Robin W. Lovin: The Religious Use of Politics

An essay by Robin W. Lovin

Americans have never been quite sure what to think about politics, and religious Americans have been as confused about this as everybody else. Despite a heritage of religious reflection that is far older than the country itself, we do not know what to make of politics from the perspective of faith. Or, to put the matter more precisely, we do not agree about what to make of politics from the perspective of faith.

In North Carolina, a couple of years back, there was a Baptist pastor who confidently told his congregation that you can't be a Christian if you don't vote Republican. (I do not know what that did for the number of Republicans in the area, but I am reliably informed that it increased the number of United Methodists.) There are some people whose faith tells them exactly how to vote. Their numbers seem to be growing. Last month, the Alliance Defense Fund recruited pastors in 22 states to make partisan political statements from the pulpit, as a prelude to a legal challenge to IRS rules that forbid that kind of mixing of religion and politics. There are other people who believe their faith tells them not to vote at all. Their numbers are growing, too.

The religious ways of looking at politics are many, and they do not agree in their judgments. But fortunately for those of us who make our living trying to bring order to these arguments, the variety is not endless. The many religious ways of looking at politics tend to return to a few major themes, and as so often happens in American life, those themes tend to become polarized. So we have people who say that politics is a temptation, a distraction that people who care about the eternal truths ought to avoid. And we have people who say that politics is a tool, an instrument to advance the eternal truths that ought not to be passed up by the faithful.

Both of those positions have been well represented in American religious history, and the tension between them has been a healthy one. But I am afraid that political and religious polarization may now be making us vulnerable in a way we have not been before. Both sides, those who see politics as a temptation and those who see politics as a tool, are acquiring a zeal for their views that makes it more important than ever to recover a middle way in which religion puts politics in its place as a human task that cannot be evaded, and can never be completed. Read More