Riders on the Storm: Navigating Politics as a Christian
“He who has no religion at all is that terrible animal who can only feel his freedom when he is destroying and devouring” - Montesquieu in 1748
Nearly three hundred years after Mentesquieu, Paul D. Hanson writes in his book, A Political History of the Bible in America, about an American society that has turned away from it own traditions, institutions, and practices. This includes even turning away from the positive human story of the Christian religion along with its values, moral principles, and vision of the common good. Instead, society has turned to the individualistic and subjective whims of emotivism, which "promotes an antisocial climate in which individuals become so enthralled with schemes for personal gain that they become blinded to the commonweal.” And, just to be clear, emotivism can co-opt religion to find an audience and hijack some kind of message to fuel its schemes rather easily.
Although these schemes, to be sure, enrich a few among us with worldly wealth, Hanson argues that "humans cannot thrive in the absence of a story, and lacking the positive kind of story that fosters self-worth, love of learning, and the patient pursuit of vocational goals, an alternative story marked by self-destructive habits and violence is likely to grow [. . .].”
Hanson goes on to lament how almost every element of American society has contributed to this by pursuing their own, self-serving goals, at the expense of reforming society at large - a task that has to be renewed by every generation. Amid this landscape enters the idealistic social reformer who, in the 2010s when Hanson wrote this book, likely saw the political as absolute, sidelining religion to individual worship and little more, surely of little use to their project of renewal.
However, for Hanson, who is a Protestant Christian, this reform cannot be done without the input of religious people who know better than to think that the political is absolute. Theirs is a crucial prophetic role of speaking truth to (human) power. Hanson writes:
”The lesson taught by history is clear: a nation’s story may enjoy monumental intellectual formulation in philosophy and theology as well as magisterial expression in art, but once hubris defeats modesty and racial supremacy extinguishes a deep respect for all cultures, calamity lurks in the gathering darkness. To our understanding of story a sobering dimension is thus added: stories stand in need of constant surveillance and critique, provided in the case of individuals by candid family members and friends and in the case of nations by a free press and the freedom of religious bodies to send their prophets to the citadels of economic, political, and military authority to speak truth to power.”
There does arise one problem with this, especially in the 21st century. What happens when religion is deemed as part of the problem by those who are familiar with world history? What if that all-too-human power has repeatedly co-opted and exploited religion to serve its own ends, resulting in horrible atrocities, such as slavery, rather than receiving religion’s prophetic criticism and judgment?
Hanson wrote this book to offer a complicated answer, namely that despite the sad reality of so many events in human and American history, society is still better setup for the flourishing of all its people with the inclusion of the voices of the truly religious - ones that do not alter their message in order to garner favor with human rulers. Moreover, he argues that there is such a way to interpret and apply the Bible to the politics of today that honors the principles and message of God and his Son, Jesus Christ, whose gospel and teachings about God's kingdom never absolutized this world's politics.
Christianity and America
Hanson goes the long way in making his argument. He first narrates how the Christian religion shaped and was shaped by the American experiment. It seemed that even if many of the founding fathers themselves weren’t all too keen on religion, they knew that a society shaped by good morals would benefit the state, so the state should safeguard the practice of religion. This welcoming of Christianity also led to conflating America’s goals with biblical ones - a practice that began in colonial times and has never stopped. And while that might have made America arguably more Christian, it definitely made its version of Christianity more American.
For example, in the middle of the 19th century, "the assurance of many American Protestants of their own moral, religious, ethnic, and national superiority blinded them to the many ways in which they substituted self-righteousness for godliness and forgot about the more subtle spiritual gifts of kindness, patience, gentleness, and humility.”
Such self-assurance was not unique to that era of American history, either. However, at the end of his survey of the Bible and America, Hanson is pleased to have highlighted several positive examples of effective, religiously-informed public debate throughout the years, even if they are tempered by accounts of this world’s powers manipulating the Bible’s message for self-serving gains time and again.
Politics in the Bible
The bulk of the book is the second part in which Hanson investigates the role of politics in the Bible, focusing on God’s people and those that governed them, whether tribal representatives, homegrown kings of varying morals, or foreign rulers of varying temperaments.
His big argument when it comes to the political vision of the Bible is that in contrast to other ancient peoples of the world, God’s people were shaped by their stories, or what Hanson labels epics, that were rooted in history, rather than timeless myths that supposedly descended from the heavens. In turn, the worldly leaders of God’s people were not conduits of those mythical gods above like other human rulers at the time. Rather, there was an absolute theo-political principle that God alone is the sovereign and ruler of the world, so every and all merely human ruler and their aims will not and cannot ever stand in God’s place.
This principle guided the prophets of God, whether they were speaking out against unjust rulers in their own ranks or shrewdly findings ways to accommodate their faith within the confines of a foreign empire, be it Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, or Rome. The Old Testament has plenty examples of both of these prophetic functions as Hanson narrates the history of God's people.
Consider the prophet Amos, who condemned the hoarding of wealth by those who claimed special divine favor. Hanson writes, "Human government is condemned when it denies the categorical distinction between divine government and human rule and exempts leaders from the norms that apply to all citizens. The religious cult is condemned when it views ritual as a substitute for justice and compassion. [. . .]. Religion can be a very potent instrument in the hands of self-serving leaders. It offers many modes of justifying immoral behavior [. . .].” Such behavior was not unique to Amos's time, as Hanson makes clear when narrating the messages of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Malachi among others.
Accommodation to foreign rulers in the Old Testament includes the likes of Ezra and Nehemiah as well as the Pharisees. And, for me, Hanson’s treatment of the inter-testamental period was rather eye-opening as he helpfully categorizes three Jewish approaches to their foreign overlords: collaboration, accommodation, and resistance. Among the three, accommodation, which is “finding a mutually agreeable manner of coexistence with the occupying power,” was the most fruitful approach that carried on into the New Testament era for Jews and Christians alike.
