Is There a Correct Christian Approach to Politics?

When I was in college, beginning in 2003, I spent a fair amount of time rather annoyingly trying to convince my friends and family that they needed to care more about politics. As an enthusiastic political science major, it irked me that the general population didn’t pay more attention to their government and how its decisions affected their everyday lives. Ironically, since the summer of 2020, I have spent a significant amount of time doing almost the opposite—not exactly telling people to ignore government but trying to remind them that their families, churches, and local communities are their most precious and closest attachments and should not be sacrificed to the idol of partisanship.

Christians and the Great Awokening

Is there a correct Christian approach to politics? In 2020, many people were asking this question, even more than in 2016, when I saw families split apart over the election of Donald Trump. Many Christians found themselves delving into complicated social issues of which they had previously been unaware. Many had little context for processing the onslaught of information, the demands for allegiance, and the villainization of anyone who stayed silent. Books and social movements promised certainty about topics that scholars had studied and debated for decades without reaching consensus. Voices began dominating the public sphere, pushing theories about economic and social realities as facts, and demanding that the public fall in line. This caused Christians of good will to divide over issues based on their own life experiences and the types of perspectives they were exposed to. Some believed that their fellow congregants ought to support antiracism because all people are made in God’s image and we should affirm this. Some believed we should support these efforts because they saw historical oppression that they felt the Bible called us to redress. Others thought Christians ought to love all races but oppose antiracist groups because of their openly Marxist ideology and derision of the nuclear family. Some believed Christians should fight for those targeted by overzealous laws and their enforcement, while others believed that Christians should support the law enforcement officers who daily put their lives at risk for their fellow citizens and the stability of society. Since that time, Christians have seemingly splintered over countless political stances. Many have left the faith altogether because they found secular theories about society and power more convincing than Christian teaching on authority and created order. Many have gravitated toward postmodernist views of truth, abandoning the morals of the church to embrace the ethics of the university.

Biblical Polarization

One thing I like to keep in mind when I am thinking through the present moment is that Jesus’s era was not so different from our own. The political landscape was intense and sometimes erupted into violence. Jesus lived in a Jewish kingdom under Roman captivity. Exploitation of the conquered and smoldering resentment were everywhere. Competing allegiances to Jewish and Roman authorities were represented even among those Jesus personally called to be his disciples. One was a Zealot (a Jewish rebel against Roman rule), and another was a tax collector for Rome, involved in a profession regarded by his countrymen as treasonous to the Jewish people. Although fellow disciples, they were by all accounts political enemies.

In addition to polarization, there was institutional corruption on every side. Those entrusted with power were often willing to excuse their own questionable actions if they felt the results were justified. Jewish religious leaders were more concerned about maintaining their own authority than considering the truth of Jesus’s message. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, was cynical about what could be known about right and wrong. He washed his hands of any possible responsibility for Jesus’s death when the Jews demanded that he be executed, knowing his conscience wasn’t clean.

Jesus’s death was a highly political event: a Roman public execution of a Jewish rabbi bucking the recognized authorities of his nation and mockingly labeled “the king of the Jews.” But, even in the face of death, Jesus continuously refused to play politics. In the book of John, Pilate asks what he has done to be handed over to the Romans by his own nation and its chief priests. Jesus could have easily appealed to Pilate’s obvious skepticism toward the Jewish authorities, pleaded his innocence, and begged for freedom. Instead, Jesus answers:

My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world. (John 18:36)

Then Jesus explains his mission this way:

For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. (John 18:37)

To this, Pilate answers like a philosophically-savvy, university-trained postmodernist: “What is truth?” Jesus provides him no easy answer in that moment, but had earlier clarified for another doubter, Thomas, in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

It was not only through Jesus that humans would have access to God the Father but through his crucifixion and resurrection. If he had opted to play political opponents against each other to save himself rather than focusing on the goal of the cross, there would be no way of reconciliation.

A New Status Quo

Jesus’s disciples originally thought he had come to establish an earthly kingdom, perhaps preparing to rescue the people of God from both the oppressive Romans and the corrupt religious leaders. What they got was something entirely different. When Jesus ascended into heaven, leaving the church to continue his work with the help of the Holy Spirit, the earthly political situation of his followers had not changed. Their ethnicities remained intact. Their everyday material concerns persisted. Their vocations were the same. They were still sometimes divided. Even their church leaders had disagreements. However, they were a people who had been given an entirely new perspective on their place in the universe. They were a people who were to live fully embodied lives with spirits attuned to something higher.

In light of how Christians lived in the past, is there a correct Christian approach to politics today? I propose that there is. When confronting the myriad political and social debates we constantly face, we must remember that the kingdom in which our primary citizenship lies is not of this world. This does not in any way mean that we should live as disembodied spirits who are not bound to particular identities. We all live in specific communities in a precise time and are given unique missions in those communities. We should seek to live out our beliefs in tangible ways that embody God’s love in the social and political contexts in which we find ourselves. The Bible does not prohibit earthly allegiances or civic engagement, but it also does not guarantee that we will have political agreement with each other on every issue. It does, however, remind us that our primary allegiance is to a king who rules over all, judges justly, and ordains times and seasons for everything. He is the one we ultimately answer to—a king who called Zealots and tax collectors, Jews and Greeks, men and women, slave and free—not to demonize each other or to agree on all points but to take up their individual crosses and follow him collectively.