christianity and politics

Doers Not Merely Hearers: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 28th August 2021 (The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8,14,15,21-23 

“…be doers of the word, and not merely hearers…”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 “The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.”

I read this remarkable sentence this week in article by a commentator who is not, as far as I know, a Christian believer, but is someone who understands the profound impact Christianity has had on Western culture.

“The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.”

This sentence referred to the international outpouring of anger that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May: the brutal public execution of a criminal by morally corrupt authorities behaving with terrible cruelty. The resonances with the story of Holy Week are obvious. Perhaps that is why it inspired such fervent proclamation of salvation for the oppressed through rejection of the currently dominant systems of political power which are transparently compromised.

George Floyd solidarity protest in Amsterdam, 1 June 2020. © BAMCorp and used under Creative Commons 2.0

In countries like ours’, the Christian story is woven deeply into every aspect of our mindsets. A few recent decades of triumphalist secularism has not yet undone the work of 1,500 years. Because Western civilisation became the first truly globally dominant one, it is easy for us to presume that the principles Christianity teaches about right and wrong are universal. But it certainly wasn’t part of Græco-Roman culture to exalt the weak or proclaim salvation for the oppressed.

Familiarity can blind us to how strange Christianity is – how wonderfully strange! – how subverting of the way that the powerful, clever, and rich try to invent clever ways of making that seem like the natural order of things is for them to dominate others. Only a very strange religion makes a tortured criminal its symbol of divinity, and puts the instrument of His execution everywhere from the tops of its temples to the jewellery around His followers’ necks.

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No Simple Answers for Christians in Politics

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I’ve enjoyed the series of posts hosted by Gillan on God and Politics UK, where guest bloggers associated with the three main GB political parties, as well as the Greens and UKIP, say they support their particular party from a Christian perspective. Two final articles are from someone saying he finds it hard to vote, and someone who says voting is a Christian duty.

I was a member of both the Liberal Democrats for many years and was heavily involved in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for a long time. I’m not a member of any political party at the moment. Given the events of the past 16 months in Northern Ireland, I doubt I could vote for anyone other than Alliance just now, but I’m living in Wiltshire and I don’t know who to vote for in Great Britain. Not voting at all is certainly an option, although one I’d take only with great reluctance. I might return to how all that fits with being a Christian in a later blog post, but just for now I thought I’d ask a few questions of the philosophy behind the series.

It seems to have been taken as a given by all the posters except Frank Cranmer, who isn’t voting, that it is a good thing that Christians are involved in politics; and that the world would be a better place if more of them were. Indeed, Daniel Stafford argues very directly that Christians should get involved both in the party which most closely reflects their beliefs, and that party’s internal Christian grouping. This view is a common assumption in British Christianity, indeed an unusual case of an assumption that cuts right across Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism and Liberal Christianity. How valid is it?

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