PCA Conversations

by Greg Thompson

[...continued from Part 1]

The second conviction has to do with the current poverty of our civic presence.

What I mean by this is that in spite of the richness of our civic and political vision we in the American church are quite far from its embodiment. There are a number of reasons for this of course—sin not least among them—but one of the most important of these seems to me to be cultural. Here’s what I mean.  In 1991, James Davison Hunter described the social and political climate in which we live in terms of “Culture Wars”. There is a lot that could be said about the origins and conditions that give rise to such a thing, but the basic description of it (which you will all recognize from your own experience) is this:

-We live in a culture where there are conflicting visions of the good: different visions for the family, for art, for economics, and for politics.

-Because our visions of the good are in conflict, we are unable to reach consensus on our central concerns, and so we become polarized (eg. red state, blue state, etc).

-And because we are unable to achieve consensus, we turn to political power, to the instrumentality of the state, to solve our problems.  We are thus in a power struggle—and politics is the theater of war.

What concerns me is not so much the culture wars themselves (which I take to be an intractable feature of the modern American moral life) but the church’s willing participation in them. We have almost wholly adopted the mindset of conflict, polarization, and power struggle that characterizes the larger cultural political climate.

I see this in many ways, but I’ll mention only three:

1.  The Prominence of Partisan Identity in the Church
One of the most disconcerting aspects of our cooption into the culture war is the way in which the polarized partisan identities of the culture are mirrored—virtually without alteration—in the church of Jesus.
There are people in the church who believe that Christians couldn’t have, in good conscience, voted for Barack Obama.  And there are other people in the church who believe that Christians couldn’t have, without deep contradiction to their profession, voted for John McCain. That is, we have taken our partisan political visions and conjoined them with our Christian profession.  And for some of us this conjoining is so profound that to be a Christian IS TO BE a republican, or a democrat.

And because of this our churches—and our church—which are supposed to be communities of peace, reflect the very polarization that marks the culture of war.  In so doing we suffer under the great illusion that we can contribute to a just and peaceful society when we are at war with those with whom we share the most vital union. To the extent that this is true, that we consider our identities primarily in polarized partisan terms, we refute our own baptismal vows and betray our confession that in Christ God is building a new humanity of peace.

2.  The Assumption of Salvific Possibilities for the Political
The second evidence of our co-option into the culture wars is the strange way in which we seem to assume that the redemptive purposes of God are at stake in our own national political life. That is, the language of both the Christian left and the Christian right seem to suggest that if an election or administration goes poorly the very kingdom of God is at stake. You can supply your own examples.  In this respect Jim Dobson and Jim Wallis seem to be mirrors of one another.

The sources of this perspective are very complicated—and I don’t fully understand them all:

-One important source is the strongly held but deeply problematic notion of what is called American exceptionalism: The idea that America has a unique or exceptional role in the development of the kingdom of God.

-Another, and related to it, is the historic fusion of religious commitment with social action in this culture.  This is a big part of our American identity.  As we’ve already said, this in itself is not a problem (after all, we’re discussing how Christian conviction informs civic life).

But these sources have combined with others to create a situation in which the unexamined working assumption of many in our churches is that the kingdom of God is in some urgent, unique, and fundamental way bound up with our national political action. And this is mistaken. We need to be reminded that it is neither the American nation nor political actors within it, but rather the international church of Jesus that is the agent of the kingdom of God.

3.  The Appropriation of Power as the Means of Civic Life.
The third aspect of our cooption into the American culture wars is an uncritical appropriation of power as the means of civic participation. Because we are politically polarized, and because the kingdom of God itself seems to be at stake in our political lives, the church becomes increasingly obsessed with the possession of political power. In this respect, Christian public life becomes about the will to power and the desire to triumph. One example of this is our approach to the abortion issue. We would much rather win a political triumph and overturn Roe v. Wade than adopt unwanted children.  Again, you can supply your own examples.

We could say a lot more about this, but the net result is that in this scenario the church conceives of its public witness in terms of political domination.   And more than that, we are perceived by our neighbors to be primarily about the task of political domination. That is, we are understood not primarily in terms of the Gospel of Jesus and the kingdom of God, but in the terms of the American culture wars. The extent to which this violates the Scriptures, estranges us from Christians around the world, and diminishes our public witness here and now is almost incalculable.

So to sum up, even though we believe in a Christian concern for civic life, our expression of this conviction in American evangelicalism is, generally speaking, deeply impoverished.  And it is so because we have almost wholly adopted the mindset of conflict, polarization, and power struggle that we find in the larger American culture war. And the tragic and deeply unchristian net-result of this is that civic life becomes for us not a place in which we seek to love our enemies, but in which we seek to triumph over them. To the extent that this is true, a recovery of Christian civic love must begin with repentance.

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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.