Worshiping Politics: Problems and Practices for a Public Faith

By Luke J. Goble

It is not a secret that the political system in the United States is broken. Unfortunately, many Christians are ambivalent about, or worse yet, contributors to that dysfunction. Many know they should do something but don't know what to do or how to do it. Drawing on insights from history, theology, and culture, Worshiping Politics reframes the relationship between faith and politics as one of intentional formation instead of divisive decision-making. When we focus on how we are formed as people and the church in relationship to our various communities instead of what we think and believe in relation to culture and society, it changes the way we engage the world. Unlearning our faulty emphasis on the power of our own intellect and learning how to be formed in grace and love for the world through our everyday lives just might make a different kind of politics possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498225892

Luke J. Goble

Luke J. Goble is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon. He is a foster and adoptive parent and advocate for vulnerable children and families.

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Worshiping Politics

Problems and Practices for a Public Faith

by Luke J. Goble

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Worshiping Politics

Problems and Practices for a Public Faith

Copyright © 2017 Luke J. Goble. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-2588-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-2590-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-2589-2

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Goble, Luke J.

Title: Worshiping politics : problems and practices for public faith / Luke J. Goble.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-2588-5 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-2590-8 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-2589-2 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: 1. Bible and politics. | 2. Christianity and politics. | I. Title

Classification: BS680.P95 G65 2017 (paperback) | BS680.P95 G65 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 01/16/17

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

For my students, who teach me every day.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Problem of Religion

Chapter 2: The Problem of Politics

Chapter 3: The Problem of Self-Deception

Chapter 4: The Problem of Interpretation, Part I

Chapter 5: The Problem of Interpretation, Part II

Chapter 6: The Problem of Paradigms, Part I

Chapter 7: The Problem of Paradigms, Part II

Chapter 8: The Problem of Justice

Chapter 9: The Problem of Virtue

Chapter 10: The Problem of Practice

Chapter 11: The Problem of Formation

Chapter 12: The Problem of Differentiation

Chapter 13: The Model for the Moment

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to work in a place that allows me to ask big questions and to walk the paths toward the answers, wherever they lead. It is a place where the combination of roots and openness expand instead of constrain the possibilities for scholarship and teaching. I am grateful to Warner Pacific College for being that place and for investing in me through a semester-long sabbatical that allowed me to work on the lion share of this book.

Of course, the place is not what it is without the people who sustain it through their practices, narratives, and relationships. I am grateful to all my colleagues and particularly to those who provided regular encouragement, feedback, and hospitality amidst my doubts and musings. Among that group are Terry Baker, Derek Moyer, Robin Gordon, Jarod Jacobs, and Cassie Trentaz. Thank you to Timothy Peterson, who provided feedback on early drafts of several chapters and whose own commitment to lifelong learning and lifelong living reinforced both my own scholarship and animus to see this project through.

Thank you to Molly Jimenez, who helped to turn my stick drawings of theological paradigms into visual models that actually make sense and are nice to look at, and to Mark for the exercise and conversation that kept my body sharp (almost) to the finish line.

I am grateful to many other colleagues in other places who have offered encouragement and formation in ways that they may not even know. The community of scholars that have convened at the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin College for conferences over the last several years have provided thoughts and feedback that show up in this text and are as much their ideas as my own. James K. A. Smith, David I. Smith, and others have made me a better teacher and a more mature and thoughtful scholar.

Without a community of practice, narrative, and loving authority to sustain and teach me over the last several years, the words that appear here would have been empty. I am grateful to Imago Dei Community for being a church that forms people with intention while still engaging culture and society with relevance. I imagine that my internalization of the wisdom of pastors Rick McKinley, Bill Clem, Eric Knox, and others show up here in multiple ways. I know that pastor, author, and friend Joshua Ryan Butler’s imprint is strong. Thank you for helping to sustain my energy for learning, thinking, and writing.

My wife, Jillana, has supported and sacrificed much in the last year, both for me and for others. She is not only my sunshine and sustainer, but she models so much of what I care about in theory, making it a reality in the world. Thank you to Sophia, Eleni, Micah, and Charlie, whose admiration and affection for Daddy and his book have kept me going. They are my most precious students and teachers.

Introduction

When topics related to religion or politics come up in mixed company, a kind of game ensues. It is sort of like the popular television show Survivor . People want to be themselves, but they also don’t want to alienate others. They want to figure out who their friends are, perhaps even make new friends, while still retaining some semblance of who they are. And they want to win. Once the alliances are formed, the game changes and the claws come out. This can happen all in the course of one conversation or over the course of many.

