Can Jesus Help Us Sort Out Politics in America?

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

The too long, didn’t read version of this post is: Maybe.

There is no simple equivalent in America to the political scene at the time of Jesus. We have to make interpretive decisions, and the track record of the American church in politics is… well… really BAD.

Compared to the time of Jesus, we don’t (yet) have an absolute tyrant of a ruler who is worshipped as a god or who is actively exploiting our country as part of a colonial military occupation (although the plight of the American south under white supremacy’s authoritarian violence shouldn’t be overlooked).

In a broad sense, our political situation today is very different from the time of Jesus.

Political opposition to Rome at the time of Jesus was easily lumped together with revolution. Violent forms of execution, like crucifixion, took care of the political opposition.

The Roman occupation government aimed to enrich the Roman Empire and its fake god-king. Government wasn’t by the people, for the people. There were no boot-strapping Jewish shepherd boys who could rise through the Roman political ranks and one day get elected to political office to make life better for the poor farmers and fishermen.

We can try really hard to determine some kind of equivalence between the sayings of Jesus and the politics of our times, but there isn’t a simple one-to-one correspondence between the challenges of his time and our own. Even if we tried, we’d likely never stop debating it.

What were politics like for the Jewish people?

At the time of Jesus, the only options available for the average person were compromise with the pagan Roman occupying army, as a tax collector for instance, or disengagement, either by keeping your head down or relocating to the wilderness like the Essenes.

The Pharisees and Sadducees tried to chart a course of engagement and faithfulness that often led them to compromise of one sort or another.

Of course you could always try out disengagement from Rome and pair that with revolution, but that never ended well.

There wasn’t a fruitful way to have a positive influence in politics without deep compromise to a government that believed its ruler was a deity and that its armies could plunder the world for its glory. We shouldn’t be shocked that we can’t find a simple correlation to modern democracy at the time of Jesus!

What great “What if?” question of Jesus and politics

We are left asking how Jesus may have interacted if he lived in a time of representative democracy. Would he have used the tools of politics to advance his Kingdom agenda? Would he have abstained from all worldly tools altogether?

Perhaps we can at least create some common ground among fellow Christians before we get into the more challenging issues. At least, what should be common ground…

For instance, we should be able to confidently assert that God favors no one nation over another. America is not the new Israel. We may aspire to be “a” city on a hill for democracy (even if “aspire” is doing some heavy lifting), but we are not THE city on a hill.

We should also be able to assert that God does not favor one political party or movement over another. The correction to the corruption of merging Christianity with one political party isn’t to merge Christianity with an opposing political party.

That should be the easy part of discussing Christianity and politics. (NARRATOR: It’s not easy actually.)

Political parties advocate for specific policies and approaches to solving real or perceived problems. I’d say it should be hard for us to imagine Jesus adopting a partisan stance or throwing in his full support of one political party or another. Yet, I also can’t imagine Jesus being completely disengaged from the political process if his vote could count toward meaningful change that would end suffering or advance peace.

This is where we need to be careful with our bias and limitations. It’s likely that we all want Jesus to arrive at the same assessments of our times as our own.

It’s very hard to open ourselves up to the Jesus revealed in the Gospels and to let that Jesus challenge us in our present time.

Which political positions align with the values of Jesus?

We could begin by asking what Jesus cared about. Put simply, he spent a lot of time feeding and healing people while teaching about the coming Kingdom of God. Since we should all, hopefully, want the government to avoid preaching for us, let’s focus on the healing and feeding part of Jesus’ ministry.

These miracles weren’t the equivalent of a parade handing out snacks and candy for fun. Jesus was feeding people who were likely very hungry and food insecure to one degree or another.

If Jesus didn’t heal people, they were stuck with suffering. Can we imagine Jesus wanting it to be harder for someone to see a doctor, to deny life-saving medical care to a child, or to see a mother needlessly die because an insurer ruled she has a pre-existing condition?

Healthcare should be part of the pro-life discussion today, but we are left to fill in the considerable gaps from the time of Jesus. There was no equivalent to a modern healthcare system at the time of Jesus. Can you imagine the Romans investing in a network of hospitals serving the people they had conquered?

If anything, we can find a few more clues in the Old Testament where the rulers of Israel and Judah met with judgment from God because they hoarded wealth, underpaid their workers, and exploited the poor. Rather than using the resources of government for the benefit of their people, they used it for themselves.

Of course, it remains extremely challenging to apply the ideas of an ancient theocracy to a modern democracy, but some patterns emerge. When God could have instructed the kings of Israel and Judah to rule as they pleased, to keep taxes as low as possible, and to let private charities help the poor, we find quite the opposite. A righteous ruler is just, attentive to the needs of the people, and takes action to ensure equity and prosperity.

