Citizenship and public policy through a theological lens
What does it mean to be a good Christian citizen?
If we’re honest, it’s not a question many of us think that much about. We know whether we lean to the right or the left politically, whether we favor limited government or not, and we may feel strongly about a number of hot-button issues. But have we considered how our theology and our understanding of Scripture ought to shape the ways in which we practice citizenship? Have we thought theologically about citizenship?
Being a good Christian citizen means a lot more than going to the voting booth once every four years and forwarding emails to relatives in the time in between. But an election year is as good a time as any to give some thought to citizenship and what it might mean for us to be good Christian citizens.
Stephen Monsma, author of Healing for a Broken World: Christian Perspectives on Public Policy (Crossway) and former member of the Michigan state House and Senate, believes we need to start with the big story of the Bible. “Thinking about creation, sin and redemption,” he writes, “are crucial to right thinking about today’s public-policy issues.”
Creation. Sin. Redemption. Not where we usually start when thinking about public policy, is it?
Starting in Genesis, we see that when God created the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden, they experienced shalom. “Shalom,” Monsma writes, “is the peace one finds among people who delight in living, working, and achieving together.” That’s God’s design for life on earth. Obviously, that’s not life as we know it. Humanity disregarded God’s intentions and rebelled against him in sin. We see the collateral damage around us every day. But God didn’t give up on us. In Christ, he has brought about redemption -- restoring humanity’s relationship to God, and enabling us to be reconciled to each other and to the world in which we live. Shalom is a real possibility again. It won’t be fully realized until Christ returns and brings about the new heavens and the new earth, but there are bits and pieces of it everywhere, even in the places we’d least suspect.
Even in government.
Drawing on Abraham Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” teaching that there’s an important purpose in God’s design for every sphere of society, including family, church, state, business, art and academia, Monsma shows that despite what some Christians and pundits may lead us to believe, government does have an important role to play in the flourishing -- yes, the shalom -- of society.
In the first section of the book, Monsma lays out the biblical principles that are needed as a foundation before considering specific application in public policy terms. Building on the creation-sin-redemption motif, he argues that “acting as Christ’s agents of redemption in the political realm” we’re to support what is just. The Bible is clear in its condemnations of injustice, whether at the hands of his people, at the hands of unbelieving citizens, and at the hands of the government. Doing justice and working against injustice is a crucial part of what Christian citizens are to do in their own lives as they’re able, and they are right to ask the same of governing authorities. This is directly tied to the principle of solidarity, “the conviction that Christians cannot simply sit idly by when their fellow human beings are suffering and in need.”
While Monsma affirms the positive role the state can and must play, he also clearly understands its limits, and sees “civil society” (social institutions and organizations) playing a crucial part as well. Indeed, as Monsma says, some of the best work the government does to contribute to human flourishing is in partnership with nonprofits and social service providers, including many faith-based ones.
The second half of the book tackles specific issues: church and state; abortion and euthanasia; poverty; creation care; human rights; poverty in Africa; and war and terrorism. While Monsma wisely refrains from making pronouncements about the particular positions all Christians ought to take on each of these complex issues, he does explore them in detail and in light of the creation-sin-redemption story of the Bible, and carefully considering the implications of those central principles of justice and solidarity.
Thinking theologically about citizenship is an essential, ongoing process that will equip us to better participate in politics and civil society -- not just once every four years, but as a regular part of following Christ and living in light of the implications of the good news, “far as the curse is found.”
Thinking theologically about citizenship should also give us a measure of humility, as we recognize the sheer complexity of the issues, and as we realize we're not innocent bystanders in the undoing of shalom. May that humility serve us well as we in turn seek to love our neighbors as Christian citizens.
How might the biblical story of creation, sin and redemption change the way you consider citizenship and public policy? Are the principles of justice and solidarity central to your understanding of citizenship and public policy? If not, what principles are foundational for you, and how do they relate to the Christian story?
[Photo credit: latimes.com - a swearing in ceremony for 18,000 new U.S. citizens in Los Angeles in 2008.]
Who is Rios Montt and why does it matter?
If you follow international news, you may have heard that a man by the name of Efraín Ríos Montt is set to appear in court in Guatemala this week. It's important to understand why.
Montt is a former army general and televangelist who gained control of Guatemala in the early 1980s through a coup d'état. He has long been tied to charges of genocide that took place during his short-lived rule as military dictator in 1982-3. During that time he had the full support of Washington, and in the midst of Cold War fears, Ronald Reagan famously asserted that Montt was “totally dedicated to democracy.”
