In a recent New York Times op-ed, the well-known political commentator Peter Wehner describes how as a college student in the early 1980s he believed his Christian faith should inform his politics. Yet, though politically conservative, he was also troubled by what he perceived to be a subordination of Christianity to partisan ideology— “the ease with which people took something sacred and turned it into a blunt political weapon.” It was only years later that he learned that one of the most influential figures in his faith journey, C.S. Lewis, shared a similar approach and concerns.[1]
Because the Christian faith gives insights into the human condition, Lewis saw the need to view public matters through a theological lens. “[He] knew that a faith-informed conscience could advance justice and that Christianity played an enormous part in establishing the concept of natural rights and the dignity of the human person.” But he also recognized the limits of what could be achieved through politics and that no political party can come close to approximating God’s ideal. He warned of an unhealthy preoccupation with politics:
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.
Elsewhere Lewis wrote: “The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great. The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost. . . .” Christianity is not about means but about ends—the telos, or ultimate purpose, of human beings. But partisan political engagement often undermines that effort. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in,” Lewis reminded us. “Aim at earth and you will get neither.”
One does not have to agree with all of Lewis’ political views to acknowledge the relevance of his warnings in these troubling times. He forces us to ask ourselves some hard questions. Why are so many of us so driven by politics? Why do we even as Christians tend to identify so strongly with one political party or another? Why do we drink almost exclusively from the well of one or another highly partisan news networks? In a word, why have we become political junkies?
The point of this post is that extremes on both the left and the right suffer from the “illusion of ideology”—or self-deception concerning the inherent righteousness of their respective (false) political ideologies which are at war and tear at the fabric of our body politic. In our politically charged atmosphere, people are disposed to a false sense of identity. They mistakenly confuse their political identity with their identity as American citizens and, worse, their identity as Christians. They are therefore prone to treat their political opponents or those who are not “one of us” (whatever “us” might mean) as “the other”—not equally American, or even equally human. The “red, white, and blue” is being replaced by a tribal “red and white” or “blue.” We must awaken to the fact that our continued unity as “We the People” is not guaranteed. A house divided against itself cannot stand (Matt 12:25). Our lack of a common culture and shared commitment to common ideals threaten to tear us apart. My concern is to explain how this has come about and suggest some possible remedies.
A House Divided
“Like water that refracts light and changes the shape of things,” observes Wehner, “politics can distort and invert Christianity, turning a faith that is about grace, reconciliation and redemption into one that is characterized by bitterness, recriminations and lack of charity.”[2] Ironically, many of those who most loudly decry the decay of morals and ethical deterioration in our society are also the most willing to endorse a kind of Machiavellian scorched earth policy in which the political ends justify the means. Over the past two decades, our escalating culture war and ideological captivity to either political party (aided by the social media) has reduced politics to a zero-sum game which disincentivizes collaboration or a common search for the common good.
In the quest for ideological purity, compromise has become a dirty word. We try to shield ourselves from our own prejudices by couching our beliefs and actions in the language of objective truth. Often, we cherry pick every piece of “evidence,” however thin, that supports our position and ignore the rest.[3] “We cannot speak truth we do not know. We cannot know truth we have not sought,” the popular Bible teacher Beth Moore wisely said in a recent conference. “You and I . . . know that humans have shown themselves proficient at finding verses to justify all sorts of heinous and unreasonable acts. So, the task is not as simple as we might hope in times when Bible verses are bouncing like ping pong balls across the political dividing net.”[4]
Americans today are in the grip of a phenomenon called “negative polarization”—meaning that a person’s membership in a political party is increasingly defined by hatred and fear of the other side.[5] To put it bluntly, we live in an age of ideology and tribal thinking which emphasizes the moral purity of our political choices and virtually demonizes the opposition. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe contemporary politics, our civic discourse suffers from the dangerous illusion that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”[6] Or as someone I know very well recently conveyed to me about his feelings during the most recent presidential election: “If I vote for Biden, I am a baby killer and if I vote for Trump, I am a racist.”
Again, how have we gotten to this point? What can we do about it? Perhaps, as Ryan Tafilowski argues, what is needed is a sober appraisal of what politics is for and what we can realistically hope to achieve through politics. This requires that we dismantle some idealistic, and indeed dangerous, assumptions and attitudes which are, unfortunately, all too prevalent both within the Christian community and our society.[7]
An Ethic of Responsibility
Two theologians who can help us navigate the difficult terrain of politics are the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and the German pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), both of whom lived through two of the bloodiest wars in human history. They both propose that our political life—both personally and corporately—must be defined by an ethic of responsibility.
