Power Made Perfect?

Is There a Christian Politics for the Twenty-First Century?

Sherratt

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498225953
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

How would politics be different if Christians acknowledged Jesus Christ as the archetype of all rulers, democratic and nondemocratic? How would our practice of politics change if we recognized the suffering love of Christ as the truest exercise of power? Power Made Perfect? offers a distinctive approach to government and politics. It is important, the author argues, to ask how creation provides guidance for political conduct; for politics to be an exercise in piety; and to approach politics in a fallen world with prudence and not in pursuit of ultimate solutions. But it is even more important to begin with Jesus Christ. Christ is the rightful ruler of the world who exercises power by suffering and dying for guilty humans. All political activity is held to the standard of Christ's sacrifice. In this book, Timothy Sherratt surveys major Christian political initiatives and schools of Christian political thought, with a particular emphasis on American politics, before outlining ways in which Christians in churches can practice faithful political engagement.

Chapter 1

Is That What You Mean by Christian Politics?

The Religious Right in the United States

Born again. How quickly we forget that some of the early stirrings of what came to be called the Religious Right stirred first in the Democratic Party. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter became the first self-proclaimed “born-again” president, the first evangelical in the contemporary mold to hold that office. To be sure, the born-again credentials did not keep the evangelical vote in the Democrats’ camp for long. Once fellow evangelicals found the President unwilling to embrace publicly their emerging pro-life agenda, their allegiances switched. Within a few short years, today’s political alignment was largely in place and Roe v. Wade had assumed its role as traffic cop, pointing supporters and opponents to their respective poles—and polls.

As its non-obvious beginnings suggest, there is more complexity to the Religious Right than meets the eye. When evangelicals abandoned Carter they did not join an already socially conservative Republican Party. Far from it. The GOP was the party of business, and had locked itself into what seemed like permanent minority status. To a significant extent, the Republicans’ contemporary social conservative identity, stillborn in the anti-communist foreign policy incarnation of Senator Barry Goldwater, came into being as apolitical evangelical Christian citizens sought political shelter in what their leaders told them was a severe moral crisis. For their part, Republican leaders in the mold of Ronald Reagan recognized that social conservatives had flung them an electoral lifeline. They grabbed it and started pulling, all the way to the White House.

The rise of the Religious Right does not, of course, tell anything like the whole story of Christian political initiatives in this country even if we keep to a contemporary time frame. It describes a controversial model of political engagement that has been at the center of important social and cultural changes since the 1970s, though not always on the winning side. For our purposes, the Religious Right provides us a major example of Christian political engagement with enough of a lifespan to show how it has worked and not worked. It has accumulated a record of achievements, forged alliances, and attracted criticisms. Whatever we make of it, we can at least make reliable, evidence-driven judgments about it. In other words, it provides us enough accumulated evidence to ask a very important question: is that what is meant by Christian politics?

The story of the Religious Right is best understood as one chapter in a much larger narrative, the story of the relationship between Christianity and democracy in America. Relations between “church and state,” which had been impressively stable for the first century and a half of the republic’s existence, began to change in the middle of the last century and helped create the conditions under which the Religious Right identified what it saw as the challenges that compelled it to launch its political initiatives.

That larger story, then, must come first.

Christianity and American Democracy: Marriage, Separation, and Finger-Pointing

The story of Christianity and democracy in America1 resembles an arranged marriage that served both partners well but eventually unraveled. It was a curious marriage since the spouses spent little time together and occupied separate bedrooms. Now ex-spouses, but remaining in the same town and knowing the same people, each tells self-serving and unflattering stories about the other and neither is willing to give much ground. For this is not just a story about church-state relations. It is also the story of the ideological polarization that infects American politics in our own day.

The framers of the Constitution arranged the marriage in the first place. Hugh Heclo dubs it “The Great Denouement,” and he describes it as a sort of peace treaty that launched the new republic in a direction that led away from Europe’s religious wars. The pact secured individual freedom of religious conscience and was preserved by separating the structures Christianity and democracy respectively inhabited. “The practical political effect,” Heclo says, “was to house-train an issue drenched in centuries of blood and turn it into something ordinary people could live with—indeed, participate in—amid relative peace.”2

The Constitution set out the terms of the marriage. The two spouses were given distinct and separate roles to play. Three brief clauses were all that was necessary. In Article VI of the original document, religious tests for holding federal office were prohibited. In the First Amendment, Congress was instructed not to interfere with religious establishments and not to obstruct the “free exercise” of religion. In plain language, there was to be no religious discrimination or favoritism of the kind that said, “No Catholics for President,” or “Only card-carrying, fully immersed Baptists for Congress.” Free exercise established a right for citizens to practice religion as they wished. By separating church and state, it became possible for religion and democracy to actually become partners, to work in complementary ways and not in competition for power.

The wording of the so-called “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment suggests that the framers never considered that separation had to be absolute. To be sure, the clause has developed into a wide and high barrier against all sorts of government activity—government-sponsored prayers in schools, taxes supporting creeds one does not accept, and so forth. But that came largely in the twentieth century. At its adoption, the Establishment Clause seems to have had a different intent altogether. The clause is brief: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” At the time, several states had establishments that gave tax support to particular denominations. Massachusetts was one of these, the Congregational Church being the beneficiary. And it retained that benefit until 1833.

