God Help Us

by David Kuo

WE ARE AFTER THE SPIRITUAL

What we, as followers of Jesus, are really after when we try and define the proper role for politics in our lives is a spiritual question: How does Christian political engagement impact the life that Christ calls his disciples to live? Or, put another way: What are the spiritual consequences of Christian political engagement and are those consequences acceptable to the Christian life we are called to live? This is the most important question because everything else is linked to this matter.

I believe that there is no other issue that so highlights the nature and substance of how one views Jesus and his Church than this matter of Christians and politics. Let me ask a few questions to illustrate the point. Do we believe that the Church is the most important and transformative societal institution? I mean do we really, really believe that? Do we believe that the Church is ultimately more important in determining the future of our world than the world’s governments? Do we believe that Jesus’ gospel — the gospel that calls us to receive God’s unfathomable and ridiculous love, the gospel that calls us to serve first and be served last, the gospel of loving our neighbors and loving ourselves — do we believe that gospel can really, truly change the world? Or do we believe, frankly, that it needs a bit more oomph, perhaps some political oomph?

Do we believe that radical Jesus-like commitment to proximate community has the power to slowly and surely change the world? Or, do we believe that is insufficient in this complex day and age? Are we as willing to be as insanely dedicated to Jesus as we are to a political candidate? Are we as willing to oppose the Enemy as much as we are willing to oppose a political candidate? These are the kinds of questions we need to ask when we explore Christians and politics. And these are hard, hard questions. They require so much from us, so much of us. They call for introspection and meditation, prayer and counseling, reflection and silence, and a daring stand against the passions of our times.

It is so much easier to talk about other things: political things and values things. And so we do. Instead of answering these very hard questions, I’m afraid we’ve settled for a crusade to make “American values” synonymous with so-called “Christian values” like marital fidelity, sexual abstinence outside of marriage, the primacy of family, and devotion to church. We long for a mythic time in American life when things were “better.” Over the last generation though, these traditional American values have been confronted by less orthodox values — sex outside of marriage became normal, family became optional and/or redefined in radical new ways, church became anachronistic, and so on. As those American values have come under assault, so to have Christians — particularly conservative Christians — been on the receiving end of innumerable cultural beat downs (ironically, often because of their defense of these values, rather than defense of the gospel).

Anti-Christian media, educational, and political bias became the norm. H.L. Mencken’s old critique that Christianity is a “childish theology founded on hate” seemed to represent the conventional wisdom. AP stories argued that Christians were prone to “riots, terrorism — and death” and that evangelical religious leaders were no different than the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Washington Post described conservative Christians in an article — not an opinion piece — as “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” And Hollywood? Its Christians were dowdy, sexually-repressed, bigots. Then there were the bad ones. This anti- Christian bias got so bad that by the early 1990s, Catholic scholar Michael Novak called discrimination against “religiously serious” Christians the “last acceptable form of bigotry” in the United States. Many Christians took this as evidence that they were fighting the right fight — that they were experiencing the trials and tribulations that come with standing up for their faith. They saw the anger directed at them as the ultimate proof they needed to fight harder for American values.

And so the fight for Americana has become almost indistinguishable with the fight for Christian values. One need look no further than this last election to see a brilliant example of this faith/values fusion.

Meet Sarah Palin. She burst on to the scene as one of the most culturally significant Christian figures in a generation — the personification of our culture wars. Palin was a stay-at-home mom who decided to run for the PTA to help protect her family. Overtly Christian, she ascended to become mayor of Wasilla, governor of Alaska and then, while in office, gave birth to a child with Down Syndrome, the ultimate pro-life commitment.

When named as John McCain’s vice presidential candidate, however, the distinction between Palin the Christian, Palin the small town girl, and Palin the politician didn’t exist. She was attacked for being an intellectual lightweight and a snake handling charismatic. She was derided as a hack governor fond of rewarding her friends with plum jobs and as someone who actually believed in spiritual warfare.

For many Christians, defending Palin became synonymous with defending their faith. Since Palin’s culture was under attack, she needed defending. They saw it as the Christian thing to do.

A dear friend of mine grew up in a small town in the northwest and was the only person in his high school class to go out of state to college. He ended up in the Ivy League, but only after having to go through numerous extra hoops because admissions officers were afraid he “couldn’t make it” at a big institution because of small town background. To this day, he experiences a sort of small town discrimination when he tells people where he is from. He even jokes that he sometimes wants to wear a t-shirt that says, “No, I never tipped a cow. Yes, I rolled in the hay with a few girls. Yes, I know Thackeray. Do you?” When he watched Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention, he did so with tears in his eyes. To watch a strong woman from a small state suddenly thrust onto the center stage having to defend herself at that moment, not about any policy decisions she had made as governor not on any electoral controversy but on the fact that she happened to be from a state with 650,000 people and 170,000 bears, was profoundly moving for him. Palin’s defense was unforgettable:

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