The Error of Excessive Political Expectations

Does the Christian Coalition (or other such groups) promise too much — or more particularly, are Christians expecting too much — from political action?

Put another way, is it really anyone’s responsibility to impose righteousness upon the land? In the answer to that question lies one of the least understood differences between our historic Protestant roots and current quasi-Christian political organizations.

Historically, Protestants have viewed the hierarchical state with suspicion. While confessing that the state derives its authority from God, we also confess this authority to be strictly limited. In other words, the state is not sovereign.

What Politics Cannot Do

Yet today, many Christians are acting as though it is. They appear to believe that genuine social change will flow from the ballot box and, too often, appear ready to impose change by the same means. This is antithetical to our most basic precepts.

As a professional political consultant, I am constantly asked by fretful and occasionally angry people, why we are failing in our efforts to change the country, why the two parties don’t work, why the system is broke and can’t be fixed, etc. Too often, the implication is that what we are doing isn’t working, and therefore we may need to adopt the shortcuts of our enemies.

The surprising truth is that the system works quite well. More to the point, we are getting approximately the government we deserve. It would be far more startling if we held an election and the next morning no one wanted to rob the 7-Eleven, everyone spoke respectfully to his parents and CBS told the truth. Few would question the life-changing power of the ballot box.

Because we do not believe that politics is the stuff of salvation, why should we expect righteousness to miraculously result from an election? Of course we want to elect godly men to public office. Of course we need judges who will defend the truth and magistrates who will protect the innocent. But is it the role of civil government to regulate all sinful behavior? No, it is not. We can’t see men’s hearts and that’s where most sin is. The magistrate has a very limited role in preserving peace and administering justice. If he, or we, step across that line, we become the enemies of another of God’s gifts, liberty.

Decentralized Religion, Decentralized Politics

Biblical law must be embraced; it cannot be imposed. Civil government does not have the power to change men’s hearts and we certainly do not want to give it the power to try. The church tried with the Inquisition and ended up making religious nonconformity a capital crime. The state has tried and ended up with fascism. Both are the result of ungodly authoritarianism.

The Reformation destroyed the concept of the hierarchical church, through its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. The reformers believed every man could read the Bible for himself. Christ was his only Mediator, making earthly priests irrelevant. Not surprisingly, the hierarchical state soon collapsed in areas where the hierarchical church paradigm disappeared, replaced by forms of government which decentralized power and limited its use through covenants, compacts and constitutions. Interestingly, it is these same areas which resisted the rise of fascism in our own century.

Misguided Expectations

The problem in our current age is not with Christian political action, per se; it is with the expectation. Just what is it that we expect to accomplish through politics? Unfortunately, for many Christians, the answer is to remake society in the image of Biblical Christianity. Not only will this lead to disappointment; it is downright dangerous. Nations are not changed by elections; they are changed by grace — and they are changed one person at a time.

The chief goal of political action for the Christian is to have a government that protects the free preaching of the gospel. Yes, the magistrate is to be a terror to evildoers and enforce the peace, but he cannot change the heart of a single child, let alone save a nation. That is the ministry of the church and can be accomplished only by the operation of the Holy Spirit.

Because the reformers understood this principle, they didn’t fall for political solutions trying to change matters of the heart. Neither should we. Few movements are inherently more dangerous than those which promise salvation through political action. Examples abound, from Latin American-style fascism to the twin evils of our century, the Nazi and Soviet states. In all of these systems, the state is absolute.

Defensive Politics

As Reformed Christians, we abhor such authoritarianism. There is no room for compromise on this issue and we must be constantly vigilant that we do not succumb to the seductive lure of such political absolutism. We must keep our focus. Politics in our age is not an offensive, but rather a defensive activity (unlike the mission of the Church).

To put it bluntly, our goal is to keep the politicians from either padlocking the church door or preventing us from raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Along the way, we’d like a civil society where innocents are protected from murder and mayhem and a system of just courts to resolve disputes prevails.

Because of our abhorrence of unrestrained state power, Reformed believers have often found themselves on the firing line. We believe strongly in submitting to lawful authority, but Reformed Christians certainly saw their duty in standing up to the Nazis and Stalinists. Many paid with their lives and are buried in the same unmarked graves as the Gypsies, Jews and political dissidents they felt compelled to try to rescue.

Those Christians were right and we need to learn from their precious example. Accordingly, let us be careful of state power, lest we come to love it too much. When it grows beyond the bounds which God has established, it will be more a terror to the law-abiding than to the evildoer.

Realistic Politics

This may seem repetitious and obvious to Reformed Christians, but to those believers whose social and political activism is as new as their praise songbooks, these fundamental Biblical principles of limited government cannot be overstressed.

Because we do not expect salvation from politics, political organizations ought not be viewed in the messianic terms in which many Christians mistakenly view them. We do not need an exclusively Christian political party, for instance.

Why? Because most Americans will not vote for such a party and we will therefore lose. The purpose of a political party is to win. Under our two-party system, we form our coalitions before the election, unlike multi-party models in which the coalitions are formed after the election. For this reason, the parties must stay slightly to the right or left of the rest of the country (to use the very imperfect linear political model), sufficient to show contrast, but close enough to still win a majority.

The parties are remarkably good at this. I know they are good at it because my party is always moving away from me in the General Election while the opposing party is always simultaneously moving toward me, each trying to steal enough of the other’s thunder to appeal to 50% + 1 of the voters. (The result is either a Bill Clinton or a Bob Dole, which is why we’re so happy that politics really isn’t everything, after all).

If this were the church, we would have an entirely different attitude. In the church, our struggle is not to give people the government they deserve, but rather the truth they’re likely to hate. The state, on the other hand, contains people who ought not be in the church. The standard is therefore very different from the standard for the church. When we confuse these two organizational principles with one another (and we seem to), we get a marginalized political asterisk for a party and a watered- down gospel with the soul-convicting power of a fortune cookie in the church.

The civil covenant in our country contains all citizens; therefore the form of our political organization (which is not prescribed in Scripture) may encompass all civil covenant members, not just Christians. This explains the Republican Party. (Nothing really explains the Democratic Party). It is therefore quite clear that in a civil covenant as ours, the church is a particularly unsuitable model to use when designing a political party, and vice versa.

To put it in the simplest of terms, consider a nation composed of ten voting citizens, three of whom are Christians. If the Christians create their own party, they will get three votes, at best (probably less). If the secularists divide into two parties, the Christians can deliver the majority to one party or the other in exchange for the freedom to preach the Gospel and raise their children in the faith.

The only way the equation changes is if a) the Christians insist on being a “pure” third party (purely irrelevant, that is), or b) two or more of the secularists are converted. At that point, the center of the political debate shifts because hearts have been changed. This is a political model of liberty and representative government in which free people choose a government which represents their hearts. As the people change, so does their government, and that explains better than any poll or radio talk show host could hope to, exactly why our government is the way it is today.

For this reason, when it comes to politics, we ought to be, well.... political. We need to stay in the game. Meanwhile, we need not only to pray for reformation and revival; we need to work for it. Most importantly, we must clearly understand the philosophy of Christian liberty which we profess, refusing at all costs to adopt the authoritarian model of our opponents. David addresses this very subject in the 37th Psalm (vs. 7-9):

Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil. For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth.