On Politics, part 2

To be quite honest, the previous blog about abortion is a conversation I don’t even really care to have. I’ve heard about abortion from the right, left and everything middle and extreme all my life. From friends who got arrested for protesting, to West Wing episodes that centered around “a woman’s right to choose.” All in all, I wrote it as a zip cord into a larger conversation about the way of Christianity, and the place/role of government.
As a quick primer in the discussion I’ve been having in my head/with my friends for a long while now, there are at least two competing views on ethics. The first rests quite squarely in the modernistic (I’m using that as a semi-technical term – see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity) view of pragmatism. Here, we find that the most honest way of governance is that which, in utilitarian terms, brings the most good to the most people most of the time. Contra this, there are “virtue” ethicists who, in the Christian world, wish to “story” the people of faith so as to live in a way that demonstrates their real, social, tangible “being” as people of the cross – this as a practice of faithfulness, without structured concern for the results. For instance: we love our enemies because this is a faithful practice of following Jesus; if that takes us to the point of death, that is vow we’ve taken at baptism. Of course, there are times when, by following “the grain of the universe” we expect the faithful action to result in God’s redemptive work, so that violence always breeds violence, and fails to redeem a hurting world, but enemy love can, and will redeem a broken world as our “better angels” have shown us time and time again: from Jesus to Ghandi, Corrie Ten Boom, to Dr. King.
The problem then follows, how does one choose, first simply to exercise the “right” to vote, and secondly, to navigate the muddied waters of political positioning to find a candidate for whom they can vote.
My current thought on the subject is that the answer lies somewhere within how one defines the “role” of government. Being raised, as I said last time, as a good Evangelical boy, brought up to think that Reagan was the best president (perhaps ever), the role of government was to stay small, and stay out of our business. While this is a view shared by millions, the problem is very, very simple. We need government. There has yet to be a society in which government did not exist. And, if we think that the Regan years (for example) were years where the government did a good job of “staying small and staying out,” we would do well to consider what that meant to fruit farmers, parents, and priests in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, not to mention the millions of poor on the streets of our own nation at the time. From this “preface” you might’ve guessed already, that I have a slightly different view of the “role” of government. Here it is.
Government exists, not to save the world or bring about the Kingdom of God. Quite contrarily, “the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdoms of our God, and of his Christ…” As Christians our allegiance and hope is squarely, only, and always in God. Our story is caught up in God’s story, and our lives have meaning only as God gives meaning to history. Thus all kingdoms, all democracies, all thrones, powers, and competing stories, are idolatrous, and the promise at baptism, and the hope at the communion table, is simply, and robustly, a hope that all governments everywhere will be undone, and that God “will be all in all.” However, we live in the actual “stuff of earth,” and the government(s) we have should do as much good as they can while doing as little harm as they can. They exist to support transit, commerce (without harm), defense (from our own injustices and those of the “other”), and, in short, a common shared space in which life can continue.
Thus we vote, not as virtue people, but as people convinced that killing brown people for oil, refusing to talk to our enemies, stockpiling weapons that will take out the entire Asian continent, and ignoring our friends and family in poverty and on the street is cutting against the grain of the universe, endangering the world, and simply doesn’t do the simple utilitarian work of government well. As I see it, those who wish, perhaps quite rightly, to be faithful to their “virtue ethics” have no choice but to refrain from voting as an “eschatological” protest to the powers that be: powers that compete for allegiance, and that are a direct challenge to the Lordship of Christ. Those who can see their way clear to view the role of government as one that they can help shape for the neglected, to be a voice for the voiceless, to inspire and lead the better parts of our common humanity, are thus forced to reckon with the things that are best for our continued life together as deeply interwoven people. Foreign policy should be the number one issue that concerns us all. It’s not safe for the world for us to be imperialists. It’s not good for the continuing story of history and humanity for those who consume four times the amount as the rest of the world put together to be always strong and never humble. History’s mistakes, from Persia to Greece, from Rome to the British Empire, from the Spanish conquests to fascist Germany teach us that when our self-interests blind us to the hurt of those we’ve oppressed in the name of low cost, and “small” government, we’re only steps away from evils for which God will one day call us to account in the most dire of ways.
Our national myths of innocence mock us in the faces of Native Americans, Iraqis, interned Japanese, African slaves, and the homeless little girl around the corner. Our selfishness plays itself out in the desire to have one or two percent less taxes while thousands of children die without health care each year from preventable and treatable illnesses. Our outdated fear of distilled “Marxism” drives us to be “strong” in the face of our enemies, and weak in the face of our inner demons. To put it straight, both our virtue ethics and our enlightenment based utilitarianism demand that we care for the weak, the poor, the impoverished, the hurting, and the voiceless. This is why I will vote this year. I won’t look for a government to save the world. I have a God who has taken time to do that in a dying poor, subjugated, impoverished prophet from Nazareth 2000 years ago. I will look for a government that will make it more, instead of less, possible to continue our shared space as humans, appealing to “our better angels,” instead of our worst fears; calling us to care not just for our “common defense,” but for our common humanity.