By the same token, we have to do some interpretative work to arrive at a Christian belief in creation care—not hard work, mind. This shouldn’t be a difficult position for Christians to adopt by connecting a few dots.

Clean drinking water, clean air to breathe, and preventing warming trends that cause severe weather events should be VERY easy positions for anyone to support, regardless of their faith. Political leaders and parties can be challenged to work toward caring for the environment without creating a conflict between “affordable energy” and mitigating climate change or keeping water clean.

We can’t make a one-to-one correspondence with the politics of Jesus and our own times, but we can at least see why this is such a challenging task. At the very least, there is an Old Testament precedent for using government to benefit the people, especially those who have the least, and to ensure justice.

When Jesus didn’t have viable political tools as his disposal, he at least took concrete steps to care for the material needs of others through healing and feeding them. If we have the means to ensure others are healthy and well-fed through the tool of a government created for the people and by the people, I can’t imagine passing up such an opportunity.

We shouldn’t need specific commands to discern in good faith what matters to God. We don’t need God to command us, “Thou shalt make sure everyone has clean drinking water.” If one political party is negligent when it comes to pollution or installing new water pipes, aren’t they in conflict with the most basic part of caring for our neighbors?

Do we have to talk about abortion politics? Uh… Yeah.

Arguments over a consistent pro-life ethic have become a stalemate over the years. I don’t know any Democrats who want “more” abortions to happen. They want women to be free from the government regulating their own medical decisions, and late term abortions are incredibly rare and often only to save the life of the mother.

I am sympathetic with Republicans who oppose abortion because I was once in their shoes. Arguments over when life begins ventures into the realm of science where preachers and theologians are out of their depth. If life begins at conception and 10%-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (80% happen within the first 10 weeks), then God has created conditions where a lot of babies are being killed.

This all fails to bring up the real fact that abortions have historically gone UP under Republican presidents and DOWN under Democrats regardless of the laws that are on the books. Is abortion politics about ACTUALLY reducing abortions or just getting certain laws passed.

With the complexity of abortion politics aside, “pro-life” encompasses more issues than abortion, and so it is absurd to call Democrats “pro-death” or baby killers. Neither party is flawless when it comes to pro-life issues. I can see where both sides come from, but I tend to be more critical of the Republican positions that I know so well from within.

Which political actions are antithetical to Jesus?

Here we have a much easier time coming up with standards that can help us judge political causes today. Bearing false witness is clearly prohibited, Satan is called the “father of lies,” so anyone who lies repeatedly, say someone who is fact-checked to have lied thousands of times on the record, does not align with the way of Jesus.

Of course “truth-telling” can be a hotly debated topic when propaganda and half-truths are fact checked. Yet, we can avoid the “all politicians lie” trope by examining who is relying on a false version of reality vs. who has occasionally bent the truth in a speech.

Bending the truth should not be tolerated, but it’s not remotely comparable to a politician who refuses to be fact-checked, lest his torrent of lies is exposed for what it is.

We could argue that honesty and character flaws matter more than anything else because it doesn’t matter what a candidate says if he/she is exposed as self-serving and dishonest. A candidate could say he’s pro-life and favors particular religious groups as long as that serves his political fortunes.

Will that person actually follow through? Could that person shift positions if there is a future advantage? He already tried to back away from the Pro-Life movement, in fact.

Vote for such a man at your own risk.

Ed Cyzewski's avatar

Author of Flee, Be Silent, Pray, Coffeehouse Theology, and other books.

Ed Cyzewski

Is There a Lot of Pain Behind Strong Political and Religious Opinions?

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

There’s a deep suspicion of the Federal government in my region of Kentucky, and as someone who came from the northeast, I didn’t understand it at first. Once I learned about the history of the region, some of that suspicion started to make sense.

When the Federal government formed the Tennessee Valley Authority in order to create jobs and affordable electricity in our area, the dammed up Cumberland River resulted in flooding that required the removal of several towns in the region now known as the Land Between the Lakes.

In addition, the Land Between the Lakes region was designated a recreation area, and the few remaining homes were purchased by the government so that residents could resettle.

Although there were some excellent benefits from this project, including extremely cheap electricity in a region that has struggled economically, homeowners in the Land Between the Lakes region alleged that the government undervalued their homes and then paid them less than the home’s value. In addition, several long time communities were unwilling to move from land that had been in their families for generations.

Such incidents hardly account for ALL of the suspicion of the Federal government in our area, but they surely don’t help. From what I can tell, the good of providing jobs and electricity was undermined by some extremely troubling exploitation of people who already didn’t have a lot of resources.

When I hear someone’s strong views about government overreach around here, I’m mindful that there’s some history that I haven’t lived through that could be influencing such perspectives.

