As the evangelical community has gained increasing media attention for its political involvements, many leaders, secular and Christian, have opined about the proper relationship between faith and politics. N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, and well-known theologian, offered his commentary on the subject while visiting Asbury Seminary last November. The bishop strongly affirmed the Christian responsibility to participate in the public sphere, while criticizing abuses of Christian social witness that he located mostly on the right.
Wright summarized: “There will come a time when the Creator God will put the world right once and for all…. The task of the rulers today is, in a measure, to anticipate that by acts of judgment and mercy in the present … and it is the church’s job to remind the rulers that that is their task.” He continued, “The church must not be afraid of the powers that be, but must say, as indeed Jesus himself did, ‘This is your job, you’re supposed to be running the show, you’re getting it wrong in the following ways, now please will you do it right.”
Wright did not cite any particular passages in which Jesus advised the Roman rulers of his day on how precisely they were “getting it wrong” and how precisely they should “do it right.” Nor did the bishop comment on the extent to which it is appropriate for Christians to expect civil authorities to “run the show” in society.
Commenting more specifically, Wright mentioned popular author and Sojouners/Call to Renewal leader Jim Wallis. While Wright said that he often agrees with Wallis’ viewpoints, he added: “I think Jim Wallis and his friends, and this new movement of the Micah Challenge [a movement, associated with the World Evangelical Alliance, to promote the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals within the evangelical community] … I don’t think they totally escape this danger which is endemic in western Christianity, that the Gospels fall apart into the kingdom work of Jesus Christ on the one hand, and his death and resurrection on the other, as though these were two quite different things….” Contrastingly, explained Wright, “The kingdom does not come simply through Jesus having meals with outcasts and healing lepers and so on, as though the death and resurrection were quite incidental, nor simply through him dying on the cross and rising again.”
Like many on the religious left, Bishop Wright sees America’s current global ascendancy as analogous to the historic Roman Empire. Warning of a past tendency to co-opt scriptural concepts, he recalled, “There’s been a sort of to and fro in western discourse between the rhetoric that empires always have and the sustained biblical language [of] justice, freedom, and peace.…” Wright called these “great themes … which the Romans waved around like they owned them and insisted that by their empire they were bringing these to the rest of the world.”
While he did not give an example of the specific situations to which he referred, Wright expressed misgivings about some consequences of western democracy. He stated: “We in the West tend to say that our great democratic traditions are the proper way through…. That may be, though now with post-modernity our great democratic traditions do not look quite as bright and shiny as once they did, and it is not entirely clear that they are not introducing new types of chaos and new types of tyranny.”
Wright criticized more politically conservative Christians for their alleged lack of environmental concern and social compassion. He remarked, “There’s the irony particularly … that those who seem most concerned about what they call creationism seem with the next breath to be least concerned about creation in terms of ecology and valuing the world as God’s good world.” Perhaps referencing conservatives’ hesitancy to expand government social programs, Bishop Wright added, “That goes, by the way, with the irony that often those who are most stridently anti- Darwinian in their account of how things began, are most strongly implicitly socially Darwinian in terms of the way they look at money and power.” The implicit accusation was that conservative Christians were “social Darwinians” who shrugged at the degradation of the poor as the necessary price of economic progress.
Similarly, the bishop characterized conservative views on foreign policy as motivated by a simple-minded bloodlust. He defended and reiterated his previous objections to the War on Terror, noting, “In political discourse at the moment I have seen the resurgence of the language of the apocalyptic, of the battle between good and evil … the way of dealing with it [the 9/11 attacks] … [with Americans] saying ‘Oh, there are evil people out there, therefore we good people simply have to go and drop bombs on them,’ was … not a mature, nor a wise, nor a productive thing to do, and I am on public record as saying all of that, and I stick by that.”
Wright said that the problem of terrorism “is inevitably dovetailed” with “the use of Scripture in contemporary political discourse … in relation to the Middle East.” Presumably remarking on some evangelicals’ sympathy with the modern state of Israel, he said it was “fascinating to see how the Darbyite dispensationalism … that rhetoric from the mid-19th century, that reading of Scripture, suddenly has become enormously powerful.”
While Wright expressed disagreement with these political applications of Scripture, he did not feel Christians should withdraw from the public sphere. Far from it, he argued: “There has been quite a considerable emphasis in some quarters … on the great split between religion and politics, and people quoting Jesus saying, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render unto God the things that are God’s,’ as though that was a way of saying Caesar has that bit over there, and God has that bit over there, and never the twain shall meet. I and others have argued that that was a radical misunderstanding of what Jesus was actually meaning.”
Alternatively, Wright suggested that passionate participation in the political life of a nation falls under the Christian’s responsibility to shape his world into one that mirrors the Kingdom of God. “God calls to himself a people so that they will be a people who will be the advance model for what the world will look like…. They hail the fact that Jesus is already sovereign over the world. This is the complete antithesis, I’m afraid, of all relativism: of all you-do-this and we’ll-do-that kind of theology.”
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