Faith Works 10-11-24

Faith Works 10-11-24
Jeff Gill

Religious politics across a wide spectrum
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Religious exhortations to support one candidate or another are nothing new.

Faith communities have goals and priorities for both their own common life, and for what many Christians call "missions," or outreach, which are their personal and congregational intentions for the wider community.

Any group, however organized, that has goals for their wider community is going to be bumping up against political agendas. That's politics in a nutshell: how we organize our common life. You can have our life in community organized by a king or queen, and that's a monarchy. You can end up, intentionally or not, with a very small group of people making all the key decisions, and that's an oligarchy.

As is pretty well known, the origin of what we call democracy in ancient Greece was letting the "demos," the people vote as a group on how the community would be governed, but that demos wasn't too democratic by our standards today: it was free adult male citizens who had been through basic military training, so about 10% of the population in Athens some 2,500 years ago.

Early American democracy had the same shortcoming: free white male property owners had the right to vote. So it was more inclusive than a monarchy or oligarchy, but still fairly limited. Come women's suffrage into the 1920s and the civil rights movement into the 1960s, American democracy is wider and more diverse than almost any broad-based democratic polity.

Within that large and diverse electorate, you end up with a wide range of religious perspectives. Under "free white male property-owners" type democracy, you had a relatively limited range of religious perspective, and most of it Christian and broadly Protestant. Expand that population of politically engaged citizens, you radically increase the variety of faith perspectives.

Sure, there are now church-based groups out there who are in favor of oligarchy, with them inside the select governing coalition, and there are Christian anarchists out there, too. We now have a rich, complex, even bewildering range of attitudes towards how a person of faith should look at political life, and while it can be confusing, I think it's better than having a handful of church traditions in the driver's seat.

Some belief systems actually opt out, and tell believers not to vote as an unjustifiable entanglement with worldly matters. I don't hear folks worry about that stance as much as there's loud concern about a congregation or preacher who tells their adherents how to vote. That's not how I roll, but the American experiment is not that churches can't tell people for whom to vote, but that you can't be expected to hold a particular religious belief in order to vote, let alone to hold office. Religious tests for being a political candidate were a real thing until relatively recently in much of Europe, and still exists in parts of the world (whether Communism is a religion I will leave for another day). Our Constitutional democracy says "nope" to that idea.

Jesus, who is the benchmark for most Christians in most matters, said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." That was in a dispute over taxes, akin to the example about voting: some religious leaders said paying taxes was too much involvement in secular matters for the truly faithful. Jesus seemed to see a space for politics, but one that should be kept alongside of one's faith, without tangling them up too much.

When challenged with what Herod Antipas was saying, Jesus replied "you tell that fox" he was going to do what he was sent here to do, regardless of political opposition. Strong words, clear distinctions. Calling the ruling authority a "bottom feeding unclean parasite" is not political, but it's pretty challenging to the politics of his day.

And with Pilate, the chief magistrate, Jesus simply kept turning his own words back to him, asking for honest consideration. Political speech, or powerful preaching?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in what Jesus is saying in almost any sphere of life. Tell him how you decide your political positions at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.