I overheard a bizarre conversation awhile back in which it was seriously debated whether Sen. Harry Reid and President Barack Obama were antichrists. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed religion and politics mixed in such strange ways, and it thus led me to reflect on the proper relationship between the two.
Religious knowledge is largely subjective. Our inner convictions are built upon personal experiences; ones that aren’t publically observable. It doesn’t make them untrue or unimportant, of course. Instead, they’re akin to love, which is also subjective. (You can’t study it empirically — What color is love? How much does it weigh? Can it fit in a bread box?) Most of us, however, would give the world for it.
Both religion and politics concern our families, communities and most important values. And so it’s not difficult to see how our subjective understandings concerning religion could wash over into our politics, especially if we were raised in a political family.
When politics is approached as a form of subjective knowledge, however, it can become irrational and dogmatic. Then, anything that I feel strongly about gets the sanction of the Spirit simply because it is charged with emotion (including my prejudices — the more longstanding and entrenched the more certain) and I just know that I am right, facts be darned.
What’s more, we tend to approach the precepts of our faith as a totality (it’s all from God), so we don’t tend to negotiate parts of it away. It’s also not easily separated from those who gave it to us: the integrity of prophets, apostles and church fathers. Yet in politics, we need to concede some points while holding on to others, and we recognize some unsavory characters in our camps that don’t thereby undermine our policies.
The facile transferring of religious ways of knowing to the realm of politics thus leads to disaster. (I mean, we don’t have a “testimony” of politics.) It exacerbates the partisan gulf that divides us. Instead of searching for the best ideas wherever they may be found, we defend our team, which we take to be on the side of God, and are suspect of the other. Moreover, we may see character flaws as signs of the devil; former President Bill Clinton’s tryst with Monica Lewinski proving that that Democrats were on the side of evil all along. How could God be with him?
More perverse still is the superficial knitting of contemporary figures into religious narratives (antichrists of the end times). Entrenched secular views are often necessarily upended, for example. Yet we may be blind to needed change and cling to outmoded ideas if we have intertwined our faith with such secular constructs, including political ones.
The resistance to Galileo’s findings, for example, stemmed from just such a tangle. Christians had sewn their tapestry of faith into the cosmic order as understood by the ancient Greeks. It had come to form the backdrop of their understandings in both the secular and sacred domains. The tighter the weave became, the greater the spiritual crisis when threads began to be pulled. The picture became blurry and incoherent, thus the strong reaction. So what for us is ho-hum today, (the heliocentric world view) produced a crisis and a resistance back then.
Of course, a more positive relationship between politics and religion is possible. Religion reinforces our commitment to things like justice and mercy. Yet my conviction that justice and mercy are connected to the divine doesn’t mean that my assessment of the policies that will best realize them has divine sanction. Instead, the religious among us must engage in a two-step dance. Step one may claim something about God — that he demands compassion, for example. Step two, however, is all on me. It concerns human policies designed by fallible people in a fallen world that may or may not realize something like compassion. After all, we see through a glass, darkly. So, I commit myself to the policies that I consider best (obviously). But the “I” must remain firmly in place. They aren’t God’s policies, and those who see things differently aren’t thereby of the devil.
Mary Barker teaches political science in Madrid, Spain, and is currently on leave to conduct research and is teaching at Salt Lake Community College.