I’d also qualify that by saying there’s a history in our region (and to the south) of resenting the government for liberating slaves and assuring the rights of black citizens. Such resentment should be understood, but it’s certainly not a belief that should be honored or accommodated.

Looking a bit more broadly, it’s fair to say that when someone is deeply committed to religious beliefs, political ideology, or a certain school of philosophy, there’s sometimes (if not often) a good bit of pain involved in that person’s story leading up to those strong beliefs.

Looking back at my own history, I am strongly opposed to the politicization of the Christian faith for the ends of any political cause, but those strong beliefs are driven in part by my disillusionment with Christianity being exploited by the religious right in America.

I know I’m hardly unique in that sense. It feels like well over half of the Christians I know in my age range share my disillusionment with politics co-opting the Christian message.

I’ve met plenty of Christians who were disillusioned by organized religion, especially Christian churches with strong pastoral figureheads, and all of them have a story of a leader abusing his (it’s almost always a man) position to the detriment of others.

People end up supporting political leaders, rejecting religious beliefs, swinging from one extreme to another, and engaging in who knows what else because of pain from their past.

Perhaps they can’t draw a straight line right away from their pain to their current convictions, but it sure seems like pain changes us and prompts us to make really big shifts that we’d otherwise resist. At the very least, our pain prompts us to make changes that we feel very strongly about.

I had some extremely negative experiences with Catholic priests who were quite dismissive of me and who were quite authoritarian in their use of power. They more or less said, “I’m the priest who represents the authority of the church, so your beliefs need to fall in line with what I’m saying.”

Such things were said with a smile that belied an assumption that I would surely take their view of things and merely fall in line. They never thought that I’d want to read the Bible and consider ideas outside of their own.

To this day I find the Catholic mass almost suffocating and unbearable. The last place I want to  be is under the authority of a priest, even in the course of leading a mass.

I can read Catholic writers because there’s a different dynamic present with an author and a reader. I can go to an Episcopal Church because our priest doesn’t claim a kind of unlimited and unquestionable religious authority that is linked to a Pope. It’s quite clear in my mind, but I’m sure it doesn’t make sense to everyone.

The common link between myself and those who are suspicious of government, religious leaders, organized religious groups, or politicians pandering to religious groups is a history of pain and disappointment.

It’s easy to judge people based on how they act today. I’ll admit that it would be much, much easier to dismiss someone who doesn’t make any sense to me or who holds views that I find wrong or even harmful.

Yet, such a dismissive spirit falls well short of how I’d want someone to handle my own pain from my past.

I also know I haven’t been as kind and gracious to some Catholics or politically driven Christians because of my own past.

We all want to be understood. We want our pain to be acknowledged and seen for what it is, even if it can make us a bit hard to handle at times.

Maybe if we can talk about our shared pain, we can even more toward a common healing where we can drop our defenses just a little bit so we can see how much we hold in common.

Ed Cyzewski's avatar

Ed Cyzewski

I’m the author of Flee, Be Silent, Pray: Ancient Prayers for Anxious Christians, Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction, and other books. I write about prayer and spiritual restoration at http://www.edcyzewski.com.

Books by Ed Cyzewski

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It’s OK to Call Dangerously Absurd Situations Dangerous and Absurd

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski
One Original Cloistered Genius

In the 1960’s the majority of people in America were preparing themselves for a far-reaching nuclear catastrophe.

Many of the people who prayed to Jesus the Prince of Peace on Sunday were quite alright with the idea of blowing up entire cities of godless Communists.

Even though the Pope had written about the urgency of peace on earth, plenty of Catholics remained disconnected from such thinking.

Monks were even building fall out shelters for themselves while debating finer points of obscure Medieval theology or selling their fancy bread and cheese for a handsome profit.

All of this infuriated Cistercian monk and bestselling author Thomas Merton who plodded away on his typewriter in the isolation of his hermitage in the hills of Kentucky.

As he wrote articles publicly about the madness of his times and the negligence of his church toward people who had been created in God’s image, Merton faced a stinging backlash from the superiors in his monastic order. They believed that a monk should remain silent, weep, and pray.

This only deepened Merton’s frustration, as he watched monks labor for hours each day on profit making ventures rather than “weeping or praying.” In fact, he directly linked the loss of any monastic prophetic function with the neglect of prayer and weeping. He wrote in one letter:

In a word, it is all right for the monk to break his ass putting out packages of cheese and making a pile of money for the old monastery, but as to doing anything that is really fruitful for the Church, that is another matter altogether. What is the contemplative life if one doesn’t listen to God in it?

