Church & Politics - Golden Calves
It's been a little over two months since I started writing this blog series, so perhaps a short recap is in order.
We started with an historical pattern: roughly every five hundred years, the social, economic, political, and religious fabric of Western society unravels, not completely but fully enough to cause significant disruption and disorientation across the whole system, and increasingly across the whole world. This unraveling, or "upheaval," as we have been calling it, is felt at every level of society, including, perhaps especially, in religious communities. When the world shakes with the tremors of upheaval, so too does the Church. Though the Church is not of the world, it is still in the world and, therefore, affected by the world. If we have so isolated ourselves from the world that we are no longer concerned with the things that concern it, we are of no use to it. We will, in that case, truly have become so "heavenly-minded" that we are of no earthly good (though, I would argue strongly that this isolationist posture is about the farthest thing from heavenly-minded imaginable. Heaven, it seems, is especially interested in what happens on this planet.) In any case, the big idea here is that every 500 years, this unraveling of society, has a profound, even cataclysmic, impact on the Church as well. Cataclysmic but not fatal.
The Church will inevitably be changed, even damaged, through the upheaval, and everyone who is connected to the Church will experience its pain. But this pain need not be unto death. In fact, if we have eyes to see, we will undoubtedly discern the movement of the Spirit in and through the tremors of upheaval, as he delicately but surely excises from his Church the thousands of tiny encrustations that have over the course of centuries made her unwieldy and ineffective. And, if we have hearts to respond, we will hear him inviting us to join him in the painful, messy metamorphosis. In other words, these 500-year upheavals, difficult and disorienting though they may be, become in the hands of the Sculptor, a tool for realizing the full beauty within this lump of clay.
Having established our purpose, we then spent the first several posts in this series tracing this pattern of upheaval and revival throughout history, from Jesus of Nazareth to the fall of the Roman Empire to the Great Schism to the Protestant Reformation. Time and again, this pattern has held: upheaval in society leads to upheaval in the Church. This generally results in three different factions within the Church: people who leave (disillusioned by the Church's flaws and inadequacies), people who stay (often, but not always, refusing to acknowledge the problems in the hopes that they will just go away and we will be able to return to the glory days), and people who branch off into a new (not novel) expression of Church. This new expression, despite its own flaws and inadequacies, will shake off many of the barnacles that had weighed down the Church for centuries and will, therefore, be free to follow the Spirit into a new season of fruitfulness. And, as history has repeatedly borne out, this transformation will work its way back from the new to the old, bringing renewal there as well. The result is two vibrant expressions of Church, pruned and fruitful, leading the world into God's future.
We will be discussing all this in great detail in future posts, but for the past several weeks, we have camped out on what we're calling the contributing factors of upheaval, the forces both within and outside the Church that, over the course of centuries, stack up until they eventually topple resulting in all the chaos and potential of upheaval. To this point, we have only focused on one contributor, the interplay between politics and the Church, and even here our discussion has been somewhat limited. We have spent most of our time with this topic on the democratic concept of separation of Church and state, the degree to which politics can and should influence the Church and visa versa. In other words, we've been dealing with the question of how deeply Christians and churches should be involved in secular politics, and the answer we have come up with is deeply enough that we can have an impact but not so deeply that we lose ourselves in it. Christians must be involved in politics if we hope to be the light of the world that Jesus called us to be, that is, to lead the way into God's vision of human flourishing, but as we do so, we must remember who we are. We must engage in politics differently than everyone else does, in a way that is distinctly and decidedly Christian. We must participate in earthly politics as citizens of the Kingdom of heaven following the lead of our King in this as in everything else. We must do politics in the Way of Jesus, living politically, to the best of our ability and by the power of His Spirit, as he would if he were us.
