 Originally posted in 2016. Edited and reposted for Labor Day 2020.
The Increasingly Unequal States of America (2018) Estelle Sommeiller & Mark Price, Economic Policy Institute While We Were Out Daniel Schwindt, The Distributist Review Why We Need More Economic Participation Richard Aleman, The Distributist Review Bernie May be Right: The Nordic Model of Health Care Works Edwin G. Dolan, Huffington Post When Capitalism Only Rewards Shareholders Bruce Scott, PBS Newshour
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 Originally posted Feb 17, 2014. I re-taught this class on Sunday, July 29, 2018, but the video seems to have gone AWOL (lol). Maybe next time!
In our detour a few weeks ago, we noted that because of their inflammatory tendencies, most people would like to keep religion and politics as far away from each other as possible. But we cannot maintain a high view of biblical justice, honor and righteousness by keeping our faith out of the voting booth. The relationship between religion and politics runs deeply throughout Scripture. Peter reminds us to, “Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king” (1Pe 2:17 NKJV; see our first post for Works Cited). Paul goes even deeper, calling “every soul [to] be subject to the governing authorities . . . for conscience’ sake,” since public figures are “God’s ministers” (Rom 13:1-7, emphasis added). Rebellion, then, is essentially a heart problem, rooted in the same sort of passion, pride, lies and idolatry that got Israel into trouble in the first place. It’s no wonder then that when Israel forsook God, she would turn to politics as the solution to her many problems. Or perhaps we have it backward: in Israel’s case political rebellion led to spiritual rebellion. The Lord says in Hosea 8:4, “They made kings, but not through me. They set up princes, but I knew it not” (unless otherwise indicated, all remaining Scriptures are taken from the ESV). It is not that Yahweh didn’t know who their rulers were; the problem lay in the fact that they ignored his will in choosing them. Even from the beginning of the Divided Kingdom, Israel had gone her own way. Though in his providence God allowed Israel to split for spiritual reasons, it was politics that drove away the northern tribes (1Ki 12:1-24). So while Judah was always led by the house of David, Israel was ruled by ten dynasties, all of which ended in bloodshed. In fact, “Between 752 and 732 B.C. four of Israel’s rulers were assassinated (cf. 2 Kings 15),” providing the background to several of Hosea’s statements (see Hos 7:5-7, from which this quote from the BKC is taken). Israel’s spiritual unfaithfulness is both a cause and effect of these upheavals. Remember that it was for pragmatic political reasons that Jeroboam built the calves at Dan and Bethel in the first place (1Ki 12:25-33). So while Jeroboam’s kingdom was entrusted to him so that he might restore the Law, he instead defied it further, repeating Aaron’s sin and explicitly violating the first two of the Ten Commandments (Exo 20:3-6; 32:1-4). But the Lord had had enough of being confused with cattle: “With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction. I have spurned your calf, O Samaria. My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of innocence? For it is from Israel; a craftsman made it; it is not God. The calf of Samaria shall be broken to pieces” (Hos 8:4-6). It is with good reason, then, that Solomon warns, “My son, fear the LORD and the king; Do not associate with those given to change,” (Pro 24:21 NKJV) because when rebels rage, there’s no end to the destruction that can be done. We also see that spiritual rebels seek political solutions. This is perhaps the greatest heresy of the modern age, and both conservatives and liberals are often guilty of it. When man ignores what the Bible says about right and wrong, justice falls as well; and where justice has fallen, nothing is sacred, twisting politics into naked greed and sheer power. Israel could identify the problems that faced her—famine, poverty, weakness—but she did not recognize them as the consequences of her sin. So instead she sought help elsewhere: “For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild donkey wandering alone; Ephraim has hired lovers. Though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up. And the king and princes shall soon writhe because of the tribute” (Hos 8:9-10). But as the prophet pointed out before, Assyria would be their conqueror, not their savior (see 5:13; 7:11). But this is not to say Israel could save herself by becoming a fortress and preparing for a siege. “For Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces, and Judah has multiplied fortified cities; so I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour her strongholds” (8:14). As the ESVSB points out, “Ephraim trusted religious shrines for security; Judah her armaments. Both will prove to be futile.” So rather then experience the alleged fertility associated with Baal worship, they would instead find famine and the rations of exile: “Threshing floor and wine vat shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them. They shall not remain in the land of the LORD, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria” (9:2-3; see 2:9-12). So Israel’s kings had done the exact opposite of what Moses had commanded, and exactly what Samuel had warned them against (Deu 17:14-17; 1Sa 8)! And finally, spiritual rebellion