PROPOSITION 11 Christianity Is Not a Religion; Christianity
Is a Politic
Liberalism construes the world
this way:
(a) religion is a privately held
set of beliefs pertaining to God or the afterlife or some such, and
religion must be protected as an individual right so long as religion
stays out of the realm of the public.
(b) Christianity is a religion.
(c) Therefore, Christianity is a
private matter and is not, must not be, political.
Camp has devoted this book to
rebutting this liberal paradigm. “The primary task of the church is to embody and bear
witness to the end of history, an all-compassing reality that has already
broken into the world. The primary task of the church is to be an
alternative politic.”
Admittedly, good reasons for being
suspicious of claims that religion is political exist. And other good reasons
exist for people to claim Christianity ought not to be partisan.
For the former, they need to
realize that the problem with Charlemagne and Truman and the conquistadors
(and the like) was not that they mixed Christianity and politics but that they
thoroughly misunderstood Jesus’s politics. They reduced Christianity to
something like what we mean by religion.
And that kind
of religion can be deadly in the public sphere.
“This sort of misunderstanding of Christianity—as a
privatized affair that has no authority truly to inform
public life—sits well alongside what the theologians call ‘sacramentalism.’
Sacramentalism typically connotes an emphasis on the sacraments of the
church—baptism, Eucharist, and the like—as very important primarily
because of their spiritual or religious or afterlife significance. They
become akin to magic rites, totemic talismans: without baptism one will go
to hell; with baptism one will not.”
Baptism
“Baptism is a voluntary induction
into a new way of life in which our ultimate allegiance is to the lordship
of Christ. His lordship teaches us how to tell the truth, love our enemies, keep our marriage vows, and share our wealth. Baptism is the Christian’s pledge of allegiance. The volun-tary nature of this commitment
is itself a profound political alternative.” It doesn’t depend on place of
birth, the present political climate, or the government’s attitude toward
immigrants.
Baptism is also an alternative
polity because it repudiates any kind of socio-political barriers to
membership. It doesn’t ignore differences but offers a way for these different
kinds of people to live and serve God together.
“Baptism is consequently no mere
religious ritual. It is a pledge of allegiance to trump all other pledges
of allegiance. Thus when we are called to pledge allegiance to other
political authorities, we must either reject such a call or do so only
with a highly qualified pledge.” Christians should not say the Pledge of
Allegiance (at least not without their finders crossed behind their backs 😊).
Preaching or Bearing Witness
“To bear witness well is to tell
the truth in such a way that new possibilities for human life,
new possibilities for human relationship, new possibilities for social arrangements
come into view. If our truth telling devolves merely into yet more hostile
partisanship, then we have not yet sufficiently told or embodied the
truth.” Christians believe in truth, that it must be shared and lived
truthfully.
“When I bear witness, I acknowledge
that I am telling the truth as I understand it, telling the truth about my
experience. This does not mean, cannot mean, that there is no such thing
as truth, nor does it mean that we have no fair-minded access to it, at
least in many cases. But because any bearing witness entails subjectivity, we
must accept the contingency of our knowing; we are a mortal,
finite, fallible species. We may be wrong. To bear witness rightly is,
in other words, an exercise in humility.” We therefore witness peaceably,
not coercively or manipulatively to the truth we know.
Eucharist
“The Lord’s Supper, instead, was
a sacrament in which community and economic sharing and the tangible
grace of God were all made manifest to the gathered, baptized community.
The primary economic policy of the early church was not to advise the
Roman Empire on imperialist tax policy but to practice a profound and
generous sharing, modeled on the Old Testament practice of Jubilee, in which
debts were forgiven and excess capital redistributed to those
who most needed it.“
The sacraments, baptism and
Eucharist, should enliven our imaginations to generate fresh ways of opening
the politic they envision to our broken, divided, and scarred world. We should
never separate these practices from that politic.
The well-known incident of the
Christmas truce between German and British troops in WW I in which the enemy
troops shared the Eucharist together before resuming hostilities is a
bastardized form of the sacrament precisely because its practice was separated
from the form of life it entails.
This incident is a parable for
the way liberal modernity in both its conservative and liberal forms, have
co-opted Christian practice. You may take thirty-six hours for a
truce, have a little religion, and they get back to blasting each other to
smithereens. Thereby the guts of Christianity are corroded and its great
vision/reality —that is, a community of peoples reconciled unto God and
thereby unto one another through the gracious power and forgiveness of God
is neutered.
“Indeed, one might conjecture
that while the World War I truce was an exhibition of the marginalization
of the Eucharist and baptism, or, as noted, a sentimentalization of the
meaning of Christmas, it was nonetheless at least a token of
such. Moreover, in those days on those battlefields, we
caught glimpses, too, of the natural human aversion to killing,
in which many soldiers would shoot over the heads of their opponents,
deliberately choosing not to kill the enemy. And yet it has been through
ritual, practice, and training that this very aversion to killing has been
overcome. The US military has studied and implemented forms of practice to
overcome this natural aversion, so that troops may learn to kill in a
desensitized fashion, increasing the rate at which combat infantry were
willing to shoot to kill, from 15 to 25 percent in World
War II to 90 percent in the Vietnam War.
“The sacraments, by contrast,
are intended to form us into a particular kind of people who share
gracious, risky hospitality, abundant generosity, and long-suffering
patience. The sacraments are to be our own alternative forms of practice, at
which we work for the whole of our lives.”
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