Jesusnomics

Since the last umpteen posts have been directed at the left, let’s take a swing at a pretty good right-wing example of doing violence to the words of Jesus.

Here’s Bryan Fischer from the American Family Association taking on the question of whether or not Christians should get into politics:

People who say the followers of Christ shouldn’t be involved in politics aren’t paying attention. And they aren’t paying attention to Jesus himself.

During the Last Supper, Jesus said to his chosen 12 (11 if you subtract Judas from the mix), “I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:29).”

Now I don’t have a trained eye, but sitting on a throne is a political thing no matter how you slice it.

In other words, Jesus’ entire discipleship program with his apostles was an academy designed to prepare them for service in the political arena.

So Christians just need to get over this debate about whether or not Christians ought to be involved in politics. Jesus has settled this question for us himself.

Which is, of course, why those disciples left that room and immediately launched a rebellion, set up a democracy, and then ran for office.

Or is it possible that the thrones that Jesus was referencing here were not exactly what Mr. Fischer had in mind? For not too much later on that same night, Christ also said this:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”(ESV)

There is certainly a good case to be made for a Christian ethic of public service that includes political action but doing violence to the Scripture in support of that ideal does no favors to either side of the debate.

One of my readers sent me a link to this opinion piece by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend about Sara Palin’s comments on JFK and the role of religion in public office. Townsend says in part…

Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that Kennedy’s [famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association] had “succeeded in the best possible way: It reconciled public service and religion without compromising either.” Now, however, she says she has revisited the speech and changed her mind. She finds it “defensive . . . in tone and content” and is upset that Kennedy, rather than presenting a reconciliation of his private faith and his public role, had instead offered an “unequivocal divorce of the two.”

Palin’s argument seems to challenge a great American tradition, enshrined in the Constitution, stipulating that there be no religious test for public office. A careful reading of her book leads me to conclude that Palin wishes for precisely such a test. And she seems to think that she, and those who think like her, are qualified to judge who would pass and who would not.

If there is no religious test, then there is no need for a candidate’s religious affiliation to be “reconciled.” My uncle urged that religion be private, removed from politics, because he feared that making faith an arena for public contention would lead American politics into ill-disguised religious warfare, with candidates tempted to use faith to manipulate voters and demean their opponents.

Kennedy cited Thomas Jefferson to argue that, as part of the American tradition, it was essential to keep any semblance of a religious test out of the political realm. Best to judge candidates on their public records, their positions on war and peace, jobs, poverty, and health care. No one, Kennedy pointed out, asked those who died at the Alamo which church they belonged to.

But Palin insists on evaluating and acting as an authority on candidates’ faith. She faults Kennedy for not “telling the country how his faith had enriched him.” With that line, she proceeds down a path fraught with danger – precisely the path my uncle warned against when he said that a president’s religious views should be “neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

To which I simply reply that if a person’s religion has no influence whatsoever on their politics, their legislation, or their public policy then what good is it? If person’s religion doesn’t affect their policy, it ends with the likes of Joe Biden’s pathetic attempts to clarify his abortion position while insisting he’s a good Catholic.

Asking a candidate to be frank about how their religious views will affect their law making is not equivalent to a legal “religious test.” If the majority of the public doesn’t like how a candidate’s Catholicism, or an atheism, or a Hinduism affects their views then they should have every right to take that into consideration at the ballot box. That’s called Democracy.

I make no apologies to Ms. Townsend when I say that any candidate who can stand and claim that he holds strong religious views but that those views somehow only inform his private but not his public life is either suffering from cowardice or apostasy. A religion that takes no stand, makes no judgments, and offers no guidance in the realm of government is a religion that is useless.