In 1787, ratification of the new Constitution was not a sure thing. “Anti-Federalists” feared the powers of the new federal government and worked against ratification. The Bill of Rights, containing the First Amendment, which in turn contains the Establishment Clause, reassured the states that the federal government would not trample on their practices, including establishment. Regulation of religion rested with the states.

But in time, the remaining establishments were abandoned and forgotten. By the mid-twentieth century, courts were ready to read fresh meaning into the phrase “establishment of religion.” But before we get to that part of the story, let’s pause to acknowledge the remarkable achievement crafted by the Constitution’s framers.

They got along, Christianity and democracy, for more than a century, providing each other with valuable mutual benefits. Christianity gave purpose and legitimacy to American democratic government. Despite having no official status, religion provided the new republic a shared Protestant language, culture, and morality. This would prove helpful because a political system that was federal (possessing two levels of government), democratic (promoting majority rule), and liberal (oriented toward individual rights) contained centrifugal forces capable of undermining the hoped-for unity of the new nation. A common Protestant culture balanced these forces and worked to integrate society. Even revivalism and the do-good impulses of Christian morality “opened up new spaces in political society that women and other oppressed groups had never had access to before.”3 Finally, the mere flourishing of religious groups, especially Protestant ones with their theology of the immanence of Christ and their grassroots organizing provided “schools for democracy.” In real and practical ways, churches cultivated the skills and attitudes helpful to running a democratically organized political system.

Democracy gave American religion a context for and a need to get along with other religions and a need to accommodate its own multiple expressions. It validated denominations and a kind of religious pluralism. Religion could flourish because no one denomination would run into official restrictions, nor would the various sects have to compete against officially favored competitors.

Democracy’s influence was not entirely benign. Heclo has it encouraging an “open market religious competition” among denominations for converts, one that fostered a “quite un-Christian idea of historical progress.”4 A democratic spirit pushed religious leaders to cherry pick democratic norms from the Scriptures to demonstrate just how friendly Christianity was to a culture of choice and equality. As Heclo points out, this tendency struck at the core of Christianity’s message—Christ is risen—distorting or obscuring the supernatural character of the faith.

While these tendencies persisted—both those that led to bad habits and those that led to good ones—the marriage remained secure for many decades. It unraveled little by little. A string of legal decisions, culminating in the 1960s decisions banning prayer in public schools, reworked the loose relationship between church and state into one that insisted on the “strict separation” of the two. What had been originally intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with a state’s establishment now became a full-fledged individual right not to be established against. The new position held that religion should remain strictly private and was not to “touch” government or politics in any way.

Christian denominations displayed a wide range of responses to these developments. The old mainline churches—Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians—were more inclined to see such matters through the prism of civil rights rather than biblical teachings. When viewed from the civil rights perspective, abortion rights advanced the cause of women, extending to them control over their lives. Roman Catholics, only recently encouraged by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) to participate fully in church life, and by the election of John F. Kennedy to see themselves no longer as immigrants but as full-fledged citizens, came to the abortion debate with well-formed teachings. In due course, conservative Catholics organized robust opposition and exercised broad influence. But many of their number were still tied by class, sympathy, and history to Roosevelt’s New Deal and its expanded version launched by Lyndon Johnson as the Great Society. Their politics were Democratic and their instinctive response to social legislation was to attempt change from within. Although this was soon relegated to a rearguard action in the face of the strong progressive bent the Democratic Party developed, some prominent Catholics carved out a distinctive position and tried hard to hold on to it. This position, upheld by Sargent Shriver in the Kennedy-Johnson years and Governor Robert Casey in the 1990s, embraced a large social safety net and upheld the “culture of life,” that is, an emphatically pro-life position on abortion.

Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants responded to the school prayer and abortion rulings with a mixture of alarm and guilt—eventually. As Randall Balmer has pointed out, they had paid relatively little attention to abortion and did not have a well-developed position on the question in the early 1970s.5 Leaders had to first articulate the importance of the issue from a Christian perspective. For decades, the social and political presence of many Christians of these persuasions had been minimal. Now, old assumptions that America retained a basically Christian national culture were shattered. Fundamentalists and evangelicals knew very few formers and shapers of politics and culture. Their first spokespeople were in the Bryan tradition—preachers, like Jerry Falwell, with a distinctly populist tone to their oratory—not politicians, and they learned politics from the outside and only by making some mistakes. They rejected abortion under almost all circumstances. And they read into its 1973 validation as an individual right a cultural revolution all the more devastating for emerging by stealth. Casting around for language to make sense of this, they resorted first to religious rather than political terminology, christening the revolution as one guided by secular humanism. In time, more prosaic and more political terms would emerge, with “liberal” the most widely employed.

Like most Catholics, evangelicals in the emerging Religious Right also had a Democrat past. Many were Southerners in...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Is That What You Mean by Christian Politics?
• Chapter 2: Or This?
• Chapter 3: Christ is Risen!
• Chapter 4: Pleasing God
• Chapter 5: Balancing Act
• Chapter 6: Issues in Christian Perspective: Immigration and Education
• Chapter 7: Issues in Christian Perspective: Abortion and Gay Marriage
• Chapter 8: Home and Abroad
• Chapter 9: Be the Church!
• Bibliography
• Index