Faithful Politics: Ten approaches to Christian Citizenship and why it matters

Book Review (Miranda Zapor Cruz)

"What is the relationship of faith, church, and politics? What ought it be?"

That's the fundamental question that this book addresses, and it's a real and pressing question at any time, but perhaps its force feels especially weighty at the present moment.

Cruz does an incredibly admirable job in this book in doing four things:

1. Providing an initial framework of distinguishing (the heavenly) Kingdom and Country, and setting up a framework in which to talk about different positions, as well as some initial biblical work to provide a theological grounding.

2. The core of the book surveys ten different approaches to the relationship of kingdom and country, and that metaphor and frame is a useful heuristic. For each major approach, Cruz looks at tangible historical (and present) examples, exploring their history, advocates, practices, and theology. She provides a strong enough case for each that you can feel why you might adopt one or another. She also provides a critique of each's positions in terms of her overall framework.

But before we get to those ten approaches, Cruz does some good work on a framework to talk about this stuff. She begins by contrasting the Kingdom of God with the United States. By not just stating this, but working through how and why and in what aspects kingdom and country differ, Cruz develops a clear mode of talking about the relationship between kingdom and country. That informs chapter two which speaks about 'dual citizenship' - our different (and sometimes conflicting) relationships to Kingdom and to Country. This leads into her third chapter, 'salty citizenship'; here Cruz makes a valuable distinction between party affiliation and unreflective total alignment with a partisan position. That is, what is it to have a critical engagement with a political party, and what is it to become so aligned with a party that its positions, all its positions, are our positions just because they are "ours", i.e. the party's.

The ten approaches that Cruz examines are:

'Separatist'

1. Anabaptist separatism as radical isolation

2. Anabaptism separatism as prophetic witness

3. Evangelical "strategic withdrawal"

'Separationist'

4. Historic Baptist Separationism

5. Two Kingdoms Separationism

'Social Gospel approaches'

6. Classic social gospel; civil rights movement; the evangelical left; mainline Protestantism

'Calvinist approaches'

7. Direct Christian Influence

8. Principled Pluralism

Dominionist approaches

9. Including: Reconstructionism, Dominionism, NAR

Christian Nationalism

10. Exactly as described.

Cruz considers Dominionism and Christian Nationalism to be "unfaithful to Jesus and harmful to the church's mission and witness"; Dominionism's fatal flaw is that it is an attempt to realize the Kingdom through political power and influence. That if Christians have enough political power, they can make a country Christian. That is not just strategically wrong, it's theologically wrong down to the bone. Christian Nationalism is "a political ideology first and foremost... a political approach to Christianity" which "subordinates the Kingdom to country". Cruz doesn't hesitate to label this an unfaithful option: "One cannot be a faithful citizen of the Kingdom fo God while adhering to Christian nationalist ideology".

All the other options are 'on the table', so far as Cruz is concerned, but for each of them she considers strengths and dangers. That's because you might be convinced of one or another and yet seeing how one can faithfully pursue that course of political engagement (or disengagement) is perhaps more important than 'picking an option'. I'm not going to provide a systemic review of the other eight, but I am going to make some observations and reflections of a few points.

I think you can draw a historical line for US white evangelicalism that plots between 3, 7, and 9/10. That is, "strategic withdrawal" was a political strategy for fundamentalism that saw Christianity as on the margins, but that changed over the course of the 20th century. I think, too, that Cruz is correct when she describes DCI as a kind of "politically conservative corollary to the social gospel. Both approaches want American law to reinforce Christian values, but they grow from different theological roots and emphasize different Christian values, leading to divergent political ideologies.”¹ But DCI seems to have veered (caromed? crashed?) into much more militant political ideologies of Dominionism and CN in the last 15 years, and certainly this present moment.

The historical and political and ecclesial context in Australia is obviously different, but I feel like I grew up in churches where the older generation generally held to some version of DCI. They were social and political conservatives, and saw the best alignment of conservative Christian values in groups like the Christian Democratic Party. That party (no longer existent) seemed to veer further right over the course of its life, as has the traditional right. That is, I think the whole conservative side of politics has been right-shifting. The younger generation(s), at least in churches I have been, tend to be more politically diverse, but I have been in two churches where their politics definitely sat on the left, and more Greens than Labor. This aligns much more with the evangelical left. I have a lot of sympathy for the evangelical left, and people like the late Ronald Sider. But I also have a lot of criticism: when Cruz name-checks influential voices in the EL, there are quite a few I would vehemently disagree with theologically.

I have always had a lot of sympathy for Anabaptist separatism, especially of the 'prophetic witness' kind as associated with Hauerwas and others; but I also think there's a lot of problems with that kind of radical separation, and with several features of Anabaptism and both its reading of scripture and its practices. But I'm always glad they exist, they almost function as a prophetic witness to the rest of the church in that way.

One useful thought experiment (not in the book, in my mind) is what I call the 'mostly Christian village' problem. For many anabaptists, e.g. Mennonites or even more the Amish, church community and society are co-terminous. But what happens if you aren't living in rural Pennsylvania? Or what happens if you live in a village and 60 out of 100 people are believers? Or 100? If 100% of the people are believers, you still need to organise social and civic life. Does 'the church' do that? So that it's your church that runs your fire department and organises street cleaning and garbage collection and sewage? Or do you develop civic, secular structures even though all the people who will fill those roles are also church members? And if so, how do they distinguish they way they relate as office holders, vs as church members. You can see why people end up with Two Kingdoms theology. This is more pressing if you have a 60% majority, because then presumably you ought to have some secular structures, and practice some form of civic pluralism. And yet you still have this question of the interaction of civic and ecclesial structures.

