Christians and Politics

I think that the Archbishop of Canterbury must have read my blog last week, for within twelve hours of posting it, he was on television news saying that the suggestion that politics could fall into the hands of a neathandral Christian Right was stuff and nonsense. He went on to affirm, smiling benignly upon Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, into whose private garden he seemed to have stumbled, that Christians should become more involved in politics.

I’m certainly not one to gainsay the Archbishop on the latter score. I too believe that Christians should be far more involved in politics, but then of course, I mean my kind of politics. I want to see Christians engaging in Kingdom politics, out in the streets proclaiming that we stand for Kingdom values which are utterly opposed to the values of the advanced capitalist state. Jesus fearlessly spoke out against the religious, political and economic establishments of his day. He condemned the religious authorities as false teachers preventing people from entering his kingdom. He said that those who had attained riches and power in this world have already had their reward and unless they were prepared to divest themselves of these encumbrances they would not be entering the Kingdom. And he strode into the precincts of the Temple, which served as the national bank and state treasury, and drove out those engaging in financial dealings which subvert the religious spirit. In his preaching that in the Kingdom the first shall be last and the last shall be first, he established God’s preferential option for the poor, and in healing people whose diseases and disabilities excluded them from their community, he demonstrated a spirituality and politics of inclusion.

So I’m all for Jesus’s brand of politics, although I suspect that we won’t be hearing much about those politics from the Archbishop or the Cardinal in the run-up to the General Election, which has not yet been announced but which the entire nation thinks is going to be on May 4th. Rather, religious leaders will babble on about topics such as that the Cardinal and Archbishop both want to turn into a political issue – abortion. And lest you gain the impression that I am pro-abortion, let me disabuse you. I am totally pro-life - but I mean life. That is, I believe that if it is morally wrong to ‘take the life’ of an unborn child, it is morally wrong to take the life of child in Iraq, an adolescent in Sudan, an adult on death row in the United States, or an aged person in a South American slum. I have little patience with those pro-lifers who restrict their campaigning to the foetus alone, but would justify the taking of life in a wide range of other circumstances including war, capital punishment and endemic poverty.

As for the Cardinal’s suggestion that Britain would benefit from a more American approach to issue-led politics and the Archbishop’s dismissal of the Christian Right constituting a danger for politics, I believe both are wrong. It is a particular form of evangelical and fundamentalist piety, funded by large private charitable foundations, which underpins President Bush’s aggressive and triumphalist foreign policy. The Christian Right’s theological and biblical allusions can be detected in almost every utterance the President makes. This lobby has now become so powerful that it is trying to change the American Constitution so that it no longer maintains the separation of church and state. It would like to see the school curriculum faith-determined by having Creationism replace evolution as the dominant paradigm for the teaching of science. It is bringing pressure to bear for a constitutional amendment which would make same-sex unions illegal. It would like to see abortion similarly forbidden by law. This all makes for a style of politics which is exclusive rather than inclusive, combative rather than conciliatory, and destructive rather than enhancing of human dignity.

So in my view the Archbishop and the Cardinal would better facilitate a greater degree of Christian involvement in politics in Britain by cautioning against rather than welcoming American-styled religious politics here. By all means provoke a public discussion, not just about abortion but on the ending of human life, but do not let that be to the exclusion of discussing what many of us see as the real crises, the increasing poverty of the world’s poor, the failure to stem the advance of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS amongst the poor, and the bleak future confronting our environment. And let our religious leaders clearly enunciate both a political and a religious agenda that guarantees justice, peace and the inclusion of all.