Why Should Politics Matter to Christians?

How do we think Christians should approach matters of politics and governing?

Politics Are in God’s Domain

To begin with, we reject the notion that Christianity and politics are at odds or irreconcilable. This is a form of Christian privatism. It has more in common with the ancient Gnostic view that creation is inherently evil than it does with the injunctions and teachings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

As all human activity—from the mundane to the profound, from personal lives to professional careers—falls under God’s domain, so authentic Christian faith should be relevant to the whole of life; it ought not to be segregated from worldly affairs. “All our merely natural activities will be accepted,” C. S. Lewis said, “if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one; it is rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural end, these natural materials.”[1]

The laws of a nation embody its values and shape them, in ways large and small, obvious and subtle, direct and indirect, sometimes immediately and often lasting.

We readily stipulate that, according to Christian teaching, the main purposes God wants to advance are non-political. The New Testament itself contains very little discussion of politics, and no obvious political philosophy. Christianity’s core concerns have to do with soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) and eschatology (the doctrine of final things such as death and the last judgment), with the cultivation of personal virtues, and with the rules that ought to govern the behavior of individuals and the community of believers.

God Cares About Justice

But God also cares about justice. And as Augustine wrote, politics can be a means through which justice—“the end of government” in the words of James Madison—is either advanced or impeded. Does this mean that the church is wrong to model itself as an alternative to this world? Not at all. But that model should not be understood as counseling subordination or powerlessness in the face of evil.

The sociologist James Davison Hunter grapples with the possibilities of political engagement in his book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. In speaking about his book, Hunter has raised a number of questions about how much we can expect politics to accomplish.

What the state can’t do is provide fully satisfying solutions to the problem of values in our society. There are no comprehensive political solutions to the deterioration of family values, the desire for equity, or the challenge of achieving consensus and solidarity in a cultural context of fragmentation and polarization. There are no real political solutions to the absence of decency, or to the spread of vulgarity.[2]

Hunter concedes that laws “do reflect values.” But, he insists, laws “cannot generate values or instill values, or settle the conflict over values.”[3] Therefore, he urges Christians to be “silent for a season” and “learn how to enact their faith in public through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy, and political mobilization.”[4]

Hunter is a thoughtful and fair-minded analyst, and measured in his conclusions. But he imputes too little influence to the state and the political process. They are more important than he thinks.

Laws Reflect Our Values as a Country

“A polity is a river of constantly changing composition,” George Will wrote in Statecraft as Soulcraft, “and the river’s banks are built of laws.”[5] The laws of a nation embody its values and shape them, in ways large and small, obvious and subtle, direct and indirect, sometimes immediately and often lasting. The most obvious examples from our own history concern slavery and segregation, but there are plenty of others, from welfare to education, from crime to drug use, to Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott v. Sandford, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and Roe v. Wade.

Politics and governing is fraught with temptations and dangers.

Laws express moral beliefs and judgments. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, the waves ripple outward. They tell citizens what our society ought to value and condemn, what is worthy of our esteem and what merits our disapprobation. They both ratify and stigmatize. That is not all that laws do, but it is among the most important things they do.

Suppose that, next year, all fifty states decide to legalize cocaine use and prostitution. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, do you doubt that, if such laws stayed in effect for fifty years, they wouldn’t fundamentally alter our views, including our moral views, of these issues? The welfare laws that passed in the 1960s helped create a culture of dependency among the underclass—and the passage of welfare reform in 1996 started to reverse it. Rudy Giuliani’s policies in the 1990s helped transform New York, not only making it a far safer city, but radically improving its spirit and ethos.

Hunter is right that neither politics nor the state can “provide fully satisfying solutions to the problem of values in our society.” Nothing can provide fully satisfying solutions to the problem of values in our society. The question is the degree to which perennial human problems can be ameliorated, and attitudes and habits thereby improved. A civilized society takes that task seriously. The work is done in our nation by many different institutions, from the family to school, from houses of worship to Hollywood, from professional sports to the military. Each has a role to play, and so does the state. Indeed, the state can have, for good or ill, a major influence on the others.

We Cannot Neglect Politics

Politics and governing is fraught with temptations and dangers. There are plenty of people who bring dishonor to the enterprise. But there is also something ennobling about it when done properly. We cannot neglect the importance of our laws because we cannot neglect their influence on our moral lives. Such are the duties of citizenship in a free society.

[1] C. S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” in The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 48.

[2] The Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics & Public Life, “Event Transcript: To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,” Ethics and Public Policy Center, http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4125/pub_detail.asp.

[3] Ibid.

[4] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 281.

[5] George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 66.