Theological Journal – July 11 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians (1)

Lee Camp has given us what some have called a Resident Aliens, the influential and formative book co-authored by Stan Hauerwas and Will Willimon in 1989, for our own day. In fifteen propositions he fleshes out an ecclesial politic that well-positions the North American church for witness and mission in the 2020’s.

Working on the premise that the only genuinely revolutionary power in the world is that found in Christian faith (quoting Merton, Kindle Loc.90), Camp poses that faith as a claim about the world and the particular way of life it entails. That makes it inherently political.

In our day the threats and challenges to our world’s health and well-being intensify while at the same time the church destroys its own witness. Quoting Andrew Sullivan:

“Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols—including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.”

And critiquing the humorlessness of the Left, he says,

“And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. . . . [They] punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history—itself a remnant of Christian eschatology—it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.”

In such a circumstance, and given the power Camps finds in the Christian faith, that faith must be retooled from the ground up. That means for him rediscovering that this faith is a in itself a politic, and not the private, personal religion it has whittled itself down to be. Camp writes:

“. . . by politic I mean an all-encompassing manner of communal life that grapples with all the questions the classical art of politics has always asked: How do we live together? How do we deal with offenses? How do we deal with money? How do we deal with enemies and violence? How do we arrange marriage and families and social structures? How is authority mediated, employed, ordered? How do we rightfully order passions and appetites? And much more besides, but most especially add these: Where is human history headed? What does it mean to be human? And what does it look like to live in a rightly ordered human community that engenders flourishing, justice, and the peace of God?” (Kindle Loc.126-132)

Camp’s not advocating for a return to Christendom with this. Far from it. Indeed it is in the debris of the mess Christianity has made of itself in this country that he sees “(a) the political possibility that rejection and loss may be hallmarks of the kingdom of God, until the kingdom comes in fullness, but also (b) the political possibility that unfathomable and as yet unimagined possibilities are made possible by the resurrecting power of God, even before the kingdom comes in all its fullness.” (Kindle Loc.138-144)

He imagines a politic (as distinct from a politics, which was the mistake of Christendom). This means realizing that Jesus

-rejected the way of making the nation great again,

-rejected the role of religious reformer, and

-rejected reducing his role to that of social reformer.

Instead he plumps for a fourth way, a socio-spiritual-political option which he lays out in his fifteen propositions (neither left or right according to our accepted spectrum.

His aim is to produce “a sort of syllabus for the sort of study Christians in the West must do to reconfigure our faith as good news to the world instead of the paltry, partisan, privatized matter too often proffered.” (Kindle Loc.200)

Camp believes that by recovering this received wisdom of the church we need be neither fearful nor critical in our approach to our world but rather confident and constructive. It is in this spirit (Or is it Spirit?) he offers his propositions. And the first of those I turn to tomorrow.