The Hidden Ground of Love, 79

He dug the knife a bit deeper about all of the “weeping” monks did at his monastery in a journal entry:

I had been hoping to republish a few articles on nuclear war that had been permitted by Dom Gabriel—thinking that it was enough that he had permitted them once. Not so. The new General, Dom Ignace Gillet, dug into the files, held a meeting of Definitors, and declared that there was to be no republishing of these articles. Thus I am still not permitted to say what Pope John said in Pacem in Terris. Reason: “That is not the job of a monk, it is for the Bishops.” Certainly it has a basis in monastic tradition. “The job of the monk is to weep, not to teach.” But with our cheese business and all the other “weeping” functions we have undertaken, it seems strange that a monk should be forbidden to stand up for the truth, particularly when the truth (in this case) is disastrously neglected.

The Intimate Merton, 215

Although Merton tried to overcome the barriers to his publications about peacemaking and justice at a moment of great peril for humanity, his superiors won in the short term. Blocked from public publishing, he regularly found solace in his journal entries and in letters to friends that pointedly and humorously described the absurd and dangerous state of the world and his monastic order’s inadequate response.

There was no other way to describe his moment in time than a failure of Christians, and monks in particular, to grasp the enormous challenges facing the world.

In both journal entries and personal letters, Merton’s humor is sharp and cutting. His sarcasm thick and heavy. He knew that he was only fleshing out what the Pope had already written, but his station as a monk, bound to obey his superiors, meant they had the final say about which of his works on the dangers of nuclear war or the injustice of racism could leave the walls of his abbey.

As an honest man convinced that he was right but also realistic enough to mockingly call himself the “one original cloistered genius,” Thomas Merton felt a burden of helpless despair to use his notoriety for the good of humanity. It appears nearly his entire order had no concern about the well-being of the many people who could suffer from nuclear war.

Having experienced a profound vision of God’s love for humanity during a trip to Louisville, Merton longed to write with clarity and sanity about the dangers of his moment in history.

Thankfully, many of those works, even the ones that were originally blocked, have finally been published. Yet, I take particular comfort in the unflinching realism of Merton’s letters and journal entries detailing his conflict and frustration over his blocked attempts to meet the madness of his times with a bit of God-inspired sanity.

It often feels like the threats to humanity have only multiplied since the time of Merton.

Today we are awash in misinformation, political partisanship driven by fabricated culture wars, vaccine misinformation during a pandemic, climate change’s threats to our planet’s viability, and attacks on voting access. It can be maddening to see the state of our world.

There are real dangers, and these dangers are only multiplied due to bad faith political actors. Even worse, too many people flat out deny these dangers, and plenty of Christians either ally themselves with those denying

We are living in a moment of mass gaslighting and an avalanche of misinformation that is threatening to tear our society apart, to marginalize minorities, and to warm our planet beyond a dangerous point of no return.

How can we stay sane during a moment that is so filled with absurdity and danger? Should we panic? Should we cry? Should we scream? Should we disconnect from it all to care for ourselves?

Thomas Merton stared down many dangerous and absurd threats in his own time, and he used a blunt realism matched with a sharp wit to endure. He sought to do what he could, he spelled out the absurdity he encountered, and he kept praying and trying to make a difference for the common good of God’s beloved creation.

It’s impossible to say what kind of impact had been achieved by Merton’s letters or limited articles that reached the public. However, we do know that peace activists and social justice leaders regularly sought his insight and support. The few times peace activists met Merton’s disapproval, they immediately sought to repair the relationship.

In my new eBook short The One Original Cloistered Genius: Enduring Adversity and Absurdity through the Savage Humor of Thomas Merton, which is also available as a paperback, I have collected many of Thomas Merton’s humorous journal entries. These brief passaged show how deeply he loved his monastic community and also how badly it let him down when it could have done so much more for the common good at a moment of international crisis.

There isn’t a simple application in a collection like this. If anything, Merton’s sarcastic and humorous letters offer us solidarity and encouragement to face the absurdity and danger of our times.

It’s helpful to know that a man recognized as a “spiritual master” in his own time mocked his own pride and leveled devastating criticisms at his superiors and monastic orders when so much was on the line.

In retrospect, it’s quite clear that Merton was right. Blasting untold numbers of densely populated cities to dust with nuclear weapons was a really bad idea and still remains a really bad idea.

I can only hope that more people will realize that issues like stopping climate change or having wider access to voting are good for humanity, good for the poor, and good for the people who are marginalized the most.

Perhaps reading Merton’s struggles in a previous generation will give us the courage and hope to persevere as we face the absurd dangers of our time. And the starting point for facing such a moment is to simply acknowledge that it’s absolutely absurd that we have even reached this moment of crisis in the first place.

On sale now: The One Original Cloistered Genius: Enduring Adversity and Absurdity through the Savage Humor of Thomas Merton

Order the eBook for $1.99 or the paperback for $7.99.