invites political punishment. This is perhaps even harder to comprehend. Okay, sure, maybe there is a connection between one’s political views and one’s religious views, but does it really matter? If there is a God, does he really care about our political views? Why, yes. The God who providentially “works all things together for good” is the same God who providentially “rules the kingdom of men” (Rom 8:28; Dan 4:17, 25, 32; see Dan 2:20-22; 5:34-37). So while your politics can reflect your religious views, your political problems could also be consequences of your religion. Sometimes this means God’s people are employed as the means of judgment (Gen 15:16; Deu 20:16-18), but at other times they are just as guilty as anyone else (Jos 7:10-12, 20-21). Israel, however, had forgotten this, essentially voting against God for generations. But the ultimate coup d’état was about to occur. The King of Israel would remind his people who was really in charge. Judgment is coming, and coming quickly. Listen to the Prophet: “Set the trumpet to your lips! One like a vulture is over the house of the LORD . . . the enemy shall pursue him” (Hos 8:1-3). “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. . . . Israel is swallowed up; already they are among the nations as a useless vessel” (8:7-8). “Egypt shall gather them; Memphis shall bury them. Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver; thorns shall be in their tents” (9:6). The trumpet had sounded, the battle lines were formed, vultures smelled blood in the air, the winds of war blew. Israel’s so called friends would form against her, shatter her strength, round up her refugees, and turn the plenty of the land to a barren wilderness. When we reject God’s claims over his people, we invite his righteous judgment. As we have stated before, Jesus Christ is the ultimate political reality: he who created all things, redeems our fallen world, and reigns at his Father’s right hand (Col 1:15-20). The heart of Hosea’s indictment is still focused on the lack of true, spiritual worship (see 8:11-13; 9:1, 4-5), but politics played an important part in how these problems came about, how they got as bad as they did, and how God would repay them for it. As the late Russell Kirk once wrote, “Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems” (The Conservative Mind 8). So when we treat God’s messengers as crazy fools, when we outlaw his word as “hate speech,” when we back believers into a corner in public discourse, we know the result: “he will remember their iniquity; he will punish their sins” (9:7-9). The church, then, cannot place her trust in political half-measures, but must instead rely on the God who rules above, for “It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes” (Psa 118:9). Nor can we allow our views to be dominated by economics, defense or foreign affairs, for “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Pro 14:34). May we, then, as his people, intercede for our neighbors, that our nation might turn to God and repent of our rebellion against our Almighty God (Jer. 29:7; Gen 18:20-33).  Last week, on Facebook, I promised an extended review of Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option, based on a much shorter version that appeared in the December 2017 issue of The Christian Chronicle. But before we get to that, it may help to understand how Dreher worked his way there, and for that we have to start with his first book, Crunchy Cons. For more on The BenOp and what it means to be the church, check out our thread on The Body of Christ. As a Christian, I’ve never really felt at home politically. Sure, I’ve had my periods of partisanship, but in many ways I have just as many differences with conservatives as I have with their liberal counterparts. So I had to chuckle when I was walking through an airport one day and saw the hardback edition of Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher (2006). On the cover (above left) there was this rusty VW minibus with a GOP pachyderm painted on the front and a kayak strapped to the top, driven by a suited man flashing a peace sign. And check out that subtitle! But I gave it a pass. I’m not even sure I opened it. Now, it makes it into my top 5. Thankfully, something about the book popped back into my mind while I was looking for some light reading in the summer of 2012. I wanted something thoughtful, generally conservative, but also more than just politics as usual. So I downloaded a sample of the extended paperback edition (2010) in iBooks, which also carried a new subtitle: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots. The sample was short, but effective—I was hooked. For example, in the new Preface I came across the following: Though unabashedly rooted in the rich and fertile conservative tradition, Crunchy Cons seeks to go beyond the shopworn ideological categories of left and right. … It’s time we stopped asking what’s conservative and what’s liberal. Maybe instead we should create a new politics by asking: What’s good? What’s true? What’s beautiful? What’s authentically human?” Having already read a bit of Aristotle, John Adams, and Russell Kirk, I could already see I was in for a treat. But the real selling point came next, in what Dreher called “A Crunchy-Con Manifesto.” See for yourself:
