The possibility of a Christian politics

Any contemporary attempt to articulate a Christian politics needs to begin with the radical change in the position of most forms of Christianity with regard to the state. Protestantism had initially to ally itself with the state as a matter of survival, but its more radical logic pointed towards the separation of church and state achieved in the United States. Pentecostalism, considered as the most extensive and most recent wave of Protestantism (via Methodism), has very important roots in precisely this American situation where religious actors make political interventions, but cannot do so as accepted allies of the state in spite of talk about the ‘Christian’ foundations of the nation. Anglican Christianity in England may retain the alliance with the state at the symbolic level but in practice exercises the life and liberty of a free church, if sometimes with difficulty. One has only to compare the English with the Russian situation to understand where Christianity once was and where now for the most part it is. The Russian church possesses influence in the state as part of its major role in fostering national identity and opposing Western liberalism. The Anglican and the Russian Orthodox Churches can barely make sense of each other, to the point where Russian hierarchs doubt whether the Anglican Church is properly Christian.

Catholicism for long struggled to retain historical alliances with particular ‘Catholic’ states against radical secularism with very varied degrees of success, but there is now a widespread recognition that the old alliances cannot be long maintained. One has only to compare the situation still obtaining in Argentina, where the old alliance has been maintained, with the situations in Brazil and France, where it has been severely attenuated, to estimate the extent of the change. The change is evident not just in those countries of Latin America where equal marriage has already been instituted, but in Latin Europe, for example Italy, and even in Ireland, where there has been a remarkable metamorphosis of public opinion.

We are back to the condition of Christianity before Constantine. That has profound consequences for any notion of a Christian politics. Before I try to work these out, let me dramatize the shift by comparing Pentecostalism with Islam, just as I have compared Brazil and Argentina within Christianity. Pentecostalism represents one end of the spectrum and Islam the other. The Pentecostal revival realized and maybe prefigured the contemporary change in Christianity, and in that it is the antithesis of the rival revival of Islam. Islam has sought alliances with the state and has been to various degrees monopolistic and intermittently violent from Nigeria to Malaysia, and even Indonesia. Pentecostals have been inherently pluralistic, separate from the state and remarkably peaceful, and those features have governed its global character from Ghana and China to Peru. It has also illustrated the moral dangers of political involvement where it has pursued the politics of recognition, for example as in Pinochet’s Chile.

Political action is morally ambiguous and political actors very restricted in their options. Politics is the art of the possible, and politicians have to find an optimum relation between the exigencies of action and the principles that have motivated their political vocation, assuming these go beyond the promotion of interests. The political vocation is a moral burden and not one that can be made transparent to scrutiny without the good ends sought being compromised. Immediate lesser evils may be judged probably but not certainly (given we are dealing with contingent likelihoods) to avert worse evils in the long run. These are the burdens of political judgement that arise most obviously in relation to pre-emptive war: do you make the eventual costs of war, including the likelihood of defeat, that much greater by refusing to act until your moral criteria have been fully satisfied? That was precisely the dilemma at the time of appeasement. Every decision in times of crises is haunted by coercive comparisons drawn from previous crises about the dire consequences either of acting or of failing to act.

What politics may realistically be pursued in the new conditions now mostly accepted by Christianity, either freely by reversion to its original ‘nature’, or reluctantly in recognition of the fracturing of most of its old monopolies? Clearly the new conditions preclude attempts to impose ecclesiastical norms of behaviour on the wider society. More than that, they render more likely attempts to criticize these norms either as supposedly derived from ecclesiastical authority or from readings of the Bible. That applies to the various models of sexual behaviour in the Bible from polygamy to monogamy and to all the models of political behaviour in the Bible, along a spectrum from aggression and negative reciprocity (or tit-for-tat) to non-violence. If we take the Gospels as the primary authority, it is remarkable how they focus on the temptations of power rather than on the temptations of sexuality. Neither appeals to ecclesiastical authority nor appeals to biblical authority work in the new situation. Clear intellectual deliverances are not available, and the supposedly definitive examples regularly appealed to, such as dominical restrictions on divorce, need contextualization. But this is not to say Bible and church are irrelevant to a Christian politics. They are the unique resources and traditions within which we work critically.