As a sitting member of Congress until last week, Montt has enjoyed immunity from prosecution -- until now. Importantly, while military leaders in Guatemala have always denied that genocide occurred (a claim that former general and newly inaugurated president Otto Pérez Molina continues to hold), Montt's strategy has simply been to deny that he had anything to do with it -- not to deny that the 626 massacres and 200,000 deaths over the course of 36 years actually happened. Military documents, for their part, seem to show a fairly direct chain of command from top to bottom during that time, so we'll see how that argument holds up.
It's impossible to understand Guatemala today without understanding its past, and Montt was at the center of one of its darkest hours. Here's how I summarized the country's recent history in a magazine piece I did on what's currently happening in the town where I grew up:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer described history as the story of what people do with power. History has not been kind to Guatemala’s indigenous people. The country’s Mayan descendants, though comprising well over half the population, have time and again been dealt a losing hand by those in power.
After Columbus “discovered” the New World, Europeans began settling in the region, usually exercising force as a means of gaining control in matters of politics, economics, and even religion. This wealthy and powerful Old World elite established large-scale coffee and banana plantations, or fincas, on Guatemala’s fertile lowlands. Many of the indigenous people, meanwhile, were pushed to resettle on small tracts of land in the more topographically challenging, and often less fertile, highlands, while some were forcibly conscripted into harvesting the fincas. The Guatemalan Catholic Church, which had by this time become a well-established social and political force, gave its silent assent to the new arrangement.
In the 20th century, with colonialism-as-usual waning, US interests at times assumed a less overt, but no less insidious, role in Guatemala. When, after years of dictatorial tyranny, a delicate democratic process resulted in the election in 1951 of a president committed to land reform, a major US fruit company with much to lose persuaded the Eisenhower administration that recent developments in Guatemala represented a turn towards communism. According to the domino logic of the Cold War, this was seen as an intolerable threat, and the CIA swiftly engineered a coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s head of state.
Within several years Guatemala had spiraled into a civil war over the struggle for land that would last 36 years, waged between left-wing guerrillas and the military forces representing right-wing dictators. Wanting nothing more than peace, the majority of Guatemalans — and especially the rural-dwelling indigenous poor — were caught in the middle.
After the signing of peace accords brought fighting to an end in 1996, reports by the United Nations and the Guatemalan Catholic Church (which had since “converted” to the side of the poor) revealed that the vast majority of “disappearances,” deaths, and human rights abuses during the war occurred at the hands of the federal government and military forces. Among the most notorious offenders of human rights during the civil war was Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general and evangelical televangelist with strong US support, during whose short-lived presidency in 1982-83 the country saw an alarming escalation of rape, torture, and gruesome massacres of indigenous people. The United Nations accused him of genocide.
This was the world into which I was born at a small hospital in Guatemala City in 1982.
When I heard the news this week that Montt would finally be heading to court, I picked up a book by Victor Montejo, who as a school teacher witnessed one of the massacres that took place in rural Guatemala in 1982, and though he was tortured, he managed to escape with his life. The book is called Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, and while it is terrible to read, I believe it testifies to the reality of what life was like for indigenous Guatemalans at that time. I hesitate to recommend it because it is vulgar and graphic, but it's part of the legacy of the war, and one way or another, part of the legacy of Ríos Montt.
For those concerned with justice and peace, I'd encourage you to follow what happens with Montt and others connected to genocide and human rights abuses in Guatemala. God forbid that we'd ignore it, or that we'd lose this chance to learn from the tragedies of the recent past. And please, pray for the perpetrators, pray for the families of victims, and pray that some semblance of peace and justice would prevail in Guatemala at last.
[Photo credit: AP via Sulekha.com]
Why ‘Fast Living’ matters and how it could be better
I’ve written on a couple of occasions about the 58: campaign, back when it launched and then again last week coinciding with the premiere of the film. Here now are some thoughts on Fast Living: How the Church Will End Extreme Poverty, written by Dr. Scott Todd, who works for Compassion International and serves as chairman of the board for the Accord Network.
The theme of the campaign, and of the book, comes from Isaiah 58, a passage of Scripture that has meant a lot to me and to many. In it, the prophet rails against the dangers of empty religion, calling the people of God instead to a “true fast” -- a life of worship characterized by loosing the chains of injustice, letting the oppressed go free, sharing bread with the hungry, and clothing the naked. It’s a radical passage of Scripture. And Fast Living is a radical book; the subtitle alone is audacious.
