Yes, it was only a matter of time…but you knew the subject of politics was due to come up at some point. After all, if the two things you never talk about in public are religion and politics, then that’s just an invitation to talk about religion and politics. And so, in chapter 9 of Surprised by Scripture, Wright dives in.
Secularists and Fundamentalists: They’re Playing the Same Enlightenment Game
As with seemingly everything else in his book, Wright starts off by taking us back to the Enlightenment, and the dramatic shift in western society’s worldview that took place at that time. I’ve touched upon that dimension of Wright’s argument in past posts, so I won’t rehash it here. But Wright’s point in this chapter is that, ever since the dawn of deistic/Enlightenment thinking, society has drifted in one of two directions. First, there is the militant-atheist/secularistic worldview of the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—Wright points out that these “new atheists” aren’t really “new” at all. They’re just spouting the exact same rhetoric of earlier thinkers like Voltaire and Nietzsche, with a hatred of Christianity, the GOP, and Fox News. Second, especially in America, there are the ultra-fundamentalist Christians who have essentially equated Christianity with the politics of the Republican party.
As opposite at these two sides may seem, Wright correctly points out that both are simply opposing wings of a thoroughly discredited Enlightenment worldview. Let me provide an illustration to help make sense of that. The secularism of Richard Dawkins and the fundamentalism of Ken Ham are like the archrivals of the Yankees and Red Sox, battling it out on the baseball field—that baseball field is the Enlightenment worldview. To extend the illustration (as a nod to my Canadian friends), we’ll say the Christian worldview is the hockey arena. Fundamentalists come to the baseball field with their hockey sticks and pucks and proceed to try to play baseball for Jesus, not realizing that that’s not the game Jesus has called them to play. Consequently, in the eyes of the world, fundamentalists tend to look stupid…and they do, because they’re essentially trying to “defend Christianity” yet are playing within the rules and worldview of the secularist.
Wright says that both secularism and fundamentalism are deeply flawed; both are playing on the wrong field. The modern political parties of both the Democrats and the Republicans are working off of Enlightenment assumptions and an Enlightenment worldview—therefore, since it is so obvious that everyone is disgusted with both parties, maybe it’s time we should ask “Why?” Wright’s answer is that that Enlightenment worldview is totally inadequate to ever adequately address the pressing issues of our day, be it global debt, the ecological crisis, growing poverty, race relations, gender, gay marriage, the Middle East—all of it. Those issues can’t be resolved by either party, because both party’s politics are too small.
As a side note, I have to say as a Christian that it is high time that Evangelical Christians realize that the answer to our country’s challenges do not lie in the GOP party platform. I’m certainly not saying it can be found with the Democrats, don’t misunderstand me. But, along with Wright, I’m saying we should be living out the politics of the Kingdom of God, not those of either political party.
Kingdom of God Politics
So what does that mean? Wright says in order to understand what that means, you have to look to the four Gospels. Unfortunately, Evangelical Christianity has tended to take its cue more from Paul and his epistles than the four Gospels. Consequently, it has tended to interpret the Gospel through the lens of Paul, rather than interpret Paul through the lens of the Gospels.
Okay, what does that mean? Basically, that means we tend to think the Gospel is all about how you get saved, how to avoid hell, what you need to do in order to “go to heaven when you die.” And we have a slew of nice systematic terms and formulas to explain it. But Paul’s writing isn’t about spelling out some sort of “salvation recipe” to follow. His epistles, rather, show a “real time” glimpse of how Paul was encouraging the early Church to live out Jesus’ Kingdom of God politics. And that we get from the Gospels.
What does the rule of God look like as it breaks in to this this world? The Gospels show us. As Wright puts it, “the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven is not to impose an alien and dehumanizing tyranny but rather to confront alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God—the God recognized in Jesus—who is radically different from them all, and whose justice aims to rescue and restore genuine humanness.”
The Kingdom of God Jesus proclaimed seeks to restore humanness, hold tyranny to account, to bind up the wounds of those suffering, and by doing so, remake us into God’s image so we can care for His good creation. Wright calls on the Church to embrace its vocation of reminding rulers of their task, speaking truth to power, convicting the world of sin, and bearing witness to the resurrection reality of Jesus in the world today. We are to “do God in public,” for sure…but we are to act as an influence on both political parties, and we should be wary to aligning ourselves too much with either party, and not enough with the Kingdom of God.
Honestly, despite the rhetoric of either political party, does “restoring humanness” really sound like anything they really try to do? Of course not. Why is that? Because a country’s political system and parties will inevitably reflect the worldview in whose image the country is made.
The final thing Wright cautions against is the glorifying of democracy, as if that is the magic cure for all of the world’s ills. We’ve almost deified democracy in the Western world, and have unwittingly bought into the Enlightenment’s equating the “will of the people” with the “will of God.” We should realize by now, given the failures of so many “democracy experiments” throughout the world, and the glaring failures in our own, that a democracy that is based on an Enlightenment worldview ends up with those in power manipulating an ignorant populace in order to garner votes and stay in power.
The truly Christian view has always been no matter how a ruler gets power—monarchy, democracy, or any other way—the Church is to challenge that ruler to rule in a way that heals and protects people—the kind of rule that would reflect Jesus and the Kingdom of God.
Our current democracy in America doesn’t really do that, does it? It’s because our politics are too small, too power-hungry, and too spineless to be truly human and Christ-like rulers. So if you’re a Christian, despite what political party you tend to agree with more, keep your eyes open, and remember, you are first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and neither the Republican or Democrat platform can ever re-make human beings in the image of God.
