THE RELIGIOUS USE OF POLITICS
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.

It's those three religious ways of thinking about politics--as temptation, tool, and task--that I want to explore, with an emphasis on the urgency of recovering politics as a task. I'm going to examine those three ways of thinking primarily in terms of the Christian tradition, because that's what I know best, and because the various forms of Christianity have the largest and longest part in American religious history. But consider these three ways of thinking in light of the traditions you know and participate in, to see if you find resonances with what I'm describing. In some ways, we all share the problems that Christian history has created for American religious life, but there will be no solutions to those problems unless all of the communities that now make up our common life can participate in them in their own ways.

TEMPTATION
Political life is full of temptation. This is evident from the number of stories in the press about politicians who have yielded to it. But the greatest moral risks may not be the ones that come out in tabloid scandals. We send corrupt politicians to prison for betraying the public trust, but those who keep that trust are also tempted, and perhaps tempted most when they keep it best. The leader who charts a successful course in difficult times and protects the nation against dangerous enemies is always tempted to put the party, or the plan, or the nation in God's place. In extreme cases, political leaders are tempted to put themselves in God's place, or perhaps we are tempted to put them there.

Christians have always suspected that the greatest temptation in political life is not dishonesty or theft, but idolatry. The people who yield to dishonesty know what they have done, and they put the money in the freezer or run the evidence through the shredder to keep the rest of us from finding it. But when politics turns idolatrous, temptation goes public, and we are all tempted to join in. The corruption is worst just when everybody is openly engaged in it.

So people of faith are wary of politics because, as Stanley Hauerwas has reminded us, it is the idolatry of the nation that is the most convenient idolatry for us all. That is the idolatry that tempts leaders and people alike to convince one another that we alone are on God's side, while those who disagree with us are wholly evil.

Some theologians see the early years of Christianity as a time when Christians understood the dangers of politics better than we do today. When Christians were being persecuted by Roman power, they understood political idolatry, but when the church came to occupy a favored position and its bishops started to exercise political responsibility, Christians began to confuse political power with faithful witness. The Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder argued that most Christians have made that mistake ever since. He calls it "Constantinianism," after the first emperor who became a Christian and gave Christians a privileged place in the empire. I think Constantine may be getting a bad rap here, but of course it's not Constantine's empire that the anti-Constantinian theologians have in mind. Their main point is that America's imperial role in the world tempts us to idolatry, too, so that the only way to approach politics is to be alert for the temptation, understand that it isn't going to go away, and try to keep your distance from it.

For Hauerwas and others who teach in my field of Christian ethics, idolatry is a part of politics that powerful leaders and powerful nations rarely, if ever, escape. That is why Hauerwas has now joined with a number of other ethicists and political scientists in a new movement that urges that people of faith abstain from voting for conscientious reasons. This withdrawal from public, political life is an old Christian tradition, too. We see it in the sectarian Protestants of the Reformation era, who withdrew from the politics of their day and tried to form self-sufficient Christian communities. The appearance of a kind of neo-sectarianism in the life in modern Western democracies reminds us how sweeping the judgment on politics is in some parts of the Christian tradition. Corrupt politics is part of the human condition, and it's not a problem we can solve. Political power is an addictive drug to be used very sparingly, if at all, and only under close spiritual supervision. Politics in the life of faith is primarily a temptation.

TOOL
Others, however, stress the potential benefits of politics, rather than the risks. They see politics as a tool. Politics is an instrument people of faith can use to ensure that God's will is done. It is this way of thinking about politics among evangelical Protestants that has generated much of the excitement in American political life over the last couple of decades.

The emphasis in this movement is on effectiveness, on winning rather than converting or persuading. Jerry Falwell perhaps launched this evangelical politics in 1979 with the creation of the Moral Majority, but Ralph Reed had the key political insight: In a democracy where most people do not bother to vote, you do not need a moral majority. A well-organized minority will do. It does not take 51 percent of the adult population to change the high school textbooks or elect a legislature that will vote for more restrictive laws on abortion and gay marriage. If only 30 percent of the people vote, 16 percent will be sufficient to accomplish your purpose.