As one who lived his entire life under the political control of an occupying power, Jesus still followed the theo-political principle of the Old Testament that recognized but one absolute power, and it wasn’t the Emperor of Rome. Hanson writes:
"Contrary to the official propaganda being broadcast by the Roman cult of the divine emperor, the mightiest power in the universe—indeed, the Creator of the universe—is the patron not of Caesar, but of the meek, the poor, and those persecuted for their refutation of idols. In his [Jesus's] teachings and acts, they learn another lesson: the invitation he brings is not the invitation to suicidal sacrifice but to commitment to a power not of this earth, the power of love, a power alien to the understanding of those who rule by the sword and ultimately more powerful than all of the military arsenals of the world. The Jesus we glimpse in the words and narratives of the Gospels speaks thus to those who are willing to consider the invitation to a strategy other than the doomed strategy of dominion by force of arms, an invitation that in effect reads, “Fear not, your well-being is not controlled by the governments of this world. They rise and fall, all mysteriously in the service of the one true sovereign, whose reign is established not by force, but by meekness, willingness to look out for the neighbor, and submission to a peaceful reign that reserves no privileged positions, but is inclusive of all who accept all-embracing love as the polity of the peaceable kingdom.”
This invitation was often confusing to listeners, even among Jesus’s disciples, because in one way the proclamation of the good news of God’s kingdom meant everything would change for the better some day, but in another way Jesus’s own teachings call for his disciples to be that change today in little ways here and there. Hanson writes:
"Where God’s love comes to expression in a visit to the imprisoned, a meal prepared for the one living in hunger, or care for the victim of illness or injury, God’s reign of compassion and justice is entering this imperfect world, and those who witness such acts enacted in obedience to their Lord can rejoice over signs of the healing of a broken world. At the same time, an essential aspect of a theo-political policy that is true to the biblical heritage will be the insistence that the redemption intended by God is not completed until there is not a single child going hungry to bed at night, not a single political prisoner remaining in chains, not a single peasant suffering exploitation and deprivation. In the biblical view of the world, realism and idealism, pragmatism and vision delineate the dynamic field of faithful discipleship. God’s love for the world God created is fully present in the hot meal given to a homeless person on a cold winter night in a church basement’s provisional shelter."
In light of all that was wrong with the world, even John the Baptist had doubts while he was facing execution as a political prisoner whether or not things would ever be different. And Jesus’s reply it at once encouraging and difficult: Hanson writes:
”Facing death for condemning the adulterous behavior of King Antipas, John in his prison cell likely was pondering, “In a world of impairment, brokenness, hunger, and despair, where is God? Where is there evidence of rule other than that of thugs and tyrants like Antipas? Can anyone point to signs of hope for creation’s healing?” Luke was well aware of the propensity of professional sages to search the heavens for signs of the new age; but words that he included elsewhere in his narration, which fittingly follow upon Jesus’ healing ten lepers, direct the reader’s attention back to earth, that is, to everyday human experience: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed [e.g., astral portents]; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” ([Luke] 17:20–21). “Among you” for Jesus meant among the blind, the deaf, the poor, and the dying. The kingdom was found not by searching the heavens, but by paying attention to what was going on across town from you, in the back row of your place of worship, in the homeless shelter or prison compound. This is the blunt truth that people do not like to hear—then or now. No wonder Jesus concluded his reply to John with, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me”
How Long, O Lord?
At the end of the book's journey I was struck by how often the world seems wrong and its leaders a mess. To be sure, the one political principle God’s people can cling to is that he is always and forever in charge. But this still raises the question: Why aren’t things any better than they are? The way of non-violence; turning the other cheek; blessing those who curse - that all seems like the actual doomed strategy in a world that is red in tooth and claw, especially considering that Jesus himself suffered a bloody, violent death at the hands of a powerful state. And yet, that’s the heart of our faith, where the powers of sin, death, and the Devil were undone because Jesus didn’t meet his end in death, but lives on victoriously in resurrection.
And so when it comes to the political arena we fix our eyes on Jesus Christ:
”[T]he political strategies guiding a community of faith in its engagement with the broader society and world must arise organically from the attributes and values that characterize its internal life. Those inner values and attributes, in turn, are the fruits of its core beliefs.” And this is part of the difficulty within which we interpret the Bible and apply it to our political lives. Will our religion rubber-stamp the values and core beliefs of someone or something else? Or will we remain true to our Savior, even if we reserve the same doubts John the Baptist had?
Hanson closes the book with a metaphor to sailing in which all of us citizens are trying to get from one place to another the best we can. In fact, his whole book made me think of the Doors' song, “Riders on the Storm,” where they sing, “Into this house we're born; into this world we're thrown."
As Christian riders we have our own idea of home port and our own tools to navigate us there through the choppy waters. We can help our entire convoy ride out the storm, but only if we remain true to our own faith and our own Savior.
In the political realm this means we should "restrain the common inclination of social reformers to confuse their achievements with the final goal of human history, the reign of universal peace and justice. Such human utopian dreams inevitably collapse amid the ruins of war, economic depression, or urban decay. Inordinate trust in the ability of humans to build the perfect society and world order commonly yields to cynicism and despair. We have found that the biblical antidote to political hubris again arises out of its core theo-political principle: humans are incapable of building or even predicting the advent of the perfect society. To them is assigned the provisional work of living in an imperfect order as citizens of heaven who embody the qualities of the kingdom to come. It is a work they can carry on courageously even in the face of failure, for “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12)."