Something we all can do during the primaries

Now that the field is beginning to narrow in the Republican race for the nomination, the gloves are off.  Claiming that Mr. Romney was brutal to him in Iowa, Mr. Gingrich has decided to answer in kind as the South Carolina primary approaches.  The cynic in me smirks and plans to watch the brawl from a distance—not a stance I am proud of.  The better man in me remembers that Jesus commands me to love my neighbor as myself.  This means for starters that I have to love Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney, whom I must labor not to turn into mere media figures—the incarnation of the few sound bites I manage to hear from them.  And then I have to move past them to the people in my neighborhood, and then the people of my country and the people that my country has an impact on.  When I start thinking this way, I begin to understand why it is so tempting to be cynical.  If I were to really care, I would be overwhelmed: The world out there is too big—the issues too complex—the forces at work too powerful—the personalities too subtle. 

I sometimes wonder if the ardent true believer among us is just the flip side of the cynic.  In neither case is there a willingness or an ability to deal with how complicated everything and everybody actually is.

What do we do?  There is no single answer.  We all have different callings—different gifts, different types of opportunities.  But if we are Christians there is one thing we all can do.  The shut-in who can’t get out to the polling station can do it, as can the twelve-year-old who is not old enough to vote, the conscientious citizen who has studied an issue carefully and is still confused about it, the civil servant who is dismayed by the corruption and inefficiency in the department where he works, the soldier on the battlefield, the official in the State Department struggling with how best to respond to an international crisis, the missionary who is being thrown out of an Islamic nation whose government has just turned radical, the national believer who is on trial for her faith, the young black who is pulled over on the highway for racial reasons.   We can all pray.

Not only can we pray.  We must pray.  If the church does not pray for “God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven,” who will?  Just how we pray is the subject for another blog.  Let me say this much here.  If the Bible is to be believed, praying is the most powerful and strategic thing we could ever do for our country. 

We may assent to this—but I don’t think we really believe it.  Question.  How much time (how many actual minutes—count them) did you spend last week praying for the country, praying for President Obama, praying for the candidates in the race for the Republican nomination, praying about whatever issue is really exercising you at the moment?

Some of the Freudians among us might say that politics (like everything else) is just sublimated sex.  I wonder if politics isn’t rather sublimated prayer.  We fight politically because we do not know how to pray politically.  Think about that.

A New Year's Resolution for the Church

This New Year is also an election year.  As I write things in Iowa are humming as Republican candidates face their first formal electoral challenge.  Interestingly enough for our discussion on this blog, the news media are reporting that the Evangelical opinion is divided on which Republican candidate is the best.  Does this promise, I wonder, even further fragmentation in the church—not simply between Christian Democrats and Christian Republicans, but even among the Christian Republicans?  Who knows.

Political disagreement among Christians is bound to happen—even among Republican Christians.  And to my way of thinking this is OK.  It proves that we are thinking.  If we are really wrestling with the complex issues before us, we will not all agree on the best strategy for nudging our country in the right direction.

But there is one thing I hope very much that Christians can all agree on--one thing I would like to recommend as a suitable New Years’ Resolution for the church during an election year.  It is this: That in the midst of all the important and valid political discussion of 2012, we will not be diverted from our essential tasks.

There are certain things that simply will not happen if the church does not do them.  They are (1) praying for God’s kingdom to come, (2) evangelizing and discipling the nations, and (3) caring for the poor and weak in Jesus’ name.  To do these things right calls for an enormous expenditure of time and energy—much of which can be siphoned off during an election year if we give the wrong sort of attention to power politics. 

Notice I say “power politics”—by which I mean the politics of election, and by which I mean to remind us all that “politics” in the broader sense (politics as the science and practice of learning how to live together) is a major concern of the gospel and continues whether or not we are campaigning in the narrow sense.   When the church stays on target—when she keeps her priorities properly—she actually contributes in the most powerful way imaginable to the improvement of politics in this broad sense.  And when the church allows herself to get politicized—pushing hard for this or that “man made” solution, she actually robs her neighbors of their greatest social and political need—namely the new heart that the grace of God at the cross alone can bring.