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was politically active in the German Resistance during the early years of the war. People have admired him for his moral courage, which ultimately resulted in martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis regime. His tragic yet inspiring story is a fascinating and important case study in Christian political responsibility.
Bonhoeffer’s early study of theology was largely disengaged from issues of social justice. It was not until a short stint in 1928 as an associate pastor at a congregation in Barcelona, Spain that he had first-hand exposure to the harsh realities of poverty. This precipitated a change in his worldview. In one sermon, he preached how God is concerned with “those who are ever neglected, insignificant, weak, ignoble, unknown, inferior, oppressed, despised.” This transformation continued during a year-long fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York, beginning in the fall of 1930. It was during that time that he developed a friendship with an African American student named Albert “Frank” Fisher. Through this friendship, he gained an insider’s view of racism and racial injustice. This became the lens through which he began to view racism in his own country—particularly racism against people of Jewish descent.[8]
In the early 1930s, one of the main goals of the Nazi party under Hitler was to gain support of the church, and to a large degree they were successful. The young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had just returned from his trip to the U.S. in 1931, was continually surprised to find that even 90 percent of the young theologians were pro-Nazi, openly wearing swastikas on their lapels. But Bonhoeffer steadfastly resisted compromise with the Nazi regime. From 1933 until he joined the anti-Hitler resistance around 1940, his mission was to protect the independence of the church from a totalitarian state. “If you board the wrong train,” he famously said, “it’s no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.” This was his response to those who thought they could remain loyal to Christ by working to reform the nazified Germain Reich Church “from within.”[9] As he witnessed the continued conflation of faith and Nazis political ideology which threatened the lives of millions of Germans (including his own), he intensified his call for discipleship.
Bonhoeffer believed that being a follower of Christ involves loving one’s neighbor unconditionally. He writes: “In renouncing one’s own happiness, one’s own rights, one’s own righteousness, one’s own dignity, in renouncing violence and success, in renouncing one’s own life, a person is prepared to love the neighbor.” Costly discipleship is demonstrated in both being like and acting like Jesus Christ.[10] He recognized that in certain instances, love for neighbor might compel one to take wrongful actions such as deception and lying when life itself and all that is good is threatened. He contrasted “living truth” with a “cynical truth” which is detached from real situations: “It is only the cynic who claims to ‘speak the truth’ at all times and in all places to all men in the same way, but who, in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth. He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth . . . but, in fact, is destroying the living truth between men.”[11]
Bonhoeffer rejected any abstract philosophizing and moralizing which did not grapple with historical realities. Because of our human finitude and creatureliness, there are concrete situations in which there is no morally perfect choice; rather, the responsible person must choose between what is “relatively better” and what is “relatively worse.” Indeed, choosing what one perceives to be the “absolute good” may sometimes be the very worst course of action.[12] This assumes that we can avoid guilt, when, in fact, “every person who acts responsibility becomes guilty.”[13] Recognition of our own moral fallibility and fallenness calls for humility and openness toward those with whom we may disagree, thus reversing the great untruth of “Us” vs “Them.”[14] Bonhoeffer recognized that one of the great temptations is moral self-righteousness. In the days before his execution, he wrote: “The man who despises another will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing that we despise in the other is entirely absent from ourselves.”[15]
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Reinhold Niebuhr carefully watched the developments in Germany under Nazism. Shortly after Bonhoeffer’s death, he wrote an article entitled “Death of a Martyr,” in which he recounts his conversations and letters with the German pastor-theologian. Years before, Niebuhr had brought the brilliant young Lutheran scholar to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Generally regarded as one of America’s most influential theologians, Niebuhr was a proponent of the view known as “Christian realism” which considers the effects of sin in human affairs. He was critical of any form of political idealism. ″He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,″ he frequently said, quoting a Psalm about God’s laughter at humanity’s blustering presumptions of absolute solutions. He added: ″The whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.”
Bonhoeffer never described his view as “Christian realism.” But had he lived longer he no doubt would have expressed agreement with his mentor. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer describes humans as by nature both good and evil. “Shakespeare’s characters now walk in our midst,” he writes, “both the villain and the saint.”[16] In a similar vein, Niebuhr states that inherent “sin” is the one church doctrine that is verified by human history; yet there are always the “possibilities of the good and the obligations to realize them” in this world. He describes the realization of love in human affairs as an “impossible possibility.”