Culture. Character. Wisdom. That’s where a Crunchy Con finds her WHY. But it’s not that Dreher says anything new. Instead, his genius lies primarily in the narrative approach he takes to his work, describing the HOW of a countercultural conservatism. Dreher simply tells the stories of people “putting truth and beauty first in their lives,” trying to “cobble together a practical, commonsense, and fruitful way to live amid the empty consumerist prosperity of what Henry Miller called ‘the air-conditioned nightmare’” (ch. 1). A good yarn reflects this beauty better than a good argument. Dreher and I already shared certain loves: good books, Craftsman bungalows, Distributism, and classic Christianity. But in other ways, I hadn’t realized how deeply I too had been shaped by my consumerism. So I’m still working on these: putting down roots, caring for creation, and avoiding “refined flour, white sugar … processed foods … and … vegetable oil” (Crunchy Cons, ch. 3). But what does all that have to do with politics? Well, quite a bit, actually. At its heart, politics isn’t about things; it’s about people, the polis (city): your family, friends, and neighbors. But that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t have any views on issues of public or national concern. It simply means that your expectations for political involvement have changed; you’re playing by a different set of rules. So in his final chapter, Dreher tells us WHAT a “crunchy-con political agenda might look like”:
Reading that list is probably as shocking to you as it was to me five years ago. But the longer I’ve looked at it, picked it apart, studied it, and put it back together again, I’d probably only change a word or two. Where has this depth of conservatism gone? And how could we get it back again? For me, Dreher painted a picture of this politics more clear, succinct, and humorous than I had ever seen—before or since. By putting it all on paper, Dreher had hoped to inform conservative politics for the 2008 election. He sought to tell a different story than the dominant narrative provided by either party, or in the media. As he said in his opening chapter, “the conservative folks you’ll meet in the pages ahead will open your eyes, and in them you’ll see a sensibility marked by what G. K. Chesterton praised as ‘sanity, humor and charity,’ but also a recognition that American life is in crisis.” But the crisis only deepened. 2008 was a game changer for everyone, with a new recession and a new president, and by 2010 a new political subculture had emerged in response, the Tea Party. That year Dreher wrote a new afterword for the paperback edition, reflecting on what had been achieved in the four years since Crunchy Cons had been published. But he was also more certain than ever that partisan politics was no longer the solution; something much deeper and more radical would be required: The original subtitle of this book … promised ideas that might save the Republican Party. But now I doubt it’s worth saving in its present form. … This suggests that the crunchy cons should embrace the practice of what Vaclav Havel called “anti-political politics”—choosing to combat the cynicism and emptiness of formal politics by living virtuously and generously in one’s own community. Politics simply wasn’t going to cut it. Crunchy Cons needed to forge another way of “living into the truth” (to borrow again from Havel), an alternative way of living out our “sanity, humor and charity.” And for that, Dreher looked to Benedict.
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To answer this question, one must first understand that the Greeks held some drastically different views on the concept of politics than most of us do today. The Greek word polis has no direct English equivalent. Because of this, we have attempted to render it in a number of ways, most commonly as ‘city-state.’ But this not only falls short of the full potential of its meaning, it also introduces some false connotations that were not meant by the Greeks themselves. Kitto identifies this rendering of the word, “a bad translation, because the normal polis was not much like a city, and was very much more than a state” (64). He goes on to catalogue the various uses of the word in order to demonstrate its many shades of meaning: citadel, town, the market town, people, state, and cultural life (Kitto 68-75). For this reason, Kitto states that polis, “may mean as much as ‘the whole communal life of the people, political, cultural, moral’ – even ‘economic’,” while also retaining certain religious connotations (75). In short then, the polis is the Greek ‘community’ and often serves as a metonymy for the various aspects of the community’s wellbeing. This more holistic view of ‘the city’ had natural implications for their view of citizenship, which meant much more than mere residence. Many a Greek lived within a city while never enjoying the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. In most Greek communities, citizenship was a birthright bestowed on male children born to a father who was a citizen and a mother who was a free woman. Other members of the community (at least at Athens) included metics (or ‘resident aliens’), women and slaves (owned by individuals in Athens and by the community in Sparta) who each enjoyed limited freedoms but were denied any political participation (Freeman 226-228). As Freeman continues, “Citizenship was thus a privilege and a closely guarded one,” but it also had its duties (228). In Athens a citizen was expected to participate in religious festivals, attend the Assembly, and fight the community’s battles as a hoplite (Freeman 226; Martin 82-83). In Sparta, a citizen was expected to not only fulfill these responsibilities, but also to provide enough food to support his military-style common mess (Greek sussition), and failure to do so meant a loss of membership in both the mess and the citizen body (Martin 77-78). Taken together, a uniquely Greek concept of political unity begins to take shape. Greeks did not form ‘states;’ they formed ‘communities.’ Citizens were not residents; they were participants in the life and affairs of their community. Note the intimacy implied by the word itself: community. Such a sense is difficult to imagine in today’s modern world (though the same connection can still be seen in our words ‘city’ and ‘citizen’). The United States has over 300 million citizens. Cities have populations numbering in the several hundreds of thousands and even millions. To the Greeks, however, political unity meant the opportunity to participate in a shared cultural, religious and economic environment. Such is the reason why Plato, when he set forth his vision for the ideal community, set the optimal size of the body politic at 5,000 and why Aristotle believed that “each citizen should be able to know all the others by sight” (though the total population, including women, children, metics, and slaves could approach as many as 50,000; Kitto 65-66). True community, then, is directly proportional to familiarity; the greater the familiarity, the greater the sense of community; and when this familiarity is lost, so is one’s sense of community. This concept of political unity is further demonstrated by other social relationships enjoyed between citizens. In Athens, the community was not divided into wards, quarters, or boroughs but into demes, a word that simply means ‘peoples’ and implies a sense of common identification among its members (Martin 87-88). Unanimity was further maintained through voluntary associations, “some purely religious,” others related to “particular trades” or aristocratic families, and even through a sundry of rancorous drinking clubs (Freeman 226). As Freeman continues, “The Athenian citizen was thus given identity through a range of shared activities which went well beyond his involvement in the Assembly” (Freeman 226). And though the Spartans chose activities that appear quite different on the surface (a rigorous martial upbringing, and the above-mentioned common messes) the intent was much the same. However, Spartan unanimity also came at a high moral cost, being reinforced from within through the perversion called pederasty, and from without by the systematic enslavement of their outlying neighbors. It was because of this misplaced emphasis on male unity that the Greeks “created outsiders such as barbarians, both free and slave, and, within the city, women and non-citizens in order to strengthen the identity of the citizen group” (Freeman 226). Though later in our series we’ll have another opportunity to address Sparta’s neighbors, pederasty deserves special comment before we move on. Pederasty was a form of ritualized pedophilia that typically included a young man as the active partner and a younger boy as the passive one. Though each community had its own twists on this practice, in general the boys “were chosen to be the special favorites of males older than themselves to build bonds of affection, including physical love, for others” (Martin 78, 79). Thankfully, the Apostle Paul condemns the practice, along with other forms of homosexuality, in two ‘vice lists’ in the New Testament (1Co 6:9-11; Rom 1:24-27). So while Greek views on civics are generally ‘higher’ than our own, this was not so in every place on every issue. To the Greeks, politics meant much more than participating in the political processes of the state; it emphasized the individual civic responsibilities owed to others as a trust and privilege held in common with one’s family and neighbors. It is in this vein of thought that Aristotle states so memorably that, “Man is a political animal,” by which he means that, “‘Man is a creature who lives in a polis’; and what he goes on to demonstrate, in his Politics, is that the polis is the only framework within which man can fully realize his spiritual, moral and intellectual capacities” (Kitto 78). The polis, then, is, in the words of Cartledge, a ‘citizen-state’ (56). We can hopefully see now why the problem of Greek unity may not be in the Greeks themselves but in the way we have formed our questions concerning the goals of their culture and its effects on their political organization. The Greeks did not ‘succeed’ in the modern conception of ‘political unity’ precisely because it is a modern conception that the Greeks neither imagined nor desired. And though certain Greek views on identity and sexuality fail to measure up to the standard of the biblical witness, we have also failed to live up to their cultural legacy concerning their views on cities and citizenship. Works Cited
4 Things Christians Should Do When Tragedies Occur Wes McAdams, Radically Christian Fighting Terrorism with Transcendence Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative French, Syrian Christians Pray After Paris Attacks Erik Tryggestad, The Christian Chronicle The Rise of Religious Terrorism in France Carl Bialik, FiveThirtyEight What ISIS Wants Jon Foreman, The Huffington Post |
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