The Relationship Between Religion and Politics

I know pufferfish look cute and all.  I’ve seen Finding Nemo.  I’m a big pufferfish fan, I really am.  So imagine my surprise to learn, what they don’t apparently tell you on Finding Nemo, that it turns out they are poisonous to humans.  I mean deadly poisonous.

Now that was alarming enough.  But it gets worse.  My daughter told me that, in spite of this, in some overseas country, they actually eat them anyway.  Apparently it takes a really, really great chef to correctly prepare the fish so that all the poison is cooked out.  If it’s not prepared just so…you die.  This is why a pufferfish chef is one of the highest-paid positions in the world.

Now, call me crazy, but I’m not overly fond of the idea of eating a meal where my very existence depends on my chef’s expertise.   What if my highly-paid chef is slightly distracted?  When this happens at Jaker’s, my Cajun pasta is merely poorly flavored.  When it happens at a pufferfish restaurant, I squirm uncomfortably, foam at the mouth, and die.

Or what if I do something that is unintentionally insensitive to the chef’s culture?  When I used to work at Little Caesar’s Pizza, we had these guys who would hock loogeys into the pizzas of anyone that irritated them.  I thought that was pretty bad (although it turns out that eating a properly-cooked loogey will not kill you, or even cause mild irritation…who knew?).  But imagine if my chef says “I do not like the look of that guy in table 4b. Seriously, a mullet?  In Japan?  This guy’s pufferfish is going to get just slightly undercooked tonight.  Maybe he dies and maybe he just writhes in pain for a few hours singing Achy-Breaky Heart over and over, but either way, he’ll learn not to bring his attitude and his mullet to this part of the world, buster.”

I bring this up at this moment because I’m about to try and bring out the metaphorical pufferfish blogging dinner – I’m about to try and write about politics and religion at the same time.  If the ingredients aren’t just right…well, this could turn bad really quickly…for all of us.

So keep that fair warning in mind, dear readers.  I’m not sure if I’m the chef or the diner or both in my unwieldly analogy, but you should yourself digest cautiously the next three posts.

In forthcoming posts, I have written separate articles designed to irritate Republicans and Democrats. I don’t mean that metaphorically or figuratively: That’s actually what the articles are called (“An Article to Irritate Republicans” is the next post; then after that is “An Article to Irritate Democrats”).  Today, I only want to make a couple of hopefully-less-irritating-stage-setting points about the larger relationship between Christianity and politics.

(1) First, and least importantly, is this: When considering the relationship between religion and politics, religion mostly provides the larger principles, the aims, that society should grasp for.  It does not necessarily provide the formula for how best to get there.  For example, it tells us that any decent society should involve a lot of “loving one’s neighbor” – but it doesn’t tell us what sort of laws, exactly, might encourage that the best.  It thus leaves a lot of wiggle room for how to accomplish those general principles.

In commenting on the relationship between religion and society, C. S. Lewis once said:

“Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed program for applying ‘do as you would be done by’ to a particular society at a particular moment.  It could not have.  It is meant for all men at all times and the particular program which suited one place of time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works.  When it tells you to feed the hungry, it does not give you lessons on cookery.  When it tells you to read the Scriptures, it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar.  It was never intended to supersede or replace the ordinary human arts and sciences: It is rather a director that will set them all to their right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life.”

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Lewis’ quote also highlights that there are two stupid errors we can make in talking about how politics and religion fit together.  One of those errors is to assume they should be the same thing, that religion necessarily dictates politics.  Obviously the gap between, say, Christianity and government is too big for that.

However, it is equally stupid to say that religion has no implications for politics.  Obviously it does.  But the implications are just that – implications.  Does religion provide energy and life to political agendas?  Yes.  Drive? Sure.  Principles?  Absolutely.  But absolute belief in a particular political program? No.  In reality, Christianity itself isn’t overtly political, it doesn’t directly offer many political imperatives, it rarely discusses politics directly at all.  And yet, it offers principles which do suggest some political implications, and offers a motivation for carrying out those implications.  It gives us the things we should aim at, and animates and inspires us to achieve those aims.

[Editor’s note: It is not unique in those aims.  Atheists and Christians and Muslims and Hindus largely agree about basic human morality, about the principles.  But as I’m uniquely considering the relationship between Christianity and Politics here, I’m of course focusing on implications directly drawn from Christian teaching].

Over the next two posts, I’m going to explore briefly some of those political implications, based solely on my own study of the Bible.

(2) But the main political implication I’d like to state up front, and that is this: Who you vote for is less important than how you treat your neighbor.  How you treat your neighbor requires sacrifice, love, hope, relationship.  Who you vote for requires very little sacrifice at all, essentially nothing but a piece of paper.  Not all political acts are like that – some of them do require sacrifice and duty and the rest, and I am aware of that and completely respect that – but Jesus clearly did not come to found a political movement.  He came to save souls and change lives.  So it is important that everything I say in the next two blog posts is taken with that in mind.  Because, dear reader, did I mention that those next two posts are intentionally irritating?

Again, C.S. Lewis sums up this idea nicely (not the idea that I’m irritating, of course; Lewis was very prescient but not that prescient – I mean the idea that politics is somewhat overrated):

“You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about digestion: the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”

With all those caveats, hang on!  This could get ugly; undercooked-pufferfish ugly.