I think religion and politics have such potential to be volatile because our thoughts and feelings about them come from similar places, places that have been shaped and formed over the course of our lives. Sometimes this has happened with great intention on our parts, but most often it happens without us even knowing. It is precisely because of their connection to deep formative places within us that we need to talk about politics and religion, or more importantly, listen to one another’s thoughts and convictions about them. If we could learn to listen well, I believe we would hear some of what’s in those deep places. But learning to listen well requires practice.

Like most people, my earliest religious and political convictions were shaped by my experiences as part of a family and community. My upbringing in an urban, working-class, immigrant-shaped, Roman Catholic community and culture created in me views about the world that I didn’t even know were there until much later. This collection of intersectional cultural features have tended to form a voting block akin to Kennedy Democrats, who, though morally and fiscally conservative, are driven in their political decisions by their aspirations for the working class and working poor. I can still relate to that impulse.

When I was a teenager, my family struggled financially as my parents divorced, but we had already begun to make a shift into a different world of suburban, middle-class, white, Protestant evangelicalism. At the time, I thought my act of accepting Jesus as my savior was primarily a spiritual act, but I now realize that it was part of a much larger cultural and worldview shift. A part of that shift was the particular way that evangelical churches translated moral convictions emanating from the Bible into particular political positions and candidates. In many cases, a candidate’s position on abortion was the only thing that mattered.

Despite my earlier upbringing, these newer ideas became normalized in my mind and I thought they were a part of a long-standing tradition of the way Christian faith played out in politics. I later discovered that those particular political alignments and teachings were the product of much more recent shifts in culture and the church, stemming from the rise of the Religious Right and Moral Majority of the late 1970s and 1980s. Though those inherited ideas held some sway over me for a few years, they were never very convincing or satisfying ways of relating my Christian faith to the world.

My college years and beyond took those previous experiences, put them together in a blender, and turned it on. I was exposed to diverse new ideas, people, and experiences that both upset and began to reform much that I’d previously thought and believed. Later, the combination of what I studied in graduate school (racial and ethnic history of the Americas), where I lived (the diverse inner city), and exposure to other Christian voices like Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis¹ came together to synthesize much of my previous thinking and experience. This combination of life experience, context, and intellectual ideas is significant and a recurring theme of the rest of this book. I would put it this way: no matter what I read, hear, or think, my early and ongoing experiences structure my response to ideas. Religion and politics do not primarily consist of propositional ideas but whole complex cultures.

So this book is an attempt to reframe not merely the way we think about religion and politics, but the way we engage that relationship. It emphasizes our formation as whole people in complex cultures and experiences instead of just purveyors of propositions. It is a product of my own journey as a student and a teacher, and a response to my string of continual questions about the role of religious faith in relation to public life. I have long felt a tension between a deep sense of responsibility to engage the realm of politics and a hesitance because of uncertainty about how my Christian faith should guide that engagement. Many of my questions remain and meditations on them form the content of the chapters that ensue, each of which focuses on a particular problem in the way we think about (and materially engage) the relationship between Christian faith and politics.

While I focus on engaging the Christian tradition because it is my own and the one with which I am most familiar, I also believe the ideas that emerge are more widely applicable to thinking about religion and politics in general. If the problems contained within amount to an argument, it is this: trying to deduce rational principles or ideas from religious traditions that then apply to political policies or positions is a severely limited approach that has contributed to the narrowing of public life and the robustness of our faith. Instead, understanding the role of religious traditions as formative cultures that make us certain kinds of people can help us to be more intentional about the kind of political people we want to be and the kind of world we want to live in.

The first two chapters create some foundational definitions and reconsiderations of both religion and politics. Chapter 1 examines the problem of religion, responding to some of the most prominent arguments for why it should not mix with politics. Understanding religion as something much more like a culture than a proposition prompts a reconsideration of how we conceive of religion in the public sphere. Chapter 2 casts a larger vision for how we conceive of politics, not just as national electoral contests, but as everyday ways of caring for others and participating in the communal aspects of our lives. It also makes a case for why politics for Christians is inescapable.

The third chapter uses the work of Jonathan Haidt to explore our moral (and political) anthropology. It emphasizes the role of our moral intuitions that develop in relation to a set of pre-wired moral categories that seem to be universal across cultures. More specifically, it explains how what we see as our rational decision-making process is most often merely an explanation for decisions or actions we have arrived at through other affective, intuitive (and therefore pre-rational) means. If this is the case, then our preoccupation with changing minds in politics is tragically misdirected and a consideration of what it might look like to change predispositions is warranted.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the implications of Haidt’s work for the primary source of (written) authority for Christians’ political reflection and action—the Bible. Chapter 4 focuses on some general problems in interpreting the Bible politically as well as the role of particular narrative traditions from the Old Testament (Exodus, King David, Nehemiah, Prophetic, etc.) for different kinds of political projects. Chapter 5 brings together diverse interpretations of some of the most common political texts in the New Testament, including the Sermon on the Mount, Romans 13, and Revelation. This multiplicity of political interpretations of Scripture should unsettle any easy, unified, political meaning while at the same time reinforcing the role of Scripture in creating and anchoring authoritative communities from which to engage politics.

