I recently heard an auto mechanic say that he was “so far to the Right, that I’m almost horizontal.” His quaint aphorism was then followed by a barrage of expletives towards his political opponents—denouncing them as unpatriotic, cowardly, and immoral.
And he claimed to be a Christian.
The problem of political division is rife in American culture. Christians (like myself) are often just as guilty as political feuding as are our secular friends. And yet we insist that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ must somehow overcome or transcend political division.
In Left, Right, and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, political opposites Lisa Sharon Harper of Jim Wallis’s Sojourners and D. C. Innes of The King’s College offer their political perspectives as Christians. Besides intimating that each has political opinions and that each is a Christian, there’s little agreement.
The stark contrast between the Christian’s responsibility for the political and social order begins from the first page with one of the more interesting forwards to a book that I’ve ever read, co-written by Jim Wallis and Marvin Olasky (not the best of friends, if you’ll recall). Harper and Innes begin their book with personal narratives, follow with a section on each individual’s belief in government and business, and end with an extended section titled, of course, “conversations.” In this last section they discuss specific issues such as abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage.
Christian Politics?
The personal narratives are, no doubt, important to their politics. Growing up in a bureaucratized Canada with repressive government, Innes found his way to America and the Republican Party that stresses limited government and individual liberty. Harper, a descendent of racially oppressed ancestors and attuned to the marginalized of society, found herself allied with the Democratic Party. Both stressed the common precepts of dignity, liberty, and justice as the proper foundation to a Christian political ethic. Here, Harper wrote a particularly helpful section on why biblical concepts of liberty, justice, and freedom can never be entirely separated from our politics, because humanity serves as the representative image bearers of God. Innes focused on the government’s responsibility to pursue punish evil and praise what is good.
Both believe that biblical Christianity profoundly affects our politics. They agree,
The Kingdom of God is not the Kingdom of Man. It comes by the work of grace, spiritually. It does not come by human means, politically or economically. Nonetheless, the Kingdom of God has revolutionary implications for political and economic activity (41).
Yet they clearly disagree about our responsibilities as good neighbors:
So, while the Lord tarries, Christians in American are to prosper our country, help make it a better place in every respect; more just, more equitable, more merciful, more wise, more bueatiful, more fruitful, more flourishing in every way that God desires human communities to flourish […] This book is our debate between the political left and right over what that understanding is (42).
Let’s Get Political
It is impossible to detail at length how each argues for their respective position, but at least one position can be discussed. An illustrative example of their differing politics is the controversial issue of gay marriage.
For Innes, giving legal embrace to same-sex marriage “would fundamentally change our understanding of the nature and purpose of marriage, and would therefore turn marriages sharply in a socially destructive direction” (133). For Innes, supporting same-sex marriage is an unequivocal endorsement for normalizing homosexuality. It also questions the integrity of the mother-father relationship by insisting that society can be incubated, equally, without deference to the family. As Innes states, “We have weddings as community events because every marriage, God willing, is the community’s lifeline to the future. It’s how we beget and train the next generation.”
Lisa Sharon Harper and D. C. Innes
Why do people have a common faith but different political loyalties?
How does the Christian faith shape how we should vote and participate in the political process?
In Left, Right, and Christ, authors D. C. Innes (on the right) and Lisa Sharon Harper (on the left) discuss and explore how the Christian faith speaks directly to American politics today, but with different understanding and applications.
Harper says she is “in process” over the question of same-sex marriage. With her abundant talk of equality on all issues, Harper unsurprisingly places the debate over same-sex marriage as a morally ambiguous, unfair allotment of rights. Noticeably, Harper vocally bypasses the debate of homosexuality within the church and chose to discuss it as “rights” issue within the political sphere alone. This raises an interesting question: How is one’s politics “Christian” if the moral status of an issue is absolved from Christian reflection? Because homosexuals are image bearers, Harper concludes that depriving them of rights and access to institutions is unjust. For the state to omit full rights to a group of people, she says, “is to set up a society that formally declares a certain class of people as less than human” (145).
Deep Divide
This book was not so much a creative work in political theology as much as a telling presentation of the political diversity and polarization in Christianity. I had hoped read this book and conclude that our politicial chasm isn’t so wide as I believed. Rather, this book confirmed my view. Perhaps the book was published with the purpose to unite. It didn’t, but I think that’s okay.
Christian liberals see government as a great leveler for social good, while Christian conservatives see government as an encroaching Leviathan incapable of taming itself. Christian liberals have a greater tendency to obfuscate moral matters by relativizing one wrong act against another (“Abortion,” liberals say, “is just as evil as war”) while Christian conservatives play a zero-sum game in which moral matters are unequivocally wrong and undeserving of legal affirmation. And because government can displace the roles of mediating institutions, conservatives seek a hedge of protection from allowing government to wrest more control into its hands. One believes that government can bring about great social mobility, while the other believes that government is about the maintenance of order, not securing anyone’s material needs or ambitions.
As a reviewer, my own biases are real: I’m a conservative. And where I found Innes to be thoughtful, chastened, and sober-minded, Harper emphasized sentiment, moral ambiguity on complex matters, and an Utopian-like eschatology foreign to an Augustinian realism or even a Postmillennialist’s emphasis on progress. Likewise, had someone from the Christian Century reviewed the book, I’m sure they’d find Innes’s views indicative of a conservatism that cares less about social equality and more about social stability.
Politics Matters
We Christians are political animals. We can deny such a fact and err in our politics, grandly; or we can embrace such a fact and somehow recognize that the impulse for order, righteousness, and stability are inherently theological paradigms.
Left, Right, and Christ confirms D. G. Hart’s thesis in his provocative book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Christianity is of such diverse political theorizing, that somehow brandishing one’s politics as immutably Christian is a fool’s errand. Yet the political theorizing that Hart calls upon evangelicals to reflect upon is marshaled and embodied in the political philosophy Innes incarnates—prudence, custom, variety, followed by an impressive conservation between human action and biblical anthropology. Harper, on the other, argues from the generalities of the “kingdom” in mandating that the state reflect unbounded charity, forgiveness, and equality.
Whether you call yourself liberal or conservative, deciphering what the actual mission of the church may provide clarity in distilling our political responsibilities.
