After the Election: Prophetic Politics in a Post-Secular Age

After the Election

Prophetic Politics in a Post-Secular Age

Ron Sanders

Foreword by Scotty McLennan

AFTER THE ELECTION

Prophetic Politics in a Post-Secular Age

Copyright © 2018 Ron Sanders. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0120-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0122-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0121-7

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Sanders, Ron, author. | McLennan, Scotty, foreword.

Title: After the election : prophetic politics in a post-secular age / Ron Sanders ; foreword by Scotty McLennan.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-0120-0 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0122-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0121-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and politics—United States. | Christians—Political activity—United States.

Classification: BR516 .S26 2018 (print) | BR516 .S26 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. April 10, 2018

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Independence and the Art of Pluralism

Chapter 2: Images of Exile

Chapter 3: Democracy Needs a Complement

Chapter 4: Christianity Might Need a Complement

Chapter 5: Prophetic Politics

Chapter 6: Experiments in Exile

Conclusion

Bibliography

For Bonnie, Zac, and Sarah

Foreword

Scotty McLennan

This is an important book. That is true not only for evangelical Christians, the tradition with which Ron Sanders identifies, but also for the rest of us: liberal Christians like myself, people of other religious traditions, the spiritual but not religious, those whose religious preference is none, secularists, and atheists. My friend Ron knowledgeably, articulately, and compellingly describes a positive path forward for politics and religion in America. This seems an almost-impossible task in an era of electoral bitterness, culture wars, religiously inspired hatred and violence, and aggressive New Atheism. My parents always told me that there were two things never to discuss publicly, at least in polite company: politics and religion. Ron has taken them on together and done a resplendent job of showing us how to converse about them, live them out, and build a flourishing society around them.

Ron convincingly describes how modern democracy and Christianity grew up together, complement each other, and need each other, now more than ever. The liberal democratic tradition, which is foundational to America, is the best way to organize our pluralistic society, giving voice to many different communities. Yet, it provides only a thin ethic of Do no harm, setting up certain procedural safeguards for how citizens relate to each other but ultimately furthering the power of the majority to enforce its will. Christianity, on the other hand, risks becoming absolutist, uncompromising and oppressive if it dominates in the political realm—hence, the importance of church-state separation—but it can also positively supply a thick narrative and exemplary ethic of love where democracy simply referees competing values in society. If the two are actively allowed to complement each other through a creative blurring of strict lines of separation between church and state, both flourish in a way they could not in the absence of the other.

Ron and I have long discussed and debated these issues, publicly and privately, in our years at Stanford University, beginning for me in 2001. We have spent a lot of time talking together in cafes, reading and commenting on each other’s papers and book drafts, helping guide students through difficult dormitory discussions about religion, standing side by side at public demonstrations, serving on interfaith councils together, and teaching together in the classroom. On many religious and political matters we are one hundred and eighty degrees apart. He is a PhD graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and a staff member with Cru. I have degrees in law and theology from Harvard and am a Unitarian Universalist minister (formerly a university chaplain at Stanford, and before that at Tufts, overseeing all campus religious groups and ministries). He identifies as an evangelical Christian, and I as a liberal mainline Christian. My politics are well to the left of his in many areas. But we are good friends, colleagues, and discussion partners. I have learned a great deal from him in a decade and a half.

For example, in a public response to my 2009 book Jesus Was a Liberal: Reclaiming Christianity for All at the Stanford Memorial Church, he challenged my four criteria for claiming that Jesus was a liberal: freedom from religious authority, rationality as a primary way of knowing, belief in the essential goodness of humanity, and tolerance for other ways than one’s own. He noted how Jesus established himself as authority, how rationality is influenced by one’s own preconceived notions and loyalties, how much evil humans are capable of, and how traditional Christianity sees itself as the only way to salvation.