Now, as this is a discussion of upheavals and the factors that contribute to them, the case I will be making in the weeks ahead is that the Church has, all too often, failed to walk this knife's edge well, straying either into isolationism or a non-distinct political activism. As I have already written somewhat extensively on this first dysfunction, I'll spend the next several posts discussing the second, the tendency of Christians to live politically just like everyone else but to call it Christian. This one factor alone has contributed as much or more than any other to the current condition of the Western Church and the upheaval we are right now experiencing. Simply put, our political engagement has, broadly speaking, not been authentically and distinctively Christian. We have not pursued the heart and mind of Christ regarding our politics, allowing him to challenge and transform our views and biases but have instead imposed our own previously held political opinions and affiliations on him. We have, in other words, baptized our own politics, calling them Christian, even when they bear little or no resemblance to Jesus. And when we do this, we mire ourselves in the political mud and muck of this world, obscuring the beauty of Jesus and his Church and losing the ability to be of any use in the healing of the world.
I want to make clear that this is neither a modern problem nor one for only one side of the political spectrum. This has been a problem for God's people for as long as God has had a people. When the Yahweh rescued the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and led them to Mount Sinai so they could worship him (that is, so they could enjoy him and enjoy being his people), one of the first things they did was replace him with a golden calf. It's important to point out that this isn't what they thought they were doing. In Exodus 32, as they were bowing down and offering sacrifices to the golden calf, they were crying out, "This is your god who, Israel, who brought you out of Egypt." In other words, they did not think they were worshipping another god; they truly believed that the statue they had created was a representative of Yahweh. Notice that they were still calling himself by his name, "Israel," he who wrestles with God. They did not believe they had forsaken him but considered their idolatry to be an expression of their devotion to him. This kind of pious self-deception is the most dangerous form of idolatry. As Jesus put it, "If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:23). It's one thing to willfully and knowingly sin; it's another thing entirely to sin and call it (or worse still, to truly believe it is) righteousness.
Nevertheless, this is a perennial problem for God's people. Throughout the Bible, God's people routinely replaced him with idols in his name. In the book of 1 Samuel, their desire for a king was nothing more than attempting to exchange their God for a hero who would protect them and enable them to be the people of God. Then, their first king, Saul, committed the same error at Amalek when he disobeyed the command of God in order to, in his words, "sacrifice to the LORD." This would happen again toward the end of the monarchy when the people of Israel defied the prophets and aligned themselves with Egypt and Babylon rather than trusting in God to sustain them. Again, in the name of preserving their identity as God's people (their land, laws, capital, temple, etc.), they replaced God with emperors and armies. Notice, each of these was political decision. This was political idolatry. God's people calling their political actions holy simply because they were the ones making them though these actions directly contradicted the will and character of the God in whose name they were doing them.
Jesus would later accuse the Pharisees and Sadducees of much the same thing, in the name of God, replacing God with his law and temple. And, of course, this problem is not limited to the pages of Scripture. I have already discussed in detail the various political maneuverings of the Church during the Roman Empire, the turn of the first millennium, and the medieval era, but perhaps the most egregious examples of this self-deceived idolatry are the various holy wars and genocides in Church history. The Crusades, the Inquisitions, the pogroms, colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny. These atrocities were all perpetrated by "Christians" in the name of Jesus. Even some of the 20th Century’s most heinous crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide were done by "Christian" nations in the name of Jesus, often (mis)using Scripture and religious language as justification for these abominations.
All these examples, from Scripture and from more recent history, are but different faces of the same dysfunction. They are "Christianized" idolatry. They are golden calves that have been built and worshipped in Jesus' name. They are our own political opinions, biases, and ambitions hidden beneath a thin veneer of Christian language and ritual. And they are deadly to the Church and the work that Jesus wants to do through it in the world. When the Church walks in this kind of Christianized idolatry for long enough it loses its prophetic voice, forfeits its influence, damages both its own reputation and that of its King, and slowly descends into irrelevance. At this point, only drastic intervention can save it. Enter the upheaval.
But we'll talk more about that later. In next week's blog post, I want to continue this conversation about Christianized political idolatry by examining some of the ways this is happening in the Church today.