The Black Minister

I have been listening my way through "Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States" at the moment, a great book (though the audio book's narrator doesn't win me over).² And I was struck by the way it spoke about the emergence of 'the Black Minister' in the post-Emancipation era. At that time of great social upheaval, and the establishment of Black churches, the Black minister stood as a distinct leader not just in the church but in the Black community. That was for several reasons: they were most likely to be the most educated; the Black church stood at the centre of most Black communities, not least because of the lack of many other institutional structures for African-Americans; and because of the way faith and civic life necessarily had to do with each other in the Black community. For all those reasons, the Black minister was a social leader not just a church leader, and spoke both to and often for the Black community.

That explains (not in a 'well, this is all the information you need' way) (a) why there has long been a 'social gospel' type tradition in the Black churches (I think Cruz is right to analyse those various types of social gospel views together, but I think the downside of that is (i) it collapses lots of the distinctives, and (ii) suggests that those other views are more directly linked to the historical social gospel movement than they they might be³); (b) why it was Black church leaders more than any other who spear-headed social movements and reform in the United States, especially of course in the Civil Rights era (huge amounts of which gains are now being rolled back under the new regime).

Faith and Politics

One of the ways I think about this whole faith-politics is the following:

• If your faith doesn't influence your politics, you end up with evangelical idolatry.

• If your faith becomes nothing but politics, religion becomes a dressing for ideology.

And you can see the slippery slope of option 2 very clearly. You can and do see lots of movements that begin with social implications of the gospel, and end in politics, either progressive or reactionary. It's why you see some progressive and liberal Christians end up being essentially secular progressive-liberals; and it's why you see conservative Christianity ends up with Christian Nationalism where Jesus is a poster-child for violence and oppression. And so the natural 'reaction' to that is to try to keep our politics and our faith separate. "Oh, we don't want to mix those things up too much". So you go to the opposite extreme in some form or another.

One form of the opposite is 'evangelical idolatry'. And I use this title because just recently I started reading a book of that title by Jeff Mikels. I can't speak to the whole of the book (yet), but in it Mikels reflects on 17 years of ministry as a church planter and how, faced with the events of 2020, he came to regard his ministry as fundamentally a failure. It's worth quoting extensively from the opening chapter:

I didn’t adequately prepare people for the turmoil of 2020. Specifically, I didn’t adequately cultivate an allegiance to Jesus, his life, and his words that surpassed other traditional and cultural allegiances. When push came to shove in 2020, people were more ready to trust the words of Fox News than the words of Jesus, who called us to deny ourselves, love our neighbors sacrificially, be a blessing to others, and oppose performative religious idolatry.

...

conclusion: If, after seventeen years of being under my ministry, their hearts resonated more with Fox News than with Jesus, I had failed to accurately portray Jesus as our example, authority, and only King.⁴

Evangelical idolatry often takes shape because the insistence on separating faith and politics means that teaching and preaching moral formation is truncated to the personal and individual. The gospel becomes only about individual spiritual salvation, and morality is limited to the typical conservative issues: personal responsibility and sexual ethics. I'm not diagnosing that for Mikels, but I am saying this is a common trend. And because of this churchgoers get their social ethics somewhere, anywhere, else. And become resistant and resentful to the church shaping their social ethic. That's not the gospel! That's bring politics into the church!

This, I think, is one of the downsides of Carson's oft-quoted slide into liberalism:

"One generation of Mennonites believed the gospel and held as well that there were certain social, economic, and political entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel, but identified with the entailments. The following generation denied the gospel: the “entailments” became everything."⁵

My claim here is that if you aren't proclaiming the implications of the gospel you are preaching a gospel with carefully curated edges, and in fact you lose the gospel in the first place. A gospel shorn of its social, economic, and political entailments is not the gospel and if you seek to defend the gospel in this way you have already lost it because people will not hear and obey Jesus' words.

You wake up and find that your congregation spent one hour a week being catechised by the Gospel, and all the rest being catechized by other ideologies, and so it's no wonder they end up with a shell of Christianity over a substance of idolatry.

And yet, surely there must be some way forward, that's neither absolute withdrawal, or leading a double life, or selling out our faith for political ideology. That is, to be integrated people whose faith shapes our political lives, and works for the good of others, while maintaining critical distance. I think Cruz's book does valuable groundwork for everyday lay readers and believers to start thinking about these issues, to identify what they think themselves, and what they see in others, and to start discussions going. But I think more work is needed (by me, as well!) to come up with some more solid answers.

1. Miranda Zapor Cruz. Faithful Politics: Ten Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters (IVP 2024. Kindle Locations 2756-2758). Kindle Edition.

2. By Walter R. Strickland II (IVP

3. In saying this, MLK was influenced by Rauschenbusch whom he read; but he was also influenced by other voices, and MLK isn’t the only voice in Black theology.

4. Mikels, Jeff. Evangelical Idolatry: How Pastors Like Me Have Failed the People of God. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

5. This is often misquoted or re-phrased. Carson repeats this in several texts, attributing it Paul Hiebert analysing what had happened in his own Mennonite history. It’s used as an axiom of inevitably for evangelicals to focus on the gospel and usually the gospel only. For an actual source in Carson, see D. Carson The Cross and Christian Ministry, p63 .