PCA Conversations

by Greg Thompson

It’s a sort of truism that if you are looking for conflict, there are few ways more certain to provide it than talking about religion or about politics.  And more than that, to talk about them together is akin to a sort of social kamikaze—a reckless and self-destructive endeavor that can only end one way.

And it is a truism because it is in some sense true—true because in talking about these things we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, talking about our most intimate concerns.  After all, to talk about religion is to talk about what we love.  And to talk about politics is to talk about what we hope for the world. And when love and hope are at stake, the stakes are very high. And so, the counsel goes, it is better not to talk of such things.

Yet we do talk about them.  We do so at dinner tables, in barber shops, in coffee shops, lecture halls, in front yards, and, alas, on television.  And we do so because we know that however great the risks of talking about these things, the risks of not talking about them are greater.  Because to stay silent is to risk living our lives in a situation where the very things we most need to talk about—what we love absolutely and what we hope for socially—are forbidden into silence.  And so, conflicts notwithstanding, we meet together and we talk about religion and politics. And this is because these issues that we know we can’t talk about are the very issues that we know we must talk about.

But…how we talk about it matters.  In what follows I want to talk about how we talk about politics.  I want us to consider the relationship between religion and politics, between one’s confession and one’s civic life.  But I want to ask about this dynamic in a way that may seem unfamiliar.  I don’t want to ask how one’s religious convictions ought to shape one’s position on certain matters of public policy—what you ought to think on abortion or immigration, for example.  And let’s not ask how one’s religious convictions ought to shape what one does in the ballot box—who you ought to vote for.  These are the typical questions we ask of this topic. And these ways of framing the issue do matter.

But there is a more fundamental question at issue.  And it is this: How does Christian religious conviction shape the way that we approach the question of civic life altogether?  That is, before it informs the kinds of policies we support or the kinds of people we elect, how might it inform the kinds of people we are, the kinds of citizens we aspire to be?  In all of the very real and complicated discussions about religion and politics, this question, it seems to me, is not asked frequently enough.  And so let’s ask it.

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The first thing I want us to talk about is what I’ll call the Christian concern for civic life.

What I mean by this is that in the Christian vision of the world love of God and love of neighbor are inescapably public acts.  They are not simply states of the heart (they are that), but they are also actions in the world. Love of God and love of neighbor have not only private but also public expression—and as such they take shape in the civitas, the polis, the city.

Consider the Scriptures. How were Adam and Eve to love God? By stewarding the world and working for its fruitfulness.  Love of God was not only affect but action.  For them every sphere of human activity was an occasion for the expression of the love of God.

And does the Bible teach us to love our neighbors?  Not only with words but with deeds, laboring toward their flourishing in every way that we labor towards our own: toward their spiritual, physical, and also civic flourishing.

This is not to say that God’s purposes for the world are exclusively or even fundamentally political.  They are not.  And this is a fact that American Christians on both the right and the left tend to forget. But it is to say that love of God and love of neighbor—because love is all embracing—have a necessarily civic application.  In other words, civic and political life—working for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors—are a part of our larger Christian vocation of love.

For some of us this is self-evident. But for others of us, this idea that civic life has a place—even a central place—in religious life seems strange.  There are reasons for this, of course: some of us grew up in pietistic traditions where most—if not all—of religious concern was the heart, and the reconciliation of the soul to God. In these traditions, civic life is often seen as marginal to, or even a distraction from, the central issues of sin and forgiveness. Others of us grew up in theologically liberal traditions where we saw the identification of Christianity with social action, but never heard the equally Biblical message of God’s redemption of sinners through the life and death of His Son.  And so for many of us, talk about the place of civic life in religious life conjures up fears of a return to liberalism.

But pietism and liberalism are both incomplete pictures of love.  One suggests that love concerns only the private spheres of the heart while the other tends to favor the public spheres of society.  But the redemptive purposes of God, Paul says, are to reconcile all things in Christ, heart, mind, body, and city. And if we are to carry out the full demands of love, we will have to recover the Christian concern for civic life.

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Greg Thompson is the senior pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, VA. He was formerly the RUF campus minister at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.