Ron then went on to make claims that he expands upon masterfully in this book. Jesus was probably a first-century liberal, in that he stood in the great prophetic tradition of Israel, challenging the accepted conventions of the day. He liberalized the traditional definition of who might be invited into the kingdom of God. He might have had a prophetic word to say to modern conservatives about setting up theological litmus tests to define people in or out of the community, about taking the log out of one’s own eye before attending to the speck in another’s eye, about being too authoritative when we all wander in the same desert. But Jesus might also have had prophetic words for modern liberals about the importance of tradition, about idolizing the individual and personal conscience, and about defining people out of the intellectual community because they take the scriptures as a primary source of knowledge about what means the most to all of us. He concluded that Jesus prophetically challenges all of us at every theological and political turn, including Ron’s own assumptions about Jesus and what it means to be a faithful follower of him. That is the virtue of humility as personified in Ron.

Another reason this is an important book is that it accessibly canvases the thought of major modern philosophers and theologians in helping us understand the relationship of politics and religion—among them Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jeffrey Stout, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Howard Yoder. Richard Rorty represents the secularist position of guaranteeing religious liberty in people’s private lives but keeping religion out of the public square, where it causes division and conflict. For Rorty, there are no capital-T or universal truths, and religion is ultimately misleading. Alasdair MacIntyre agrees that there are no capital-T truths, but he asserts a modest universalism based at first on particular communities’ own understandings (often religious), which then become larger and broader as they stand the test of time and reach across communities in the public square. Jeffrey Stout sees that religion can be a positive force for good in the public square (for example, the Christianity of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.). Stanley Hauerwas, however, wants to keep a clear separation between church and state, because once religion enters the public square he sees it getting corrupted by cultural dynamics and political power; an uncompromised Christian community can ideally be an exemplar of what human flourishing looks like. For John Howard Yoder, the Christian community should strive to remain uncompromised and uncorrupted, but still should engage in the political realm, reflecting Christian values like pacifism.

Ron explains in detail both the desire to keep church and state strictly separated (Rorty and Hauerwas, for different reasons) and the urge to blur the boundaries between church and state for their mutual benefit (Mac-Intyre, Stout, and Yoder). He then describes two fundamentally different images from ancient Israel of the role of Christianity in America—the new promised land for a chosen people that becomes a Christian nation, or a covenanted people who are living in exile under another realm’s power. Ron sees the first image as a misguided mythology for America and the second as a genuinely Christian perspective. The political problem with the first is that it demolishes church-state separation in the name of Christian hegemony for the nation. The second maintains the possibilities both of church-state separation and of somewhat blurred boundaries.

There are good reasons to blur the boundaries for both the liberal democratic tradition and for Christianity, as Ron sees it. Democracy can be strengthened by faith-based voluntary associations that bring the marginalized into focus and provide creative and exemplary ways to minister to them; by moral response to unjust majoritarian state action, as with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights movement; and by development of Christian virtues like love, taking us beyond the core democratic value of preventing harm. On the other hand, Christianity can be strengthened if religious language and motives are introduced to the public conversation, where they can be challenged or nuanced; if religious traditions can be asked publicly to see their all-too-human dimensions of finiteness and self-service; and if they are pushed to hear voices that have been excluded from the Christian worldview so that empathy can be developed.

I would like to expand on Ron’s arguments for blurring the church-state boundaries in the service of each. I believe that, historically, this has been done fairly well by an American notion of civil religion, which Ron explains has been disparaged both by Richard Rorty’s concern about retaining the purity of the liberal democratic tradition based solely on secular discourse and by Stanley Hauerwas’s concern about washing out the particularities of being a follower of Jesus in the service of a generalized religious ethic promoted by the state.

It seems to me that the Declaration of Independence is the centerpiece of a civil religion in America. It reads, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.¹ Stanford graduate and Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church has called this, in a book by the same name, the American Creed. It states commitments to values of equality, liberty, and rights-based justice—not merely as a matter of principles of good government, but as having a transcendent source in the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

Clearly, as Ron points out in this book, we have historically fallen far short of fulfilling the values of the Declaration. African-American slaves were not considered men at the time slaveholder Thomas Jefferson penned the document, and it took a long, bloody Civil War to settle that issue. Women were not included in the term men, and women’s equality, in terms of suffrage alone, took another 144 years. Much of this country was stolen outright from its indigenous inhabitants, who were herded as supposedly sovereign nations onto reservations. Martin Luther King Jr. had to invoke the Declaration of Independence again almost two hundred years later at the Lincoln Memorial, along with explicit biblical references, to talk about a dream of freedom not yet achieved.

