Politics, Preachers & The Gospel

An unsolicited online critic recently scolded me for making my political voice heard in public places. He said every clergy person he knew kept their political opinions to themselves and I should be ashamed of myself for writing on politics. I feel a certain immodest shame when I write on economics, the famously dismal science about which I have marginal knowledge. I claim modest competency in theology, as long as I’m not too far from my books and Google. As for politics, it’s a field in which I feel comfortable. Thirty years of messing around in the realm of public policy and electoral politics at every level from local to national has given me the courage to write about it. As for being a member of the clergy, the story of Christianity, beginning with Jesus, is the story of pastors and preachers confronting the state from their understanding of the primacy of the Word of God in the world of human affairs.

Politics and preaching are inseparable, which does not mean preaching’s politics has always been God centered, or even wise. A good part of ordinary Sunday preaching for the past sixty years or more has been highly political as pastors catered to the social mores of their congregations, giving them God’s endorsement. It’s a politics of contented appeasement with the way things are that avoids any serious examination of how God might assess it.

For good or ill, preaching has always been political, because politics is about the way we live together in societies organized as communities from families to empires, and everything in between. The good news of God in Christ is not only about being saved, it’s about what God has commanded as the way in which we are to live in community. God is not done speaking, and we should not be done listening.

The political history of the church is filled with the preaching of saints guiding it in more godly directions, but honesty compels us to admit it’s also filled with intentions gone bad, and bad intentions bear ungodly fruit. Some want to blame it all on the Roman emperor Constantine, who made Christianity legal, and then made it the official state religion, which, so say some, brought politics into the picture and ruined the Church. It seems an unfair accusation to me. He did only what emperors had always done and were expected to do. To be sure, Church leaders took advantage of their new standing as any reasonable person would.

There remains a romantic illusion that the Church before Constantine, subject to many persecutions, was innocent of the corrupting influence of engagement in politics. I don’t understand where that comes from. Jesus was crucified as an enemy of the state for political reasons. He dared to confront, in the name of God, the state, and the state sanctioned religious hierarchy of Judea – they killed him for it. Paul addressed prefects, proconsuls and kings, proclaiming the good news of God in Christ Jesus that would, if they believed it, change they way they governed. For that he was beheaded as an enemy of the state. The 3rd and 4th century persecutions of the early Church arose because political authority felt threatened by a new teaching that challenged their status.

Some scholars have tried to make Jesus and his disciples into anti government radicals fomenting rebellion. They were certainly accused of that, but neither scripture nor secular testimony supports the idea. The way of Jesus was the way of love, of healing, of reconciliation. It still is. Odd how God’s way of love could be so threatening that those in authority saw it as rebellious and threatening. It still is.

God’s way of love has been corrupted by the Church from time to time. Political authority has a way of corrupting its own environment, even in the Church. Yet it’s necessary to provide structure that makes community possible. Only Marx and anarchists have ever thought otherwise, and, given the opportunity , both lead to totalitarianism. But I digress. It’s true that Christian faith has been used corruptly. It’s been used to promote crusades, persecute Jews, establish theocracies, and given into the hands of princes to advance their own agendas of power and empire. We Anglicans (Episcopalians) are too aware that Henry VIII dragged us into the Reformation for political, not religious, reasons. It is why, as Luther observed, its own reformation is what the Church must always be about.

Amidst all that, it is the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ that commands Christians in every age to engage with the world as agents of God’s healing, reconciliation and justice by doing what they can to influence public policies in favor of society’s most vulnerable. My critic believes preachers who speak the gospel boldly are trouble makers upsetting the status quo, worsening the Church’s decline. He may be right, but the gospel comes first. I was struck by a single sentence in Rowan Williams’ book “Christ The Heart Of Creation:” [Consider the possibility of] a Church that was systematically unconcerned about preserving its own space for its own sake.” (p.213). I like that. A Church fearless about proclaiming the gospel is a Church fearless about political engagement.

I suspect my critic’s greater fear is political engagement is a cover for radical, left wing socialism, which, I further suspect, is anything for him not safely conservative. Or perhaps he is opposed to preachers endorsing candidates from the pulpit, and I heartily agree, but that doesn’t rule out standing firmly against political leadership that makes a mockery out of God’s way of love.