Let me put it this way.  Societies change most dramatically as people change, one by one, from the inside out, rather than by the imposition of rules and restraints from the outside in or from the top down.  Sometimes, of course, those restraints must be imposed. That is why God established our government, and why we respect it and the process we are engaged in this year: Without God’s rule through our government, our natural selfishness would reign uncontrollably and make living together impossible. But a greater glory shines, and a better society thrives, when people voluntarily come to bow with joy before the King of kings and this heartfelt allegiance spills over into all of life. Renewed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, who writes God’s moral law on the heart (see Ezekiel 36:25–28), people need less and less the fear of governmental sanctions to make them live as they should.

Who is responsible for advancing this powerful and strategic solution to society’s woes? Clearly, it is the church.   So let’s stay focused.  Someone (was it Casey Stengel?) has said, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”  Let that be our 2012 New Year’s resolution.

The Biggest Idol of All

I mentioned last blog how depressed I was by the failure of the Congressional Super Committee to make any progress.  I had friends who just laughed cynically over the whole thing:  "What did you expect, Charlie?  It's congress!"  

I get it--but I don't want to cave in to cynicism.  I don't think the Christian should.  I think it is too easy to say that the Super Committee log-jam happened simply because each member was trying to save his or her political skin.  I am sure that that was part of the picture, but there were also sincerely held and conflicting ideals in the mix.   

Being an involved citizen (or congressperson) is a little like being married. It is living 24/7 with somebody besides yourself (in the case of politics, lots of somebodies). This would be fine if nobody but you wanted to be at the center of things. Unfortunately, everyone else is just like you in thinking that his opinion, his candidate, and his strategy for making things better are all the best. This is where the heat in politics comes from most deeply: everybody wants things to go his way. 

Given this analysis we can see where the solution to political heat must begin—and continue. Each of us must surrender the throne he has wrongly assumed. He must surrender it first to God, by sincerely trusting God for the outcomes he seeks, and second to his neighbor in service. 

Doing these things will not mean that we will no longer have any heartfelt disagreements—even in the church. Nor does it guarantee that, if you serve me, I will in turn serve you (people spurned Jesus’ love and they may well spurn yours). Nevertheless if you do your part, you will find the heat in you dropping down a notch or two. For your sense that all is well will no longer depend on getting things your way. “Winning” will no longer mean getting your candidate or policy in place; it will mean doing the right thing and leaving the results in God’s hands. You will find yourself more able to back down when someone insults you. Winning a school board debate won’t be quite as important as it once was, since your ego will no longer be invested in the outcome, and for that reason compromise will be easier. When love begins to replace winning for growing numbers of citizens, life together becomes more tolerable.

Political Log James, Idolatry, and the Golden Rule

In the last few blogs I have been saying that idolatry is the reason we get so angry over political differences.  We commit idolatry whenever we shift our deepest hopes and allegiances from God and to something (or someone) else—say a candidate or a political strategy or an ideal—like privacy at all costs.  Idolatry is an addiction, a habit of the heart, pulling at us like gravity.     We have a very difficult time shaking it.

Why did the congressional super committee just fail?  There are lots of complex reasons I am sure.  But if we could see down to the foundations of the heart we would see idolatry at work.  And I am not just picking on those twelve.  Had I been given the misfortune of sitting on that committee I would have been as susceptible as any of them to the forces of my heart’s misplaced affection—political ambition, fear of people, or something else.   

The beginning of the way out of idolatry, and of the log-jams it creates, is a trust in God that is sufficiently strong to warrant living aggressively by the Golden Rule.   We are not very good at this.  Many activist believers, for example, have sought to redress the anti-Christian bias in textbooks, or to make public school facilities available after hours for Christian meetings (often with good results), or to pursue litigation in defense of Christian conscience, or to expose the anti-Christian bias in the academy. These are, of course, all worthy undertakings, as far as they go. If Christians do not blow the whistle on anti-Christian bias, who will?

