restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
The Constitution and Christian Politicians
The Christian who engages in politics will view his work as the service of God through the service of mankind. He will see himself as a person who himself has needed forgiveness and salvation from sin. He will therefore be humble and not count his Christian profession as conferring upon him superior political expertise.
The temptation to self-righteousness is endemic in politics. Its opposite is humilitythe willingness to believe in the sincerity of ones opponents, the willingness to admit the possibility that they might have some right on their side, and especially the willingness to submit to the law of the land, which (hypothetically at least) is still the Constitution of the United States. Beyond all these virtues, the Christian politician will recognize the sobering truth that all public officials are ultimately answerable, not to the electorate, but to God Himself. As the inimitable Dr. Johnson once quipped, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
It would, of course, be unrealistic to suppose that constitutional government in the 1787 sense of the term could be viable in todays political climate. Clearly we have moved beyond the Founders vision of a limited constitutional republic. Yet the Founders teaching about the necessity of personal responsibility and the evils of political power has a timeless relevance, even though in our day a restoration of the old Constitution is, to most Americans, quite inconceivable. The truth is that government tends to run roughshod over our God-given unalienable rights in the name of security or welfare or whatever. Still, Christians are to pay their taxes and give their respect to the authorities to whom honor is due.
I have noted this tension on more than one occasion in relationship to church-state relationships in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. But if Lutheranism acquired a certain reputation for subservience to the state both in Bismarcks Prussia and Hitlers Third Reich, we should remember that resistance to totalitarianism by the Confessing Church of Niemöller, Bonhoeffer, and von Stauffenberg has more than wiped the slate clean. Albert Einsteins statement is eloquent testimony to this fact:
Only the churches stood squarely across the path of Hitlers campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
Every good tree brings forth good fruit, said Jesus, but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit (Matthew 7:17-18). Everyone knows, or ought to know by now, that the overthrow of the original Constitution has had a tremendous impact, and a corrupting one in my view, on our society as we move more and more into the fold of totalitarianism. Once the bedrock of constitutional liberty is forsaken, there is little left to prevent the arbitrary working of human political and social forces and the abuse of power by fallible rulersbe they Christian or not. Few will doubt that the slide into liberalism and secularism proceeds unabated, and little has changed with the assumption of power by the Bush administration. Chuck Baldwin, one of Americas most perceptive commentators, is correct when he writes:
Not only has Bush not faithfully fought for conservative, constitutional principles, he has actually shown himself to be just another big spending, big government liberal. Bush has promoted the homosexual agenda every bit as much as did his democratic predecessor. He has increased the size and scope of the federal government to levels not seen since Lyndon Johnson. He is in the process of expanding federal law enforcement powers to a degree no previous president, liberal or conservative, dared try.
What to do then? There can only be one recourse for any conscientious Christian, and that is to acknowledge that a politicians personal testimony about his relation to Christ means next to nothing if he is not willing to follow the law he took an oath to defend and preserve. One thing that may be asserted with confidence is that from its earliest beginnings the Christian faith has consistently affirmed an ethical system that needs to be spelled out in specific social contexts, including the realm of politics. There is, in fact, no such thing as strictly Christian ethics, because what is called the Christian ethic is really right human behavior. In other words, good action is good only if it is good for all men everywhere.
No thinking on the relations of church and state can be clear and real which thus dissolves the church into a fog of ideals and speaks of it in the vague as an experience of the soul or a pursuit of the good while designating the state as where the real work is done. One must deprecate the air of unreality that haunts statements such as this. Christianity will never penetrate the whole life of politics if it can only be described with such misty verbiage.
Little wonder it is the enduring conviction among protagonists of the state, such as Machiavelli, that Christians are never entirely reliable in political matters. This platitude is but a reminder that while the state defines the circumstances in which our responsibilities as Christians are fulfilled, the state does notbecause it cannotdefine those responsibilities themselves. This must be done by every individual Christian, andat least in a constitutional republicmust be done in such a way that marks the limits of the state in terms of its authority.
May 6, 2003
David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.