I’ll be watching the debate tonight. And I expect most of us will wake up tomorrow to our social feeds dominated by debate content repackaged as memes, clips, and quick reaction pieces. This is how things work.
Part of what concerns me about Christian engagement in the US public square(s) is how reactive it can be. And there’s no partisan prerogative to this reactivity. It’s no less characteristic of Democrats than Republicans. But of Christians?
We’ll be watching for many things in the debate tonight. And yes, the stakes are high. But so too is the spectacle. And there’s a risk here for responsible Christians found on two ditches that run along the path of discipleship.
On the one hand, we risk falling headlong into the spectacle in all its immediacy. Here, we become partisan reactionaries and captive ideologues. We surrender to fate, to the inevitability of quantifiable results. The debate, the election, it’s all flattened into a fever pitch contest between ultimate good & evil.
On the other, we risk falling into the muck of our own piety or persecuting opulence. These two form one ditch. Some extricate themselves from questions of political responsibility through appeals to other-world piety (i.e. “that’s too political!”) Others still outsource Christian freedom by submerging ourselves in the persecuting opulence of American life.
If you’re reading this as a practicing Christian, as someone on the path of discipleship, and plan on watching the debate tonight, I want to invite you to sit with these words from K.H. Miskotte who was a reformed Dutch pastor and resistance leader in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. I hope they are as paradoxically unsettling and bracing to you as they have been for me:
“Many cry out for action. But could it be, that the primordial action is hearing—the hearing that arose in former times as resistance against the worldly powers, giving rise to martyrdom and a new song; a new diaconate [service], a new confession, and suffering and action arose.”
Miskotte warned his fellow Dutch citizens against reactive action and counseled responsible worship. If this strikes you or me as mere impractical piety, then the fault is with us, not the Kingdom. The worship of the church community is inherently political because the Kingdom in which it exists and to which it points is inherently political.
The greatest affliction shaping Christians in America is not just that we have “traded faith for politics” but more that we have allowed the Word of God to be crowded out by rogue words. We pave “a thousand secret paths” as Karl Barth says, to escape this one Word.
And whether through partisan immediacies, false pieties, or the persecuting opulence of American life—we surrender our distinctly Christian freedom to lesser causes and lords. (To quote the Barmen Declaration)
The task is not finding a way to transcend politics as the church. This is an elaborate way of extricating ourselves from responsibility. No, the task is always and ever listening to the Word which gives rise to a unique, irreducibly political, form of worship.
This is not a worship that traffics in domination. The Christian conquest of the State happens whenever the Church decides it can possess and wield the Word. By listening to the Word, the Spirit works in the midst of the church and gives rise to a worship which itself offers a real, political, concrete witness to reconciliation, not retribution or domination.
This demands nothing less than responsibility. And this responsibility will always express itself in a profound, unsettling solidarity with the downtrodden, the marginalized, and the oppressed, those to whom Jesus declared liberation.
And in a moment where responsibility is called for, Christians in America cannot afford to watch without first listening. To act, without praying. To give, without receiving grace upon grace. This is why I’m making every effort, in my own ways and I hope you in yours, to listen before watching tonight.