Christian Political Engagement

Platitudes and Nullities

We have been reading a book on Christian involvement in politics, entitled City of Man.  [Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Chicago: Moody Press, 2010).]  Our advice would be to save money and by-pass this volume, notwithstanding positive blurbs from Richard J. Mouw, Mark A. Noll, and Ronald J. Sider.

Few books are universally inept or bad.  But this gets pretty close.  It has been written for the pop-Christian market in the US.  It has many broad-sweeping generalisations that irritate more than inform.  Gerson and Wehner are establishment figures in the United States.  (They served in the Bush Administration.  Gerson was a former policy adviser and chief speechwriter to George Bush.  Wehner was a former deputy assistant to the President and a director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives.)

Its core weakness is its trite question begging.
  We are told that indeed the United States is an "exceptional" nation.  Its role has been to "defend and exemplify certain ideals in the world".  The authors claim that:

. . . exceptionalism and moralism are distinctively Christian contributions in American foreign policy.  They can be abused and misunderstood.  Yet in the history of the last century, they have been irreplaceable.  (Op cit., p.77.)

Now, as a rule of thumb, whenever an "ism" appears at the end of a noun, expect to be face to face with an idol.  When "rational" becomes "rationalism" we have moved from the creature's exercise of the God-given gift of reason and rational thought to an idolatrous belief that human reason and reasoning represents ultimate truth.

So it is here.  "Exceptionalism" is the idolatrous position that the United States is qualitatively different (better) than all other nations on earth.  Every nation has a legitimate claim to being exceptional in one way, shape or form.  But when a people claim "exceptionalism" for their nation as some kind of nationalistic or philosophical commitment they have elided into idolatry.  The same with moralism, as if certain moral standards were absolute in and of themselves.  These are decidedly not Christian contributions, but pagan ones. 

The benighted history of American exceptionalism and moralism over the past one hundred years is testament to this reality.  "Exceptionalism" has proven to be a bloody and warlike doctrine, leading the United States to shed blood somewhere on the planet every year since the Korean War.  It has led to the terrible idolatry that US intervention (usually armed and dangerous) into world affairs can replace or substitute for the redemptive work of Christ and His Spirit.  That Christians could sign up to this is an abiding shame upon us all. 

The authors go on:

We believe that an active and practical concern for human rights is among the most important elements of a Christian political theology.  And as other philosophical foundations for the idea of human rights weaken and fail, we believe that the religious foundation for human rights will assume even greater importance.  (Ibid.)

Here's where the question begging gets really serious.  Over the past thirty years we have seen "human rights" inflate to mean anything which a human being desires or lusts after.  We have had asserted and claimed women's rights to their bodies to justify the killing of their own innocent children.  We have homosexual rights to justify not only the immoral and sinful practices of homosexuality, but to demand state sanction and support for the same. 

Should a Christian reject these claims as wicked and, therefore, spurious?  Of course.  But the authors regrettably do not address the matter.  It illustrates so clearly that discussions about human rights, without also discussing the basis for those rights, and the Author of them, are of little value. 

Moreover, there is another issue.  Human rights are of different kinds.  There are freedom rights, civil rights, conscience rights, and demand rights.  Should the state be involved in defending or asserting all kinds of rights, simply because the descriptor, "human" is put in front?  If not, why not?  Addressing these issues will necessarily drive us back to Scripture--something the authors fail to do. 

Finally, when the author's speak of the "religious foundation for human rights," do they mean the Christian religion, or religion in general?  We believe the latter.  They operate from a presumption that all religions share the same basic moral concerns.  Islam truly is a religion of peace, as George Bush so (in)famously asserted.  They assume (and Bush asserted) that peace within the Islamic paradigm means the same as in the Western secular paradigm.  But of course, the peace of Islam is fundamentally unlike Western conceptions.  It is the "peace" of universal submission to Allah.

To suggest or imply that the peace of Jesus Christ speaks of the same reality as peace constructed in a secular Western world-view or an Islamic world-view is a bizarre nullity. 

Ignoring issues such as these make this volume little more than a collection of mindless platitudes.   We need so much more.