How then to go about formulating a Christian politics in the absence of straightforward appeals to authority? Let me begin with a paradox. Christianity is comprehensively rooted in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. It treats the Old Testament as an integral part of a progressive revelation of God though one that is fully realized in Christ. That means that interpretation of the Old Testament is Christocentric. It also requires a critical reception of the two axes of political liberation in the Old Testament, from Egypt and from Babylon, because both are followed by aggression and exclusion based on the idea of the Chosen People and the Promised Land. Christianity deals with this partly by laying strategic stress on liberation rather than oppression. More fundamentally, it turns these exemplary narratives into metaphors of the pilgrimage of the soul through a spiritual wilderness to salvation. The idea of a particular people attached to a land and a capital becomes translated metaphorically into a universal church detached from a land and a capital. In short, mainstream Christianity has turned a narrative of political events into a spiritual metaphor expressly to align the Old Testament revelation with the New. Of course, the idea of the particular and chosen people remains important in the New Testament. But it is progressively set in the context of ‘the Jerusalem above’, the universal place that is not Jerusalem, or Mount Gerizim or any other location, but everywhere the faithful gather together.

None of this is easy because a reinterpretation of a politics of liberation that repudiates the associated vengeful aggressions also mandates a Christian recognition of inevitable political realities. Minimally, that recognition includes the role of force and violence as that is inherent in the idea of the state. Christianity may not any longer be partly coextensive with the state, but the moment the idea of the state is accepted, as it is in the New Testament by Paul, Peter and (implicitly in relation to Caesar) by Jesus, and as it is by mainstream Christianity today, a difficult question arises. It concerns the radical Christian embrace of non-violence in a world that uniformly practises the ‘negative reciprocity’ of tit-for-tat. We have to work out the implications of that extraordinary revolution whereby negative reciprocity is not treated as straightforwardly ultimate in human affairs and provides a yardstick of the fall. At the same time, in a fallen world (or as we all experience it in daily realities) there are only two options: some version of the state with channelled violence, or the anarchic chaos of a war of all against all. Non-violence is not an option, except for individuals witnessing to the ideal, sometimes at little cost, given that (say) Stanley Hauerwas can rely on less principled people to protect him from the consequences, and sometimes at ultimate cost. The choice is therefore either the channelled violence of the state or anarchic violence. Here one contemporary false option has to be rejected. It is the theoretical acceptance of a logic of self-defence against aggressors while at the same time drawing on an anti-war sentiment to raise the bar against action so high that deterrence loses its rationale.

Channelled violence is better than the war of all against all, but channelled violence needs a principle of justice to circumscribe the extensive potential of the state for oppression. Here a Christian politics may appeal to the Old Testament concept of a law of righteousness as inherent in its moral concept of peoplehood. Once again, although the Christian Church is no longer bound up with peoplehood, it nevertheless proposes a politics for a world composed of peoples. For that it needs the reference point of the Law and the Prophets. That need not include the ritual elements of law, although these have their place in social ordering, no matter that some interpretations of Christianity have fostered prejudice against ‘mere ritual’, but it does need the ethical imperative embodied in the Law and in the social critique of the Prophets. In this it also follows the norms of the New Testament. Neither the Gospels nor the Epistles seek to ‘destroy the Law’, and Paul explicitly warns against the antinomian consequences of doing so. There is a new freedom based on fundamental ethical principle and interior assent not on rote and the external performance of rules, but it is not licence. The universalism of the New Testament has to be read back into the Old Testament to release Christians from peoplehood understood as exclusive providential privilege. Our earthly Jerusalems need to be defended, and borders are an inherent part of social definition and identity, but they do not need to be exclusive. The Old Testament can itself be deployed against exclusivity in terms of the universal imprint of the divine image. The Christian embrace of universal brotherhood and sisterhood renders it wary of particular loyalties to family and nation such as are implied by the promises to ‘the seed’ of Abraham. A Christian politics recognizes the particular loyalties into which we were born and the universal loyalties into which we are reborn. Any Christian individual has to negotiate this tension between universal and particular, as Bonhoeffer did.

Separation from the state offers a new freedom to Christian political commentary. Of course, the state will attempt to curb Christian political interventions. Moreover, this attempt will be reinforced by popular memory of past ecclesiastical restrictions, for example on sexual freedom, that have since been slowly abandoned. In resisting these attempted restrictions, it is not so much that ecclesiastical authorities may claim to speak for all Christians, which they clearly do not, and have not for a very long time. It is that Christians as such may deploy the distinction between the restricted freedoms and collective disciplines of political actors – controlled as they are by electorates, rival interests, and choices of lesser and greater evils rather than unequivocal goods – and the greater freedoms available to commentators. Political actors can enlarge their freedoms by responding to the criticisms of commentators (say) to face down populist pressures. Christians, along with all people of goodwill, can be part of the exchange between actor and commentator, always remembering, at least in formerly Christian societies, that these have been informed by Christianity through the cultural dissemination of the core ideas of what it is to be a neighbour. It is the neighbour as the one who binds up the wounds of others defined as fellow human beings that provides the initial animating principle of a Christian politics, whatever qualifications may have then to be implemented, for example in the policy of Germany to migrants of various kinds.

There, with its principle of love towards neighbour, stranger and even enemy, a Christian politics realizes the governing idea of both Testaments.