Does faith affect our politics or does politics affect our faith? Is there such a thing as “Christian” politics? I invited my friend Michael Wear, author of The Spirit of Our Politics, to help us think through Christian political engagement and political division in the church, as well as to discuss our mutual love for Dallas Willard.
Background and Spiritual Journey
I'm from Buffalo, New York. I became a Christian when I was about 15 after reading Romans and thought for a season that meant I needed to go to seminary and become a pastor, even though I was interested in civics from a very young age. But thankfully I had a pastor in my life who said, Michael, there are Christians who aren't pastors.
I thought that was a helpful insight. I went to DC for college and ended up, through a series of providential events, working in government. I worked in the White House for three and a half years.
Then I worked as a consultant for a decade advising Christian leaders and organizations on navigating public life and the public square and helping other organizations, mainstream organizations partner with the faith community. And then a couple of years ago, we started the Center for Christianity and Public Life, which is a nonprofit with the mission to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life for the public good. And that's the work I'm doing now.
You know, politics didn't happen to my faith. My faith happened to politics. So part of my coming to faith was coming to terms, not just with whether I could provide mental assent to Jesus living, dying on the cross, raising from the dead, but whether I truly intended to give my life to Jesus, the whole of my life, and whether I thought the world was his, and whether I thought he was fit to govern, whether I thought he was a wise counselor, whether I thought the governments of the world were his footstool, whether I thought I could trust him in the middle of a storm.
Dallas Willard
I first came to know Dallas when I just started working at the White House. A mutual friend, Gary Haugen, sent a copy of Divine Conspiracy to my office. And it sat on my shelf for months. I thought, what is this? I'm working 16-hour days–who has time to read a book like this? But my pastor back home recommended it. And I thought, well, if he's recommending it and Gary Haugen is, I think I need to pick it up.
Ιt changed my life. It was like a second spiritual awakening in my life. Οbviously Dallas has affected how I think about my work and how I think about politics. Dallas has profoundly shaped my relationship with Jesus. Dallas talks about God's life in a way that I am profoundly drawn to it and captured by it.
It's because Dallas has so shaped me personally that I couldn't help but think about the public and political sort of implications. Dallas was a Christian leader in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s. And there is not a scandal to his name. There wasn't a season where he sought to see how he could leverage his influence to support a candidate.
I think what he wrote has profound implications for our politics, but he was deeply committed to teaching about Jesus Christ. There was just an evident apprenticeship to Jesus. That is an incredible testimony and witness for so many who are wondering, “Does anyone really believe this stuff?” “Is it all just a power play?” “Is it all just a game?” And Dallas's life among many others stands as testimony that, yes, this is real.
You can step into the kingdom and be a part of it, and you can take on Jesus's kind of life.
Society and Culture
I was seeing, both within the Church and from outside the Church, two approaches to Christianity and politics. 1) This idea that God is outside and irrelevant to our politics. 2) That politics is above and superior to life with God. So it's either a political idolatry that places politics outside of the influence of God and Christian resources, or a political idolatry that places politics above the kingdom.
I think the great need and the great contribution that the Church can make is to place politics within and under the life we're living with Jesus. My book is an attempt to apply a Christian way of thinking to politics as opposed to trying to get Christians to talk about politics as political analysts.
“Christian” Politics
Christian politics is not reducible to a particular platform, a particular policy prescription. I think that Christianity has tremendous resources to offer when it comes to policymaking and decision making. I've become convinced that in this moment, one of the greatest contributions Christianity has to offer our politics today is not in telling our politics what it is or what it must do, but in reminding our politics what it is not—that our politics is penultimate, not ultimate. That our politics is the area of the prudential, not the dogmatic that our politics is contingent, mediated. I talk about politics as an essential form in which we can love our neighbors.
[An example is] the act of voting. I think so often we talk about voting as this pure unmediated expression of your personal will. And then we wonder why we feel so burdened by it. And some people alleviate the burden by saying that neither of the candidates are good enough for me. And then other people deal with that tension by saying, yes, there's a candidate who is a great representation of me and everything I desire for our political life. Instead, when you walk into the voting booth, you're deciding on options that have been decided for you.
That's one of the primary ways in which our politics is mediated. It's mediated by community, by our neighbors. It's mediated by structure. We live in a representative democracy. That is, with our consent, but not of our choosing. Our political participation is channeled through that system.
One way to think about contingency is there are political decisions and policies that you could support in one moment that might be wise and for the good of your neighbor, that in a different context, in a different set of circumstances, would be unwise or not loving of your neighbors.
Politics is inherently contingent on circumstances: circumstances of life, of broader affairs. It's not that politics should be without a moral burden. We have a responsibility to steward the influence we have in a way that's consistent with integrity. But I think our politics has a misplaced and misshapen moral burden that does more harm than good.
Political Division in the Church
I think that the aim here is not political uniformity, but spiritual integrity. And so I'm comfortable with Christian political disagreement to an extent. I trust God to use political disagreement within the church much more than I trust my political opinions to dictate what everyone else ought to believe when it comes to politics.
People are responsible for their own actions, for their own behavior. I do think we need to right-size that and understand that most people are not thinking about politics all of the time. Most people are imbibing gestures and nods in particular directions.
And so I think at the level of the individual, especially your aunt or uncle who may not even bother to vote, [that] it's really important not not to over-identify them with their bad political opinions… They may just have a misguided view about the inflationary effects of tax cuts.
We are not saved by our politics.
The Kind of People We Are
In the Divine Conspiracy, Dallas quotes T .S. Elliott, who observed that the great human endeavor has been to try to find a system so perfect that people no longer have to be good. And I think this is the primary political and technological conceit of our day. That we can find the candidate, the policy, the technology that constrains us so that it doesn't matter what we are actually willing to do and the kind of person that we intend to be, but that will somehow achieve an outcome through bypassing interiority, by bypassing the kind of person we are.
The beauty and weakness of our democracy is that no matter how hard it tries, it can't quite get around the kind of people we are. We're kind of stuck with it. The state of our politics is a reflection of the state of our souls. And we need to look that in the face.
How can we build a morally healthy culture through means which disavow morality? “We need to make some sacrifices now because politics is dirty and we need to get things done. But once we have all the power, then we'll be able to be moral, you know?”
What we can say about Christian politics is if it is intentionally motivated towards harm, it is not Christian. And as Christians, we need to have the confidence to say that.
Living Faithfully in 2024
I think the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence are particularly potent right now. I think that our political life is such that if we don't step away, we are prone to think of ourselves as an amalgamation of all the various inputs and messages that are vying for our attention.
Dallas once said that you may discover in solitude that you have a soul. Parker Palmer has this quote that we have a politics full of brokenhearted people. It takes a godly kind of vision to look out at our politics and see brokenhearted people.
Solitude and silence are vital disciplines. I talk in my book about this term political sectarianism. Political sectarianism refers to the kind of polarization we have today, which social scientists say is made up of aversion, othering, and misplaced moralization. And in the book, I offer the disciplines of fellowship, service, and confession to counteract those kinds of impulses.
There is a real danger in considering your political community to be your primary community.
We are more than our politics. It's not that politics is unimportant, but we are more than our politics. Politics is not the ultimate determinant of our character. It relates to our character. It's not separate from, but we just need to make sure that we're not centered in our political life. It can be a wonderful thing when Christians engage in politics with their feet planted in the gospel. It can be incredibly dangerous when Christians engage in politics with their feet planted in politics.
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