For those with more liberal political convictions, this has seemed somehow like cheating, though on this point at least the new religious right is playing strictly by the rules. More to the point, while the candid emphasis on electoral strategy is perhaps new, there's nothing unusual in American history about religious groups using politics in the hope of social transformation. The abolition of slavery, the temperance campaigns, the civil rights movement, and a variety of anti-war movements have had their roots in religion. Most often, these movements begin with a heavy emphasis on direct action and personal transformation. You want people in the streets as evidence that their own hearts and minds have been changed. But there is a limit on what direct action can accomplish, and most American reform movements have at some point decided it would be nice to have the coercive power of law available to fill in what moral transformation leaves undone.

It is a strategy religious activists have turned to since the days of abolitionism, for both liberal and conservative causes and for all sorts of goals. It was not Ralph Reed who said most clearly what politics as a tool is all about. It was Walter Rauschenbusch, the great theologian of the Social Gospel. What we have, said Rauschenbusch, is a society that makes good people do bad things. Poverty and lack of education lead to crime, abuse, and addiction. What we need is a society that will make bad people do good things, a society where laws will compel selfish people to think about the common good and ensure that greedy people can only get rich by meeting genuine human needs. The idea that politics is a tool thus does not belong exclusively to liberals or conservatives, and it's certainly older than the Christian Coalition and the other organizations that have enjoyed such prominence in recent presidential election cycles. It is in some ways a peculiarly American idea, with a characteristically American confidence that good intentions and good organization inevitably lead to good results.

TASK
What we've seen so far, then, are two different but interconnected ways of thinking about politics in religious perspective. Politics as tool and politics as temptation both have long histories, and both are present in American life today. But there is a third way that speaks more directly to the lessons of twentieth-century politics and to the new realities of our present situation. I call it politics as a task, and it gives a new shape to the public role of religion in response to a new kind of politics.

This new kind of politics was largely a product of the twentieth century, beginning as early as the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is a politics that seems itself to make claims that are religious in their scope and power. This politics proclaims a special moment of history in which particular political decisions taken now can seal human destiny for the indefinite future. The point of politics, then, is not the ambiguity of the choices, but the certainty of the commitment. The point of politics is to compel people to push every political choice until it becomes an ultimate decision from which, once it is made, there can be no turning back. This politics to end politics may seem to be an extreme idea, associated chiefly with Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and the totalitarian movements that threatened the Western democracies during the last century. It may not seem that this has much to do with us, or much to do with now. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, there was a tendency in the Western world to breathe a long sigh of relief--to proclaim the end of ideology and look forward to a long future of moderate, secular, pragmatic politics.

But it is now apparent that the twentieth century has not faded so completely from the horizon, and we are just beginning to understand how deeply the legacy of ultimate, apocalyptic politics has become embedded in the emerging global consciousness. What people expect from politics and what they want from their political leaders now bear the marks of this belief in a defining political moment. This is true not only in those parts of the world where political experience is short and the legacy of colonialism remains strong. It is also true of politics in the oldest democracies, including our own. Political choice and religious hope are no longer easily distinguished.

What theologians discovered early on, as the Confessing Church in Germany struggled to define itself in opposition to Hitler's German Christian movement, was that the old tradition of politics as a temptation was not quite strong enough to resist the demands of a politics that had itself become a kind of religion. You cannot withdraw from the Nazi state, or the Soviet state, or the Islamist state, in the way Mennonite and Anabaptist movements could withdraw from the governments of European princes in the seventeenth century. Nor could you use this kind of politics as a tool. Most notably, religious and political conservatives who thought Hitler might give them a political tool they could use against the Communists discovered that apocalyptic politics is a particularly dangerous tool. It is the kind of tool that ends up using those who try to use it.

Under those circumstances, the theological task is not to choose between political ideologies as though we were looking for the best tool to accomplish some religious purpose. The theological task is to return all forms of politics to the distinctive place they occupy among human activities. The theological separation between faith and politics is drawn not because politics is a temptation to be avoided, but precisely because it is a responsible human activity that people of faith are called to undertake. Politics is neither a temptation nor a tool, then, but a task, a vocation, a calling.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who finally lost his life in a Nazi prison shortly before the end of the Second World War, formulated a perspective on politics that was deliberately the opposite of the ultimate political choices that Hitler offered. Bonhoeffer identified the sphere of politics as "the penultimate." The term comes from a Greek word which means "the thing just before the last thing." Penultimate questions are important, but they are not final. They are our choices, and they cannot be less serious, or more final, than we are.

"The hungry person needs bread," Bonhoeffer wrote. "The homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom . . . It makes a difference before God whether, in the midst of a fallen, lost world, people … practice justice or despotism. Of course, those who … protect justice are still sinners, but it makes a difference whether the penultimate is respected and taken seriously" (Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6; 163, 165-66).

