WASHINGTON (ABP) — Participants in a conference on “The Minister and Politics” got their plates filled with passion June 27, as a series of speakers spoke to the issue of “How to be political without being partisan.”
The need to understand the role of Christians in the Kingdom of God and in the world was a common theme at the event. The conference was sponsored by Christian Ethics Today and was one of several meetings held prior to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship general assembly in Washington, D.C.
Jim Wallis, president and executive director of Sojourners, said the American political system is broken and needs to be fixed by a social movement with spiritual foundations.
“We're not going to get to social justice without a revival of faith,” he said.
Wallis said many Christians want to engage the world with their faith but aren't sure how to do it, and he suggested several “rules of engagement.”
“God hates injustice, and we should, too, if we are God's children,” Wallis said. To get angry at the same things that make God angry is a sign of the image of God. And Christ-followers are called to be a part of the new order that Jesus predicted, he added.
As such, Christians are more effective as a prophetic minority than a dominant political force, he said.
Likewise, believers advance the cause of Christ best when they give up on visions of a separate utopian society and focus on specific injustices they can address. Wallis said Christians are to act as the conscience of the state, recognizing that there are specific roles for the government and roles for the church.
American Christians, like others, should learn to “take a global perspective” and to seek the common good, Wallis said. Christians can be political without being partisan when they remember that “our task is not juts to elect a candidate, but to build a movement.”
“Nationalism doesn't go well with the Kingdom of God,” he said: “‘God bless America' is not found in the Bible.”
Melissa Rogers, visiting professor of Religion and Pubic Policy at Wake Forest University, cited the late Foy Valentine in saying that Baptists “must recover the prophet-hood of all believers, not just the priesthood.”
Addressing social needs and justice issues is every person's job, not just that of ministers, she said. But she noted that boundaries between church and state must still exist.
“We must remember and remind others that it is the job of religious communities, not the government, to spread our faith,” she said. Asking the government to endorse the display of sacred symbols and scriptures is violating the government's proper jurisdiction, she said. “When the government promotes religion, it always plays favorites” with the dominant religious group.
Christians should not condone a system that sets up a hierarchy of acceptable faiths but must insist on full religious liberty for all, including those who have no religion, she added. And allowing the government to promote religion would result in a “funhouse version of our faith, regulated and monitored, warped and weakened.”
Christians are called to speak the truth, Rogers said. Those who claim that religion has been “kicked out of the public square” or that there is an inherent bias against religious charities are not telling the truth, she stated.
Christians must also “ask what is happening in the name of our country to human rights, including the rights of conscience, in the name of the war on terror,” Rogers said. When American interrogators exploit their captives' religion, tempt them to violate it, or make it impossible to practice it, Christians must speak up.
Political involvement is “not necessarily a tawdry thing,” Rogers said, though many Christians have typically avoided the partisan electoral side of politics because “it's about winning,” and people will do whatever it takes toward the end of winning.
It's not surprising that political candidates “use religion as a sharp stick,” she said. “The surprise is when religious people join the spectacle.”
Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Pauls, Minn., said his ministry is based on a passion and a vision for the Kingdom of God.
Boyd defined the Kingdom of God as a “dom” (domain) over which God is king.
Jesus is the prototype of all kingdom activity, Boyd said. To the extent that the church serves, acts, and loves like Jesus, it is manifesting the Kingdom of God.
If Jesus cared about the poor and homeless, or about women being oppressed by patriarchal societies, “that's our job, too,” he said.
“Jesus put absolutely no trust in government,” Boyd said. Though he came into the world at a time when politicians were profoundly bad, there was great unrest, and the Jewish people longed for a political messiah, Jesus steadfastly avoided political issues, always turning questions about earthly politics into questions about the Kingdom of God.
“The hope of the world is not that someone will finally get it right in politics,” Boyd said. “The hope of the world lies on followers of Christ being willing to imitate him in his life and death.”
Tony Campolo, founder and president of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, said too many people want to be Christian, but only up to a point. “To be a Christian is to go way beyond the point, to the cross,” he said.
“Our lifestyle is crucial because we have no legitimacy unless we live the life,” Campolo said.
Christians are not called to speak from a position of power that grows from coercion, he said, but from a position of authority that comes from service and earns the right to be heard.
When considering politics, Christians should not “delude ourselves into believing that politicians make the decisions in our society,” Campolo said: “The truth is that economics makes the decisions.”
As an example, Campolo said America has done little to combat the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan because the government doesn't want to offend Sudan's Chinese allies — in part because the U.S. is borrowing heavily from the Chinese to finance the war in Iraq.
Saying ‘thus saith the Lord' is the responsibility of the church, but the church hasn't earned the right to be heard, Campolo said. “I believe we must become politically involved, not from a position of power, but from a position of authority, earned by service, living out the ethic of Jesus.”
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