Third response to Sullivan

Sullivan used apolitical several  times in the article—Christianity in its truest form is apolitical.  It’s a very risky thing to say.  In general, people like Christian politics when it favors their issues and dislike it when it doesn’t.  What we don’t want to accept is that fully formed Christian politics doesn’t conform to pre-existing political categories.  From the perspective of Liberals.  We rally behind the political theology of Martin Luther King (thoroughly Christian) but despise the political theology of Rick Santorum.  When confronted with the political agenda of a Rick Santorum, we retreat to notions of separating church and state and extend that—as Sullivan gets awfully close to doing—to claim that political advocacy can and should be divorced from theological conviction.

The appeal then gets made to Jesus who  “never said a mumblin’ word” in the face of oppressive Roman government.  But such notions make less sense than does the argument that we should not use musical instruments because the early church did not.  Jesus had little other means to indict human violence, greed, and power lust other than to proclaim the Kingdom of God (a political statement not an apolitical statement) and accept the cross wherein by accepting, forgiving and dying he both judged and forgave our destructive nature.  Same thing is true of Francis.  The reality that we have to face is that there is no Caesar in the American political context.  We operate in a government for, of and by the people.  We are Caesar, we are the king.  The system governs.  Therefore we cannot as people of Christian faith partition God’s reign out of the policies for which we advocate.  The problem with politics today is that we do not know how to advocate for certain things—like protection of unborn children, the end of capital punishment, pacifism, equal distribution of wealth—without turning to coercion.  When we cooperate with another church,  we do not want to chastise or coerce a church to change but lovingly pray that they do.  They also lovingly pray that we would become more Christ-like in the ways that Christ is evident in them and not in us.  And that’s why they accept the invitation.  We aren’t interested in just coexisting.  We gather together that we might be more Christ-like.  Christians have an agenda.  We need to.  It is that through faith in Christ—as one who though he had all power accepted that it be power under people rather than power over people—can transform not just individuals but also the systems in which individuals live and move and have their being.