Notice the kind of choices Bonhoeffer has in mind here. He is concerned about exactly those choices that the revolutionary politics of the twentieth century wanted to skip. Bonhoeffer thought penultimate politics should be about sinful, limited people making choices that may be wrong, and that may have to be made again.

Sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry and providing community for the lonely are religious duties, and people of faith cannot omit them just because the tasks are difficult and may mix us up with other people who don't share our faith. We know that it is sinful, limited people who do these things. But precisely for that reason, we need to avoid thinking our choices are ever the final choices about justice, hunger, and community. Part of making our choices rightly is sustaining the institutions and structures that will allow us to make them again when we have to. That is real politics, and if we are to do our duty to the homeless, hungry, lonely, and abused, we will have to tend to politics--now and in the future.

At the same time that Bonhoeffer was writing these things in secret, in the midst of a conspiracy against Hitler's regime in Germany, religious leaders with a more public audience in the Western democracies were shaping similar ideas about politics as a task.

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was one of those leaders. His religious perspective on politics begins with a prophetic warning against idolatry. There is no Christian system of justice or economics, Niebuhr wrote. There is only a prophetic attitude toward all systems, which asks hard questions about whether they can actually deliver what they promise.

But this negative warning against the temptations of idolatry, taken all by itself, is no more sufficient in a Western democracy than it was for Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany. The prophetic attitude must be coupled with a responsible attitude, one that is willing to make hard choices between less than perfect alternatives. The responsible attitude, as Niebuhr put it, "will not pretend to be God nor refuse to make a decision between political answers because each answer is discovered to contain a moral ambiguity in God's sight. We are [human beings], not God; we are responsible for making choices between greater and lesser evils, even when our Christian faith, illuminating the human scene, makes it quite apparent that there is no pure good in history; and probably no pure evil, either" (Faith and Politics, p. 56).

This understanding of responsibility was the core of Niebuhr's Christian realism, which dominated American religious thought and a good deal of American politics in the years just after the Second World War. When commentators write that we need to rediscover Reinhold Niebuhr, as it seems that they do now almost weekly on the op-ed pages, what they have in mind is this responsible engagement with the ambiguities of politics, in contrast to the quest for certainty and finality that pervades much of today's political rhetoric and strategy.

It may seem strange that we have to be reminded of this, especially since Niebuhr was perhaps the most successful public theologian of the last 100 years. Americans responded to his realism and political responsibility because they had already rejected the ideologies of Marxism, nationalism, and racial identity. Politics as a task came naturally to us, while many other parts of the world have had to learn it the hard way.

Nevertheless, we do need to be reminded. We have not entirely escaped the heightened sense of expectation that surrounded politics during the struggles of the twentieth century. Indeed, as partisanship has deepened over the past decade and the battle lines between conservative and liberal, red and blue, and right and left have become more sharply drawn, the desire to believe that we have it in our hands to settle the score forever becomes almost overpowering.

That observation gets us from Reinhold Niebuhr to Newt Gingrich, if you will, from Christian Realism to the Contract with America. To carry the interpretation further, I have to make a move onto political ground that is currently in dispute. But I would not be responsible to my topic if I did not conclude by saying what I think the understanding of politics as a task implies for a religious perspective on politics as we have it right now.

As I read our recent history, the way it works is this: During the 1990s, political strategists devised a version of politics as a tool that won elections by abandoning the conventional goals of middle ground and high participation in favor of mobilizing a base and ensuring that base would get out and vote. The opposition, meantime, could be lulled into staying home out of indifference or even induced to abstain by creating a negative image of their candidate.

That is a risky electoral strategy, so risky that the experts keep waiting for it to fail. But it has worked well enough over the past decade that nobody now dares to abandon it, and the polarization of electoral politics has begun to have serious repercussions through the whole of the political process. Polarization demands more and more complete commitment to a tightly defined partisan agenda. Under these circumstances, continuity of policy becomes something like a religious dogma, and "staying the course" takes on the seriousness of a test of faith. Political leaders become less able to respond to evidence, whether it is collected by intelligence agencies or reported by those who watch what is happening to the markets. Policies are pursued without criticism or correction right up to the point where the policy fails.

In the partisan environment that now prevails, these ultimate expectations about political questions shape everybody's thinking. The Bush administration has been heavily criticized for substituting dogma for analysis, but the positions and pronouncements of the Democrats have become equally predictable and likewise largely independent of the available evidence.