               

The difficulty, as I see it, is that we often do not go far enough. Our active interest in the freedom of conscience often extends only as far as we have felt our rights and freedoms as Christians being threatened. Assuming that you desire prayer in public schools (I realize that Christians differ on the wisdom of doing so at all), would you do so with as much fervor if you lived in Honolulu, where praying would as likely be to a Hindu deity as to Christ, as you would if you lived in Memphis, which is in a heavily Christian part of our country)? Perhaps not. Sadly, in our valid concern over the decay of faith in our society, we may find ourselves advocating action that marginalizes the faith of the lonely Jewish kid in the otherwise Christian fourth grade classroom in rural Mississippi.

               

Do you see the problem? Christians are, or appear to be, religiously self-serving when it comes to their engagement with public life. We can make such an idol of the freedom of our own conscience that we become blind to the fact that freedom of every conscience is a Christian principle worth fighting for.

One need not be a religious relativist to acknowledge this. The Jesus who claimed he was the only way to the Father never forced anyone to believe him. He has no place in his kingdom for coerced disciples, but says instead, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). In a day when so many angrily assert their rights, Christians have a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate a totally different mindset, the mindset of a statesman—one that firmly defends the non-Christian’s right to believe as he or she does.

               

I am not suggesting that we cease bringing what we believe into the public discussion. Nor am I suggesting that we cease believing that Jesus Christ is the Lord of all. But I am suggesting that we trust his Lordship enough to obey him when he commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. If we want our voices to be heard in the public debates, we will also want the voices of our Muslim, secular, and atheist neighbors to be heard. We will look for ways to say, in effect, “I think you are dead wrong in what you believe, but I will go to the wall for your freedom to argue for it.” We will see as equally worthy of legal consideration the rights of a Caribbean cult to sacrifice chickens in Miami and the rights of a fundamentalist church in rural Ohio to start a school. With a love undergirded by confidence in Christ’s ability to promote his kingdom in any setting, we will resist the temptation to be selfish in our religious advocacy, concerned only to defend our turf from our enemies. We will always have an eye on the common good.

               

If the Golden Rule should apply in the broad world of public life, should it not also apply in the narrower world of church life? Should not Republicans, Democrats, and Independents be able to worship together under the same roof? And should they not be able genuinely to listen to each other, and to disagree without blowing the church apart?  Should they not want to?

               

Living by the Golden Rule is not easy. It provides no clear-cut answers for how to hold to and advance our deep convictions while also honoring the neighbor who disagrees with us, whether that neighbor is an atheist or a fellow believer. The Golden Rule offers no blueprint for building a safe and godly America (which should be OK, since we have decided not to worship America—right?).   The Golden rule, rather, charts a path for us, a path whose end we cannot see, full of difficult turns (complex thinking), steep climbs (the hard work of listening), and sudden descents (humble apologies). But it is the path that Jesus commands and for that reason we should follow it. Most important, the Golden Rule gives to us the antidote to the self-protective and community-compromising worship of ourselves and our views, for by taking this path we demonstrate that we are worshiping the true God, the God who is big enough to vindicate what is true and real in his own way and in his own time.

More idols that stir up political heat

I said last post that the heart of the matter in political heat is the heart.  That is to say, we often disagree so furiously with each other because we have allowed something other than God to be our heart’s first love.

I was deeply moved by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I did not endorse everything he advocated, but I was nevertheless happily amazed that our country chose to elect an African American—and that such an unprecedented change in power had occurred without violence (a rare thing in world history: John McCain admirably championed that peace when he silenced the bitter voices of his own constituency during his concession speech). When I saw the President-elect’s daughters on the victory platform on election night and imagined that they would soon be in the White House, not as guests, but as hosts, I could not help but weep. But in the midst of all the euphoria, I was also troubled by the nearly messianic status that Mr. Obama had come to enjoy. “He is only a man,” I kept saying.

What drove the adulation, I think, was idolatry—undue reliance on a political leader. 

We do the same sort of thing when we rely too heavily on a particular movement.  When the Christian Right rose to power in the 1980s, many Christians who had heretofore been inactive politically began to discover that they could affect the national agenda. And with that discovery came a tendency to expect too much of political solutions to the nation’s deepest ills.