In his book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) Niebuhr makes his well-known statement, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[17] This mixture of the two impulses in human nature, of justice and the good on the one hand and self-interest and egoism on the other, makes any simple distinctions between good and evil or between selfishness and altruism invalid.[18] A biblical worldview sees the human condition as shot through with irony, ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. There is no judgement that is not at least partially corrupted by pride and self-interest. Thus, while in principle there is a moral requirement to care about the well-being of other human beings, because man is fallen and imperfectible, no solution to society’s problems will ever be perfect. A democratic society must, in other words, seek proximate solutions to insoluble problems. Our knowledge that there is no complete solution for a problem, says Niebuhr, saves us from the illusion that a proximate solution is an ultimate one.[19]
As Tafilowski summarizes Niebuhr’s view, “Paradoxically, the quest for pristine ideological purity actually undermines the pursuit of justice, since it supposes that perfect solutions are available for every problem and will settle for nothing less. So, in his obsession with perfect justice, the ideologue refuses the opportunity for proximate justice.”[20] In fact, evil often results from the attempt to make human goals ultimate goals. The responsible citizen therefore recognizes, on the one hand, that no choice is perfectly moral or that no problem can be solved perfectly; yet, on the other hand, that it is possible to improve society through a shared pursuit of the common good.[21]
Our Politicization of Nearly Everything
Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr teach us that the quest for ideological purity or a perfect “fit” between our faith and our politics is both an illusion involving a defective anthropology and bad politics, since is makes compromise in pursuit of the common good increasingly difficult. If everything we believe perfectly aligns with one political platform, we should therefore ask whether our ideology is driving both our theology and our religious commitments.[22]
Seldom, however, do we stop to question the tendency within our culture to think of the solutions to our society’s problems in political terms. For many people today, the most important thing is whether you are a conservative or liberal. This is indicated by recent studies which show that political affiliation is becoming so important that for some people it trumps every other aspect of their identity.[23] Tragically, this politicization of nearly everything has infected the church. In fact, according to Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter, the sad irony is that “no group in American society has done more to politicize values over the past half century, and therefore undermine their renewal, than Christians—both on the Right (since the early 1980s) and on the Left (during the 1960s and 1970s). Both sides are implicated and remain implicated today.” The consequence of this wholehearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians, he argues, “has been in effect, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations to special interest groups.”[24]
Thaddeus Williams similarly describes what happens when faith is politicized:
“The great triumph over evil, then, must be political. We must use the power of law to squash those who dare question our self-defined selves. Political activity becomes a spiritual quest to usher in a new heaven and new earth.”[25]
The tragic irony is that both the far left and far right ends of the political spectrum engage in a sort of tribal warfare in which each side is playing the very same game they condemn the other side for playing.[26] The primary battlefields in this cultural and political war are the competing ideologies of white Christian nationalism and critical theory (CT) or critical race theory (CRT).
While the current tribal war has been decades in the making, it came to a head with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. It was then that two competing narratives began to take shape. The narrative on the left flows out of our nation’s history of racism and white supremacy. From this perspective, a shrinking white Christian population is lashing out against threats to its privileged status as America becomes more racially, culturally, and religiously diverse, and using its power to marginalize minority populations. The competing narrative on the right is rooted an interpretation of faith and our nation’s founding. It states simply that the left is using the instruments of power under the guise of “social justice” to deprive us of our rights (especially the right to religious freedom and individual liberties) and install a liberal hegemonic “religion” of secularism within the public square.[27]
My concern in the next three posts is to help the reader to better understand these competing narratives and show how, as totalistic ideologies, both white Christian nationalism and critical theory pose a threat to true Christian faith and the body politic.
[1] Wehner, “The Political Magic of C. S. Lewis.” [2] Ibid. [3] Banerjee and Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times, 120. [4] Moore, “Faithful Leadership.” [5]French, Divided We Fall, 2 [6] Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, 70. [7] I am indebted to Ryan Tafilowski for this observation. See, “Politics at Twilight,” 2 [8] DeYoung, Living Faith, 26-28. [9] Haynes, “If You Board the Wrong Train . . .” 110-114 [10] Cooper, “A Reorientation to Discipleship,” 7-8 [11] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 367-68. [12] Ibid., 227. [13] Ibid., 241. [14] Tafilowski, “Politics at Twilight,” 4-5 [15] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 10. [16] Kleinhans, Till the Night be Past, 140 [17] Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, viii. [18] Ibid., 21. [19] Ibid., 144-45. [20] Tafilowski, “Politics and Christian Realism in Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer,” 1 [21] Ibid. [22] See Tafilowski, “Politics at Twilight,” 2; and “Politics and Christian Realism,” 3. [23] French, Divided We Fall, 81. [24] Hunter, To Change the World, 168-72 [25] Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, 33. [26] Ibid., 60. [27] French, Divided We Fall, 12-17.
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