I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –
Something I intend to reread this year is James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. I was very late in reading it, but few books have more perfectly and fairly summarized—by the second chapter alone—my entire experience of “evangelical” political engagement. And Hunter’s early description of evangelical politics could not have closed with a more simple, accurate critique: “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”
This has been the ever-increasing sense for me over the past 10 years (again, late to the party): that what I have usually been shown/sold as Christian civic duty is almost entirely a sham.
Hunter:
Though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture more broadly, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, causing harm to America and harm to the church, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ through a strategy of acquiring and using power is identical to the longstanding approach of the established Christian Right. The leading edge of such initiatives is still one of negation. To use words and phrases like “enemy,” “attack,” “drive out,” “overthrow,” “eradicate the Other,” “reclaim their nations for Christ,” “take back” influence, “compel, “occupying and influencing [spheres] of power in our nations,” “advancing the kingdom of God,” and so on, continues to reflect the same language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest. This is because the underlying myth that defines their identity, their goals, and their strategy of action has not changed. The myth continues to shape the language, the logic, and script for their engagement with culture. Circumstances might change as might the players, but if the myth that underwrites the ideal of Christian engagement does not change, then very little has changed at all.
Probably no question than this is more prescient for “evangelicals” right now: How do we change the myth?
For Christian believers, the call to faithfulness is a call to live in fellowship and integrity with the person and witness of Jesus Christ. There is a timeless character to this all that evokes qualities of life and spirit that are recognizable throughout history and across cultural boundaries. But this does not mean that faithfulness is a state of abstract piety floating above the multifaceted and compromising realities of daily life in actual situations. St. Paul, in Acts 13:36, refers King David having “served God’s purposes in his own generation.” This suggests, of course, that faithfulness works itself out in the context of complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that prevail at a particular time and place.
To that effect, Michael Gerson recently offered a brief analysis, lament, and general way forward, one that seems to me both timeless and, to some extent, specific to our own generation. And it’s one that fits well into what Hunter calls “affirmation and antithesis” (or what I call incarnation and cultivation qua witness):
There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.
The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.
This seems quite obviously right to me, and it seems very closely related to Hunter’s “theology of faithful presence.” But there is one problem with it. Hunter points out in his book what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures”: the social conditions that make certain beliefs credible and intelligible to a person who holds them.
Right now the bulk of the evangelical vox populi, at least among white evangelicals, is dominated by a plausibility structure that bears very little if any resemblance to a Christ-like social/political engagement. Put simply: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and reformation are not its hallmarks, if they even make the fine print anymore. Shamelessness, self-assurance, retribution, subversion—these seem to make up the new quadrilateral for “evangelicals.”
I truly do not know a way to change this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve given up trying to find it. My own plausibility structure for Christian faith consists, in part, of a small handful of friends, a list of which I could count on one hand. The rest is almost entirely made up of books by authors who, if they’re even still alive, I have never met or spoken with and who almost no one else I know reads. (These include George Hunsinger, Mark Noll, Gilbert Meilaender, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Christian Wiman, Alan Jacobs, and David French to name a few.)
More than anything, these folks seem to me to see their role as Christians not as promoting some ethic or denouncing another, but as primarily seeking to display God’s faithful presence in Jesus. As Hunter describes it:
Pursuit [of], identification [with], the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual.
Hunter also points out, in at least a partial echo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, that “we must be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” I’m no expert on Bonhoeffer, but it seems like in his later years he was more focused on the second half of that objective.
If the “community of faith” seems more intent on loving itself—while, of course, it fights valiantly against its (often self-created) enemies in the (often self-created) culture war—then are Christians justified in, to some extent, turning their backs on the church—or, less dramatically, turning their attention from it— in order to live among and love those “outside” the community of faith—to “affirm” their neighbors while living out the “antithesis”?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s where I’m at.