There is nothing idolatrous about political activism or about advancing skilled politicians whom you feel will push things in a good direction. The idolatry arises when we begin to think that things will be so much better if “we can just get this law enacted,” or “we can just get this person into office and that person out of office,” or “we can just mandate this book for the history curriculum and that book for biology.” Certainly leaders and policies make some difference--  but not as much as we sometimes think, given our sprawling polity and selfish hearts. How easily (and unfairly) we tend to blame elected officials for the social ills of our time, as if greed, family problems, uneven pay scales, failures in education, and inner-city violence were simply the government’s fault. Those in office bear responsibility and their decisions affect our lives to some degree, but such scapegoating, which appears with a vengeance during election years, reflects an unrealistic and idolatrous reliance upon the machinery of government. We often grow to hate certain administrations and figures because we once loved them too much. Just think of the astonishing political reversals in the 2010 midterm elections.

If some of us tend to make a god out of public empowerment, others among us tend to make a god out of privacy. Or, perhaps, at different times we tend to make gods out of both.

Think about privacy. In certain areas of life we passionately want to be left alone to make our own way. My observation is that we do this whatever end of the political spectrum we occupy. From the left we cry foul whenever religion finds its way into our relationships (“Religion has no right to impose a particular view of marriage on me!”). From the right we cry foul when Uncle Sam finds his way into our wallets (“Congress has no right to impose such limits on my income!”). Those on the left assert the “right” to terminate a pregnancy with as much fervor as those on the right assert the “right” to bear arms.

The issues may be different, and may carry different weight, but what awakens the passion in each case is the threat, either perceived or real, to personal freedom. And the passion increases in direct proportion to how fervently we believe that that freedom is essential to our lives—the degree, in other words, to which we have permitted it to occupy a godlike place in our hearts.

The worship of privacy may be more of a problem inside the church than we think.  We may feel safe and even comfortable “going public” about our politics at church, but that may be only because there is no risk that doing so will invite any challenges. After all, we may have chosen a church where our private convictions risk no violation because everyone agrees with us.  This happens, incidentally, on both the left and the right, and we must examine ourselves before being critical of others about it.

More discussion of idolatry next blog

Why do we get so angry at each other?

I was recently talking about this blog with a young couple in my congregation.  The husband reported that politics tends  to get him pretty worked up and he agrees with my suggestion that he has at times allowed it to become more important to him than the church.   The wife reported that she runs away from politics in the church because the heat—or the possibility of heat –upsets her.  With a wry smile she said that one of the reasons she chose to be a missionary in Africa for a number of years is that she wanted to get away from fights in the American church.

Often the only reason churches don’t explode is that Christians of differing politics have already split from each other. Evangelical blacks (who tend to be Democrats) don’t as a rule worship with evangelical whites (who have tended to be Republicans—though that is changing). Evangelicals who are closely linked to academia and are more likely to be Democrats tend to drift from evangelicals who are closely linked to business and are more likely to be Republican.  

Why are we so divided? Why do we disagree so much?  Why is the heat in our disagreements so often indistinguishable from the heat in the broader culture?  Aren’t we supposed to be different?

One reason, well documented by sociologist James Hunter, is that many Christians have joined the broader culture in the mistaken assumption that public life is the same thing as political life.  For this reason we tend to think that the only, or best, way to change the culture is through politics. But politics is intrinsically coercive, using power (rather than persuasion) to bring about change. And forced change tends to turn up the heat in public life; it tends to polarize people, transforming ideas into slogans, discussions into shouting matches, and the opposition into demons. This is the case even when Christians are involved; perhaps more so since Christians tend to feel that they have a mandate from God in their efforts. Christians need to rediscover that “public” is much larger than “political.”

But why do we seize on solutions, political or otherwise, with such polarizing energy? There is more to the problem than too narrow a definition of public life.