Yet, it turns out that our creedal commitment to liberty as an inalienable right, as interpreted through the constitutional Bill of Rights, keeps atheist and agnostic liberty from being coerced by believers, just as much as it protects believers’ rights to free exercise of their religion. Our American creed also protects liberty from itself, from it becoming such thoroughgoing individualism that we forget the transcendent referent that calls us together in covenanting community. It helps us to see ourselves as one nation, not just many individuals living in the same place—e pluribus unum—out of many, one.

It also helps us in the face of religious fundamentalisms that challenge the alleged amorality of certain forms of modern secularism. Our civil religion can face down sectarian fundamentalist attempts to impose a different creed upon the body politic, and can also co-exist with many different forms of sectarian religion, which can be freely exercised as long as they don’t try to become the established religion of the state.

Moreover, our American creed has given rise to a robust and respected tradition of civil disobedience, from Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay war taxes to Martin Luther King’s rejection of Jim Crow laws. Calvin Coolidge once said, you may speak of natural rights, but I challenge anyone to show where in nature any rights existed. As Coolidge saw it, that is what positive laws established by legislatures are all about. Laws create rights, and they do not exist otherwise. That would mean that rights could just as easily be eliminated by legislators. Of course the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany was in large part based on duly passed laws, carefully administered by legally authorized agents of the state. Coolidge was wrong. The genius of American civil religion is that it produces moral checks and balances to positive law, whether created by legislators or by judges in the common-law tradition. It’s on the basis of inalienable rights with which we’re endowed by Nature’s God that Martin Luther King could write from the Birmingham City Jail that "there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws . . . A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God . . . An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law."² President Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, after noting that the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God, went on to say that the trumpet summons us again . . . [to] struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.³

Is it not our civil religion that holds us together, given our enormous diversity and our commitment to pluralism? We are constantly absorbing new immigrant populations. Many other countries are held together by an ethnic identity of being, say, Japanese, Turk, Chinese, Russian, Serbian, or French. Although America has arguably historically been a melting pot into a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant reality, that hasn’t been our conscious self-image. Instead, we’ve pledged ourselves to liberty and justice for all, and we have sung of crowning thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. That spirit of hospitality is picked up in the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Written by a Sephardic Jew, it reads, Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

America is not an ethnicity, or even a people with a common history. As Jacob Needleman exclaims in his book The American Soul, "American [is] an idea! What other country can say that?"⁴ Of course, our American civil religion is far from being fully realized. To say God bless America, as presidents and presidential candidates inevitably seem to do in ending their speeches, should be a trembling statement of supplication, not an assumption of fact. It is not America has God’s blessing and we deserve it, but instead "May you, God, please bless America, by showing us your ways and May you shed your grace on us, sinners that we are, and help us to move closer to you. In Irving Berlin’s 1938 song, God Bless America," God is asked to stand beside America and to guide her.

I suggest that America should not be seen as a nation divided in the sense of conservatives and liberals, or religious people and secular people. Our nation’s soul is not divided, either. Instead, we have a civil religion that binds us together. Like any great myth or symbol, the idea of America has layers of meaning, and it’s capable of holding opposites in creative tension. We are united by a few basic values inherent in the idea of America—like liberty, equality, hope for the future, and faith that Nature and Nature’s God have endowed us with certain inalienable rights as human beings. Of course, we differ deeply over a number of political issues like abortion, marriage for same-sex couples, our wars around the world, and levels of taxation. Yet, we can base our arguments in the public square on this set of deeper values that make up American civil religion. We can have the same reference points for our disagreements. Great symbols and myths work by incorporating dichotomy and paradox, by having the breadth to embrace past, present, and future, and by providing a hopeful vision of transformation out on the horizon.

But Ron is not talking about the historical role of civil religion in this book. He has taken on the much more difficult task of proving why the liberal democratic tradition and evangelical Christianity need each other, right now, in America. That is why what he is saying is so important for all of us to read and understand. For we are, as he well-demonstrates, in a new post-secular age, with modernism and postmodernism in the rearview mirror. We have had two recent presidents, Republican and Democrat, who maintained a White House office for