Chapters 6 and 7 show how it is not just the choice or influence of particular scriptural accounts that shapes Christian political engagement, but also how historical and social contexts lead to certain models or paradigms through which Christians come to see their role in relation to the state and society. Chapter 6 includes the models that seem to dominate the early church through the Middle Ages while chapter 7 explores some of the main theological models that have influenced church and society from the Reformation to today. Each of the models respond implicitly to questions about what the church is and how it is formed in relation to society and the state, eliciting a constant tension between what it means to be distinct from the world while at the same time faithful to engage it.

The questions raised about Scripture, models of engagement, and the general goal of Christians’ engagement with the world seem to require a discussion of the telos or end/purpose of Christian action in the world. One central concept that intersects with a discussion of that purpose is justice. Chapter 8 raises some problems in thinking about justice for the church and justice for the world. In dialogue with other contemporary voices, it attempts a biblical interpretation of what we mean when we talk about justice. Finally, it suggests an approach to justice that emphasizes the role of practice and virtue.

Since justice is one of the classical virtues from Ancient Greece, the idea of justice as an end versus justice as a virtue sets up a larger discussion of virtues in chapter 9. After explaining the basics of virtue theory as a moral and ethical framework, I ask the question of whether virtue theory is an adequate response to the moral fatalism of Haidt’s moral psychology. For example, if our rational intellect only serves to justify the consequences of our affective desires, is there even such a thing as a virtue? As Haidt himself suggests, virtue theory has some important intersections with moral psychology. It shows us that we are not just passive victims of our experiences but that we can have a role in the way we are morally (and politically and spiritually) formed to respond to the world around us.

One intricate component of the acquisition of virtue is the notion of practice. Practices are habitual activities we engage in that necessarily lead to the development of particular virtues (or vices). While each chapter contains suggested practices to engage the problems that are discussed within, chapter 10 specifically addresses some of the negative inevitabilities of our political behavior. By way of illustrating the function and potential of practices, it offers some remedies for making more virtuous citizens, Christian and otherwise.

Practices are part of a larger framework of formation that is described in chapter 11. Formation refers to the process by which we come to be the people we are, especially in relation to things like morality, spirituality, and politics. In fact, our formation in these areas is intertwined. Understanding some of the components of that formative process, both those outside of and within our control, can help us be more intentional about becoming the people we want to be. The problem of formation emphasizes the role that narrative, practices, communities of authority, and imagination all play in making us who we are, and, in turn, what we do.

One of the problems that arises from thinking about formation as well as models of church-state engagement has to do with the context in which formation happens. When formation happens in ways that are cut off from society or the world it hampers faithful and effective engagement. But when formation happens primarily in and through the world itself, Christians and their communities lack any significant distinctiveness from the rest of society. This is what I call the problem of differentiation and is the subject of chapter 12. I use the church’s response to the genocide in Rwanda and the holocaust in Germany to think about the role of the church and the problems of formation in various contexts. When we don’t think about such a role intentionally it is easy to become subject to stronger forces around us.

Using these ideas about formation and differentiation, in chapter 13 I explore a case study of an organization in Portland, Oregon that is leading a unique movement of churches in engaging the state’s child welfare system. It is a movement that reflects the particularities of our historical and social context. It demonstrates creative and faithful ways of engaging politics, but it is also ripe for reflection on potential pitfalls.

As mentioned, each chapter contains a restatement of what I see as the problem as well as one or more potential practices. If one of the presuppositions of this book is true, that we are feeling, loving creatures who think and not the other way around, we are not going to think ourselves out of these tensions. It is only by being formed and reformed that we can begin to engage politics and our world differently.

1. These three authors, speakers, and organizational leaders could be considered part of the Christian Left for the ways that they have brought balance to evangelical Christians’ discussions of politics and social issues. They have continually shed light on the Bible’s teaching about environmental concerns, poverty and economic inequality, immigration, etc., in addition to family values issues like abortion and gay marriage.

1

The Problem of Religion

The Emperor’s Flesh-Colored Leotard

During the early morning hours of Sunday, June 16 , 2016 , just two days before writing this very sentence, a gunman took the lives of forty-nine people and injured many more at a gay, mostly Latino nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Since the time of slaughter of Native Americans in the name of manifest destiny, it was the worst such massacre in US history. It was soon discovered that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by Islamic jihadist propaganda, and claimed allegiance to the Islamic State.

