In America’s capitol, leading evangelical thinkers debate how faith should influence politics. (Photo Credit: Britannica)
Meeting in President Teddy Roosevelt’s old Dutch Reformed church in Washington, D.C., two prominent evangelical thinkers, former presidential speech writer Michael Gerson and Hillsdale College professor Darryl Hart, recently discussed the proper role of evangelicals in politics.
“The most important evangelical contribution in American politics that I’ve seen, is the setting forth of a transcendent vision of justice and human dignity that stands above human systems, that provides a goal and a motivation for movements of justice and social reform,” said Gerson, a Washington Post columnist who wrote speeches for President George W. Bush.
This “Evangelicals in Politics” discussion on October 13, 2011 was hosted by Christ Reformed Church in Washington DC and moderated by Terry Eastland, publisher of The Weekly Standard. A positive evangelical presence in politics is “religious thinkers and political figures that force power to take human dignity seriously,” Gerson said. “At its best,” he explained, “the evangelical contribution is William Wilberforce,” who fought tirelessly on moral grounds to eradicate the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
Hart, who teaches history at Hillsdale, was cautious about evangelical political involvement because “some of the worst examples in American history of political activism have come from evangelicals.” Too often, he said, evangelicals today forget about “the two kingdoms view” that Christ’s Kingdom is “in the Church and not in the secular or social world.” Hart explained, “If you’re worried about order and stability in society and in the world, you want to tread lightly in appealing to a higher law,” because in Romans 13, Christians are instructed to submit to government authority, and “you don’t see Paul making an appeal to a higher law.”
Prohibition in the 1920’s was an example of “an appeal to a higher law,” Hart said, as it was “evangelicals trying to impose their morality on the rest of the nation.” Hart said “the effort to attach an amendment to the federal Constitution to achieve one’s moral ends strikes me as really dubious politically.” Even the abolitionist movement was too extreme, he said, “because evangelicals conceived of slavery as a sin that had to be eradicated from this righteous nation.” They thought “it was OK to go to war, and maybe a war of this kind was a just war.” Hart said he believed “there were other ways to try to get rid of the enormity of slavery,” as “lots of other nations in the world had liberated slaves without killing 600,000 citizens.”
Rather than write off all evangelical political involvement, Gerson said “at its best, evangelicals in politics will reflect the broader tradition of Christian social engagement,” which requires a rich, guiding intellectual tradition. Gerson found this tradition in Catholic social teachings on solidarity and subsidiarity. He explained that solidarity “means that the justice of a society is not just the impartial application of social rules and markets, it’s actually the way that the vulnerable and the weak are treated in society in addition to rule based justice.” Gerson cited a “principle of subsidiarity that human beings are prepared for life and liberty in the context of social and moral institutions, families, communities, churches, and that that role should be respected and encouraged in a society.”
Gerson said: “I have sometimes found conservatives not to be that interested in solidarity, and I have found liberal people in politics not that interested in subsidiarity,” so “the traditional political ideologies need to be reminded of these areas periodically.” He suggested: “Solidarity and subsidiarity bring a humane perspective to politics, it puts individuals at the center, but it says that other social institutions other than government are real and deserve our respect and support.” And he explained that “one of the great contributions of Christianity to the history of the West was a belief in individual rights and dignity,” and withdrawing from politics in areas concerning human rights and dignity can have devastating consequences.
“In the 1930s in Germany, a general failure of the Christian community to engage politically with the rise of Nazism … resulted in terrible tragedy,” Gerson explained. He said today most evangelical political involvement is about the “nature of human beings, their rights and dignity,” which is what “motivates pro-life people.”
Although they disagreed on the extent to which evangelicals should allow faith to influence political action, both Hart and Gerson agreed that official church involvement in politics is inappropriate. Gerson said “politics is the calling of Christian laymen rather than church authorities,” and must be approached “from a practical and prudential perspective.” He said “most statements by churches on politics are ignorant, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Hart agreed “it’s possible for Christians to be involved as citizens,” but “the church as a corporate institution, as the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ … should not meddle in public affairs.”
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