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I’m listening to an interview with Jamie Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College. Smith begins by talking about his frustration with much of what the media reports about evangelicalism, and the people that speak for evangelicalism. But he’s also dissatisfied with with evangelicals:

There is (and I don’t want to be trite or quick about this)…there is a remarkable collusion and identification in this country of being a faithful Bible-believing evangelical Christian, and being a very patriotic, pro-business, pro-war (after 9-11) kind of citizen. And so to suggest, for instance, that Christians might want to rethink their commitment to the sort of nationalistic pride that motivates participation in war, that feels like you’re taking a brick out of the wall of their Christian faith, because they haven’t been able to distinguish the two. Or, if you start saying, “hey, you know, I don’t know if we should be so pro-big business and free markets in the way that we are because, if we think about this a little more carefully, there’s some really serious injustices that are engendered by that…” it’s like you might as well have said, “I’m not sure that Jesus is God,” in some places. That’s so bundled up in a sense of identity and standing up for what’s right that you’re very quickly marginalised as a Christian if you start challenging those areas… In other words…there’s a way in which the core of evangelical faith already provides the resources for calling into question this collusion between the two [biblical faith and patriotism]…When I try to convince people, in an adult Sunday School class, in a local congregation, to think differently, it’s—within evangelicalism, you need to be able to come and say, “look, let’s look at what the Bible shows us about the sorts of things that we should be passionate about; what really matters.” And if you can show that it’s in Scripture, for evangelicals, that’s the authority. That’s ultimately the authority…If somebody says, “well look, the only way you can do this is if you show them from the Scriptures”, I would just say, “what better place to go to?” I’m very happy to derive a very different vision from the Scriptures, and use that as our common starting point.

What’s does he suggest instead?

The thing that I find so maddening in evangelicalism today, is on it’s right wing there is this idea of, sort of, re-Christianizing, or Christianizing the State. In my reading, Radical Orthodoxy would put much more emphasis on the church as being and exhibiting this alternative community without it being a withdrawal…and thinking about, “we’re going to exhibit an alternative economics by the way we distribute resources within the body of Christ”…I’m reading a fascinating book right now by Charles Marsh called The Beloved Community on the history of the civil-rights movement…and you see a lot of the things that I think of, as what would be a radically orthodox community, you can see embodied in something like those early civil rights projects, which weren’t fundamentalists trying to take over the State, but they also weren’t a-political, withdrawals from the State either. It was engaging the public from a confessional perspective.

The key is recognising the false-dichotomy that frequently confronts us, and finding the third way:

One of the things I get frustrated with very quickly is that, “well, if you’re against Bush or against current Republican policies, then you must be a Democrat.” To which I would reply, “no”. I don’t understand why it’s always this either-or. I think what happens is, both sides of that game are playing by the rules of what I would call “state-craft”. I developed this a fellow named Daniel Bell, a Methodist theologian at Southern Lutheran Seminary. What he says is both liberal-progressive Christian Democrats, and the more conservative, right wing Republican Christians, both think that the way to solve problems, and the way to be faithful is to marshal the resources and mechanics and engine of the State. And this is where I think there is an alternative which says, “you know, I don’t want to play by either side’s rules in that respect.” The church, within a civil society, can carve out its own space to be political as the church. That is, I think the church is a political space; it is a polis, in the Greek sense; it is a community which has a specific goal that its aiming for, and it’s trying to embody practices to form virtuous people to achieve that goal. So I think that’s a political space, but I don’t think it should be identified with the space which is the State. When I say “the church”, I wouldn’t want us ever to just think of a local congregation, and I wouldn’t even want us to just think of American evangelicalism. What we’re talking about is a body, a community, which is a trans-national reality; it’s really an alternative, but global, community of people, which transcends the borders and citizenships of nation-states, and yet that’s our primary citizenship. So that has to make a difference for how we think about our relationship to global realities.

Listen to the whole interview here.

HT: FFF

This entry was posted by Bryce on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 12:37 am. This entry was tagged with Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.