It would seem that some of our worst fears about the role of religion in determining our way of life together have become manifest (again) in the world in this second decade of the third millennia. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has captivated world attention with their brutal version of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Articulating a religious commitment to establishing a worldwide caliphate—a sort of transnational Islamic state—ISIS has conquered territory, recruited disaffected young men, seized women as sex slaves, and literally enacted a reign of terror in several Middle Eastern communities. Inspired by its ideology, terrorist acts have shaken communities now in Orlando, France, Belgium, San Bernardino, and elsewhere. Its activity has created a refugee and humanitarian crisis of epic proportions affecting the whole world. In the name of religion, ISIS has established a new government that is exclusive and oppressive even to those with moderate religious or political differences.

Closer to home in the United States, a group of armed militants occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon in January 2016. One of their leaders, Ammon Bundy, narrates the reasons for his involvement in a YouTube video, saying that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds . . . (ranchers sentenced to prison for arson on federal lands) and I did exactly what the Lord asked me to do . . . in the way that he asked me . . . in the best way I could.¹

Author Jon Krakauer makes a connection between the occupation by the Bundys and others and a strain of Mormon fundamentalism present in the rural West and Northwest. In his book Under the Banner of Heaven, Krakauer describes Dan Lafferty’s ruthless murder in 1984 of his sister-in-law and infant niece as a result of clear instruction from God. Found to be neither insane or with any alternative motive, the murders confounded Krakauer and others. He writes:

These murders are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than Lafferty’s complete and determined absence of remorse. How could an apparently sane, avowedly pious man kill a blameless woman and her baby so viciously, without the barest flicker of emotion? Whence did he derive the moral justification? What filled him with such certitude? Any attempt to answer such questions must plumb those murky sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God—and compel an impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end.²

While the Hammonds’ and Bundys’ armed takeover of government-managed land did not involve any direct violence (except by the death of LaVoy Finicum at the hands of law enforcement), their stated religious motivations were very similar to Lafferty’s. Krakauer highlights the important tension and question of whether a) such religious belief is wholly irrational, and b) whether violence is its logical end. When thinking about the role of religion in politics, these questions cannot be skirted.

There is a temptation in these scenarios to depict what we see as extreme behavior as wholly other and then to vilify it. For urbanized religious folks in industrial societies like the United States, both groups referenced above can be made to seem like cultural and religious others. It is easy for many of us to say they are not like us, however you define that "us." This othering is a temptation that we all experience and must be combated.

If your us is evangelical Christians, you, too, have come under fire for what is perceived as discriminatory and even hateful attitudes and behaviors. When Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses in 2015 as a personal protest of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to prohibit discrimination in marriage against same-sex couples, she was both heroized as a faithful religious freedom fighter and villainized as a hateful bigot. In January 2016, the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability recommended that Judge Vance Day be removed from his bench, at least in part for refusing to marry same-sex couples, an action he attributed to his religiously grounded moral conscience. And groups like the Westboro Baptist Church have obnoxiously spouted anti-gay rhetoric in many contexts, including picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in judgment of the United States’ cultural tolerance, attributing their actions to religious beliefs and biblical texts.

Are these examples of perceived hatred and violence the inevitable result of what the association of religion and politics produces?

Since the rest of this book establishes and then takes for granted that there is a necessary and constructive call for followers of Jesus to engage public life in particular ways, it is important to address the above question at the outset. Whether you identify yourself as a follower of Christ or not, gaining perspective on different ways to think about the role of religion in public life can broaden and benefit our public conversations.

In the United States and other Western industrialized countries especially, a narrative has emerged that challenges both the value and legitimacy of the role of religion in public life, even to the point of responding yes to the question above. These critiques come in different forms and from different, even unexpected, directions. They are certainly not entirely new. Back in 1984, Richard John Neuhaus importantly described changing dynamics in the United States as a result of the rise of the Religious Right that created further animosity toward religion in the public square. He was attempting to counter the call for a naked public square, one devoid of religion, by rethinking the role of public religion and virtue in American life.³ Some of the same dynamics from the 1980s are still present with us today, while others are new and different.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known folk tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor is told he is wearing beautiful clothes until he goes out in public and a child finally says what everyone else sees with their own eyes—that the emperor is naked. Playing off that tale, I would suggest the opposite is true of the public square. People believe, and we are told, that it is naked, i.e. neutral and devoid of religious language or ideas, when in fact it is clothed in something like a flesh-colored leotard. It looks naked, but really it is not.

In this initial chapter, I will walk through some of the primary arguments made for why the public square should be naked and religion actively excluded from politics. For each of the arguments, I will offer an analysis that prompts a reconsideration of the role of religion in public life and hopefully opens new spaces for meaningful public conversation for all. The arguments take shape along the following lines:

1. Religion poisons everything

2. Secularization is happening and is better

3. Arguments from religious revelation are not rational

4. Church and state are meant to be separated

5. The state poisons religion

Religion poisons everything

I am always wary of straw man arguments in which an