should be another hour or so.