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.
