Faith and Politics

I've been working on my application to Princeton Theological Seminary and part of the application calls for some reflective essays. One of the questions asks the applicant to state, in a paragraph mind you, their hopes and concerns for the church and its mission. My response to the question was that I want to see the church become more political. Faith and politics have become a huge topic of conversation, both in the church, and in the larger culture, there are some ways of engaging politically by the church that I'm not too fond of, and there are some ways of engaging that I'm much more of a fan of, and some ways of engaging that I think need to be reflected in the Church both locally, nationally, and internationally.

When I look at the religious right, I see some engagement with the political system, I think this is a good thing. Its entirely proper that the Christian faith be represented in the political system. For the church to not engage with the world politically, it would be tantamount to denying that Christ is Lord over all of creation, that's not an option. However the right has largely concerned itself with just a small number of issues, largely relating to issues surrounding sexuality, hardly representative of the Bible as a whole.

This has led to the rise of guys like Jim Wallis, and Tony Campolo, who have looked to represent a much broader range of issues that the bible concerns itself with. I'm reading Wallis' book, "God's Politics" right now and for having just started it, I'm impressed with some of the thinking that Wallis is doing. I think he and the other Evangelical progressives are 100% correct in seeing that the Bible is concerned about social and economic justice. I would agree that the church needs to recapture it's prophetic voice declaring to the nations God's heart for the poor, the widow, the orphans, and the oppressed along with God's demands for righteousness in our lives as sexual beings.

While I agree with at least some of what's going on in the church engaging politically with the world, there are some important things that I don't see going on that have concerned me in this endeavor. First and foremost, can engaging politically be the work of just a few voices within the Church? When I think of the church and politics, I think first of the religious right, who have done a much better job of getting the churches on board with what they are doing. The right though seemed to be largely dominated by a few voices, the Pat Robertsons, James Dobsons, and John Hagees. On the progressive side I think of the voices of Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. I would think that with such few voices representing the Church, on either side, the tendency for distortion is huge. I really want to see the entire Church, protestant, catholic, and orthodox, come together and work towards finding a unified voice that is representative of scripture as a whole.

My second concern, and probably my bigger concern, is that if the Church only engages the world politically by looking to influence and steer the government, how is the church any different than any other political lobby group? I don't think that the Church can just live in a nice neat bubble separated from the world, never looking to engage with the powers, but neither should the church's function in the world be relegated to just another political lobby group. Here I find myself identifying largely with guys like Stanely Hauerwas, and Michael Gorman who see the church as a separate polis, a separate city state, whose vocation it is to offer an alternative way of live, both personally, and politically. What would it look like then, if the church, instead of merely trying to lobby governments for 3rd world debt relief, took the lead and began to work at doing large scale 3rd world economic relief and development? I would imagine that here in the United States, and world wide, the Church could pull together a large amount of resources for doing some thing just like that.