Many people in both parties now recognize that this way of going about the work of politics is a problem. The art of the possible has been replaced by the appearance of ultimacy. Purity is preserved, but very little is accomplished by way of dealing with the serious issues of economic stability and security, sustainable energy consumption, and affordable health care. As these failures of political leadership became apparent, the emergence of a campaign built around an abstract commitment to "change" became almost inevitable. Like Voltaire's God, if Barack Obama did not exist, we would have had to invent him.

But here is what I find alarming about the immediate situation: The politics of ultimacy is coming to rest on the promise of change with the same weight that it only recently placed on the assurance of continuity. What the electorate still seeks is one choice that will relieve them of the necessity of all future choices, one change in light of which all future changes are already made--and though the voters are dissatisfied with all the leaders whose single-minded partisanship got us into the mess we are now in, they seem determined to choose a new leader who offers the same sort of ultimate choices. Not surprisingly, the candidates are eager to present themselves as that leader. Everyone is now a maverick and a reformer, able as a result of a lifetime lived on the margins to usher in a new era in which there will be nothing left of the old one.

I do not fault Senator McCain for wanting to claim the mantle of change for himself and Governor Palin, nor do I blame Senator Obama for trying to associate his rival with previous failures by saying that McCain is running for George Bush's third term. But the hard reality of penultimate politics is that everybody is running for George Bush's third term, in the sense that the problems his administration will leave behind are the only problems that any president will have a chance to solve for at least the next four years. If you watched the first presidential debate on September 26, you may have noticed that the one question both candidates ducked was how they would adjust their programs and expectations to the new realities created by massive budgetary commitments to stabilize the financial markets. In the real world of penultimate politics, that is the question they will have to answer first.

That is the reality of political responsibility of the kind that Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer described. Both candidates know this, when they are not just running for office, and it seems to me Senator Obama has at least made an attempt in recent weeks to turn the discussion to more concrete policy choices.

What is alarming is not that the candidates are unwilling to talk about the issues, but the mounting evidence that the voters do not want to hear it. Our taste for the politics of ultimacy has been whetted by the intense partisanship of the past decade, so that penultimate choices will no longer satisfy us.

Some argue that our election rhetoric is so heated and our real choices are so obscure because, as the saying goes, we get the candidates we deserve. But I doubt that is true, or at least I'm afraid it may not be true yet. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is really suited by temperament or experience for the politics of ultimate choices, and for that we may be grateful. But a people who want ultimate choices will eventually find leaders who offer them. When we get to that point, the changes may not be as benign as the vague hopes that we are offered in 2008, and the enemies targeted for elimination in some future contest may not be as abstract as "greed" and "evil."

It seems, then, that we may be at a point in history where, in order to prevent politics from taking on the dimensions of a religious choice, we have to turn to a religious perspective that allows us to take politics seriously on its own terms, as a continuing task. If politicians are no longer able to teach us what politics is, then theologians must at least remind us that it is not theology.

We must meet the people and ideas we encounter in political life on terms of equality, not just seeking votes for a solution we already know, but respectful of other people's choices and prepared to learn new ways of thinking about problems. We must accept the risks that go with those encounters, including the risk of guilt that goes with making choices between greater and lesser evils. All of those points were apparent to Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer more than half a century ago, but they bear repeating in our quite different circumstances today.

We are tempted today not so much to seek political power instead of seeking God, but to see political power as God, to find in politics the locus of an ultimate choice that will free us from the burdens of future responsibility. Some will say I have overstated the case, and these parallels between our present polarized politics and the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century are overdrawn. Others will say I have understated the problem, by keeping it safely within the confines of Western democracy shaped by Christian traditions. They believe we are now engaged in a clash of civilizations, in which faith and politics cannot be separated in ways our Western, secular democracies have tried to do. If these people are right, the conflict that threatens us today is religious, not political, and the right century from which to learn our lessons is the sixteenth, or the eleventh, not the twentieth.

The threat of religious conflict is real, though the gap between religions is not as wide as some people have tried to make it. But in any case, the question of peace does not rest on whether all religions can agree on their answers to the ultimate questions. Peace depends on whether each religion can, for its own good reasons, find a way to take the penultimate tasks of politics seriously.

Robin W. Lovin is the Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. He is grateful for recent opportunities to present these ideas in lectures at the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University and the Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson, Mississippi.