The heart of the matter is the heart. Our hearts tend to drift away from their proper center in God. We are, in other words, idolaters, prone to setting our deepest hopes and identities in things other than God. And these false hopes are so fragile that we become angry and afraid when they are threatened, as they so often are by politics. For one reason or another people of differing politics threaten the leaders, strategies, or ways of life that we have come to rely upon too heavily. If, for example, we have built our lifestyles and future plans around a largely deregulated economy, we will tend to become angry (even infuriated) over a political administration that pushes hard for regulation. If on the other hand we have built our lifestyles and future plans around certain governmental social benefits, we may find ourselves growing nervous and angry—even furious—over a political administration that aims to remove or diminish entitlements.

The most immediate and perhaps the best thing any of us could do for America is to take Psalm 97:7 to heart (All who worship images are put to shame, those who boast in idols”), searching our lives and attitudes carefully and repenting of our complicity in the idolatries of our time.

Think for example of the economic woes of 2008–2009. Many Americans rejoiced to see Bernard Madoff, architect of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that ruined the lives of many, brought to justice. But how many of us were prepared to admit to our own headlong pursuit of money? Mr. Madoff was a hero as long as he was producing money for us; he became the villain only when he didn’t. At the heart of the financial meltdown was what one of my church leaders (himself an executive in one of the firms that came near to collapse) called a “tsunami of debt.” Certainly greedy bankers and lazy regulators were key players in this, but vast numbers of us contributed to the problem. How many of us were not drawn into the worship of the “good life” that the world of easy credit offered? How many of us spent far beyond our means simply because we thought we could get away with it?

“Pick your poison” a friend of mine says regarding the idols available to us. Some of us may feel free from the worship of money. But what about other obsessions: celebrity mongering (a recent survey indicated that a distressingly high percentage of teenage girls would rather be “the personal assistant to a famous singer or movie star” than a U. S. Senator or the president of a great university), or sexual addiction (pornography seems to be as much a problem for the church as it is for the rest of the culture). We pour money and energy into sports, into body image, into professional success, and into the acquisition of power. We grow angry at anyone or anything that threatens our freedom to spend as we please or to express ourselves as we please because we have become worshipers of unbridled freedom.

More talk next post on idolatry

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Why do we disagree politically?

I recently witnessed a debate between the co-authors of a new book entitled Left, Right, and Jesus.  They are both Bible loving evangelicals.  One is a young black woman, the other an older white man.  One (I will let you guess which) comes out on the political right—the other on the other side. 

As I listened I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in his Second Inaugural Speech:  “Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God…”  But recollecting Lincoln didn’t make me cynical. Lincoln was no interpretive nihilist.  He plainly believed that some readings of the bible on the slavery issue were better than others. 

Interpretational nihilism is a trendy cop out—a lazy person’s excuse for not thinking hard.  On any issue some interpretations are better than others—say Bonhoeffer’s versus Hitler’s interpretations of the value of Jews.  Nevertheless it is very important to notice that two Bible loving people can come to very different places in politics.  They can do it with a high degree of integrity.  It is happening all the time these days, and we need to respect it in each other. 

Why the differences?  Because the way we see things, including the way we read the Bible, while it may not be completely controlled by our backgrounds and experience, will nevertheless be influenced by them.    One of the reasons we get so angry with each other is that we don’t realize this, or we do realize it but refuse to admit it.  We confuse the infallibility of the Bible with the infallibility of our interpretation of the Bible.

And why do we cling so stubbornly to our interpretation of the Bible when it comes to politics?  I am sure there are many reasons.  But one of them is that politics is more important to us than the church is.  If the church had its proper place in our hearts, if it occupied the place in our hearts that it occupies in the heart of Jesus (who died to save and make us one), we would be bending over backwards to give each other the benefit of the doubt, working double time to submit our own interpretations of Scripture to the scrutiny and critique of the brothers and sisters who disagree with us, looking for common ground.

I am happy to report that the co-authors in the debate I saw were gracious towards each other.  They sparred a bit, scoring points here and there, to applause from their different constituencies in the audience, but there was good will between them. 

We need such good will.  We need more meetings of this sort.  Christians on both sides need to be sitting together in the same room listening to each other.   The church needs to be different from the world, animated by a unity that is higher and deeper than that of party.