As I’ve said before, the campaign really excites and encourages me. Made up of ten Christian relief and development organizations, it seeks to mobilize the Church -- North American churches and Christians, in particular -- to get serious about ending extreme poverty in our lifetime. Scott Todd highlights the successes we’ve seen already, and points to the untapped potential for the Church to lead the way going forward. I work for a Christian relief and development organization (though it’s not a member of the campaign), and I’m passionate about mobilizing churches and Christians first of all to care about this stuff, but second, and more importantly, to actually get to work as instruments of shalom in our world. And because of those shared passions, I’m so grateful for the energy this campaign is generating and for the many lives that will be saved and transformed because of it.
But... I do have a three (relatively minor?) qualms with the book.
First, its reading of Isaiah 58 under-emphasizes the core of Isaiah’s main plea. Yes, the prophet Isaiah calls the people of God out of their lives of affluent materialism and overly private piety, and into merciful, just, sacrificial lives, and yes, the application for us today is clear. But this transformation is not simply a matter of the will, or a matter of getting excited about being part of something big and world-changing. It’s a matter of sin and repentance and new life. After repenting of our selfishness, our pride and our greed, and then, having experienced the lavish grace of God, we are freed to go and love others as Christ has loved us. I wish that the book would have emphasized this need for repentance and the promise of new life at least as much as it sought to inspire. People who have experienced God’s grace are in a unique position to love their neighbors, because they know that no one is below them, unworthy of love. Inspiration and guilt, meanwhile, only go so far -- especially in a matter like fighting extreme poverty. As Christians, I don’t know what will sustain us in this work if it’s not the grateful recognition that we’re undeserving recipients of God’s love and that we’re invited in turn to share that love with others.
Second, its suggested remedy for the complex problem of extreme poverty strikes me as a bit simplistic. “Simple generosity can, and probably will, end extreme global poverty if we channel it effectively,” Scott Todd writes. Now, that’s a very big if. But even so, I’m not convinced that simple generosity has what it takes. Simple generosity is obviously what relief and development organizations need from us to do their very important work. But ending extreme poverty will require not just the social sector, but bold leadership from government and business as well. He touches on this in a later section of the book, emphasizing that all three sectors have a role to play in the fight against poverty. It’s understandable, given his audience and his own work, that his focus is on the social sector -- and especially on the Church and parachurch organizations within that sector -- but simple generosity can’t account for businesses that create jobs that help give the poor dignity and lift them out of cycles of poverty, and simple generosity can’t account for laws and policies that are just and that defend the rights of the marginalized.
Third, and finally, the book’s positing of the Church as a victim of “the media” seems to miss the mark. Todd is right that Christians are often portrayed in the mainstream media as “shallow, anti-intellectual, judgmental, disengaged, and uncool hypocrites.” He wonders why the media focus more on our scandals than on our humble service to the world’s poor. I’m just not convinced that this is because of some sinister conspiracy by “The Lords of Media” who are out to get us. Rather, I’d point to the fact that the mainstream media are big businesses, and they are concerned, first and foremost, with what sort of reporting and programming is most lucrative. Media coverage, in other words, is based on supply and demand, and as they say, "if it bleeds, it leads." There are reporters who care about telling good stories and doing good journalism both within the mainstream and at the fringes, but the media system is driven mostly by a bottom line. This is why the media focus more on political sex scandals than they do on the many politicians who lead quiet, faithful lives with their families. It is why we hear more about Muslims being terrorists than about the vast majority who simply want peace. It’s why we hear about murder and rape in our cities rather than about those who walk old ladies across the street or volunteer at soup kitchens. If consumers of media rewarded newspapers and TV outlets for focusing on the good things that are happening in the world, we’d automatically see a lot more of it. Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but it seems to me that playing the victim is a dangerous posture. It becomes too easy to then disregard the many ways in which Christians all too often do reinforce the stereotypes others hold about us. Plus, it disregards the matchlessly influential role the media can play in getting the word out about urgent needs in times of emergency or otherwise. Christians aren’t always portrayed well in the media, it's true; but if we want to change that, I'm not sure that playing the victim will help.
Again, the first and the last thing I have to say about the 58: campaign, film and book is that I find them exciting, encouraging and worthwhile, and I know that many feel the same way. I offer these thoughts, I hope, merely as three ways to make 58: even better.
Have you read the book or watched the film? What are your thoughts? What did you appreciate the most about them? What would you change?
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