Abstract
For a British reviewer, reading Lee Camp’s book Scandalous Witness feels like intruding on another family’s troubles. Although it bears the subtitle ‘A little political manifesto for Christians’, it is specifically written for American Christians. He pulls no punches. The claim that the USA is, or ever was, a Christian country he describes as historically and theologically false. The country is not the hope of the world, he asserts, and to view the USA as the country that stands tall in the world is merely a messianic pretence.
Lee Camp is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Lipscomb University, Nashville and challenges head-on the American Conservative Christian narrative. He is deliberately provocative in style. Chapter headings include ‘American hope is a bastard’, ‘Every empire falls’ and ‘How Christian values, and the Bible, corrupt Christianity’. A liberal Christian might start reading the book with a certain smugness, anticipating an all-out assault on the American political right – ‘the idolatrous and blasphemous use of the Bible in contemporary politics’ (p. 79), as Camp puts it – and its curious adoption of the character-flawed Donald Trump as its standard bearer. The liberal will chuckle at Camp’s colourful description of the Southern Christian with a 12-gauge shotgun across his lap, a Bible on the living room table, droning on piously about making America great again.
Yet a rethink is rapidly called for. Camp’s scathing assessment of the right is matched by his view of the left. ‘There is no ideologically pure or utopian social arrangement among the nations for which we should strive’ (p. 164). All systems and empires are destined to fall, he suggests, as leaders succumb to the sins of hubris and power. The Christian duty is to constantly monitor the process of politics and strive to correct excesses as they occur. It is an ad hoc business within the much wider and significant context of the invitation from the risen Christ to ‘live according to the end of history already inaugurated, but not yet fully realized, not yet consummated’ (p. 22).
Therein lies the significance of the book to Christians in other countries. Camp’s background is American and he draws his examples from his own world, yet his arguments may be universally applied. To be a Christian in this world, ‘prior to the consummation of the Kingdom of God’ (p. 164), is to constantly seek fair and equitable social practices in peace and with patience and truth.
Christianity is not a religion, he states in a challenge to the Christian community’s perception of its role. It is a politic, not a privatized interest. Camp reminds American Christians that Jesus and the early martyrs were not executed because they were spiritual; it was because they were a threat to the powers that be. The community’s primary role is not to be ‘a so-called religious gathering concerned with souls floating off into the after-life’ (p. 121). Its chief task ‘is to embody and bear witness to the end of history, an all-consuming reality that has already broken into the world’ (p. 121).