Apolitical Christianity is Pure Delusion

Private religion produces political dehumanization

First:

I am leading the monthly book club for Mockingbird tomorrow at 3:00. We will be discussing Robert Jenson’s little book, A Theology in Outline:Can These Bones Live?

Here is the information:

Zoom info:

Meeting ID: 871 9451 4029 / Passcode: 519867

Invite Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87194514029?pwd=NVV4MVRwMmhZeWgxWEF4RldHMjJaUT09 

Speaking of Jenson…

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In my parish, I am in the midst of a lectio continua series through the Apocalypse to John. As Karl Barth famously insisted in his Römerbrief, Christianity that is not entirely and altogether eschatology [proclamation of the End] has entirely and altogether nothing to do with Christianity.”

It is exactly Christianity’s apocalyptic character, its preoccupation with the End, that makes Christianity, like Judaism before it, inherently political. Consideration of the City of God and how we shall live in the Fulfillment necessarily bear upon how we live now in the Earthly City. Because to follow Jesus is to stand at the Kingdom’s gate, labor for the public good and service for the neighbor just are a glory to God. However, our common life now is only possible if gathered around a common good, St. Augustine argues in City of God.

As God is the only ultimate good common to us all, any polity premised on any other lesser good will fail to bind a people together.

America is still too young to think herself the exception to Augustine’s rule.

On these matters, I recently stumbled across an aside by the theologian Robert Jenson. Eerie for its prescience, Jenson prophesied our dehumanizing politics before I was born.

This is from 1976:

In the United States, Jefferson indeed traced the sovereignty of the people to an endowment by the “Creator,” but the Creator he had in mind was religiously quiescent, a deity whose presence or absence would make no difference to the practical conduct of affairs. Insofar as modern states appeal to deity, they appeal to a deity invented especially for the purpose of not interfering. The God who would make a difference to public affairs is explicitly banished from them by the found ideologies of modern states. Thus James Madison insisted on religious freedom in order to “multiply sects,” the purpose of the multiplication being so to balance them against each other that none could achieve public influence…

In all Western secular states, the expulsion of faith from the political realm is gradually destroying faith. Expelled from the arena in which we make shared choices, faith becomes a “private matter.” But the “private” in this sense shrinks to a dimensionless point; for once the individual is set against the community, the individual loses reality. The individual’s religion loses application to actual life, which is live in communication and community.

Thus American Protestantism once dreamed of the American commonwealth as a new Zion prepared for the returning Christ. Then Protestantism abandoned the commonwealth itself to the inactive Creator of Jefferson and Madison, and the collapse to the dimensionless point began. First Protestantism set out to create, instead of a holy state, a holy people for the Lord within the state; the great movements of reform and revival in nineteenth century American Christianity are the successive waves of this effort. Then, around the turn of the century, Protestantism abandoned the attempt to convert the people, and limited itself to “saving” enough individuals to make a holy leaven among the people. Now, finally, it is accepted doctrine that religion is “private,” that for communal purposes it does not matter what I believe so long as I believe something. As is manifest to all observation, this “private” religion is precisely religion which can be counted on not interfere with any actual action or communication of its possessor, all of which are necessarily in some fashion public.

This religion is pure delusion.

Just as the separation of religion and politics is bringing modern Western communities to religious deprivation, so it is bringing them to political dehumanization.

Now that Jefferson’s “Creator” has to go it alone, his incapacity is manifest; and the moral cohesion and common purpose of the American people visibly decrease from day to day.