The
Christian Right has argued this activism was a legitimate expression of the
prophetic voice, challenging power and an unjust government.
These same
operatives had in the 1960's criticized the Black Church in the United States
as overstepping its boundaries and transgressing the line between religion and
politics. They considered it theologically dubious that ordained ministers such
as ML King Jr. should be so vocal in the cause of social justice and demand for
political change.
It's kind of
ironic isn't it? But historical veracity has never been the concern of
political operatives. History is often a mere plaything, a substance to be
molded for the agenda. Truth is appealed to only when it is a means to serve the
end. A principle is often 'right' because the historian (or journalist)
approves of the goals, and yet the same principle can be viewed as 'wrong' or erroneous
if its goals and doctrines are disagreed with.
As the
Church we are the faithful bride to He who is the Truth. Pragmatics and Consequentialism
cannot dictate either our ethics or our understanding of history and current
events.
American
Evangelicalism zealously turned itself into an adulteress and spiritual whore
in the late 1970's and has been re-writing history ever since, today even
claiming to have supported the Civil Rights movement they had so viciously
critiqued and opposed... even well into the 1980's.
"Preachers
are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners".
So said
Jerry Falwell in the days before he formed the so-called and greatly misnamed
political faction known as the Moral Majority. For once the old reprobate was
right.
Not in his
views or the causes he supported... in the name of Christ I might add. He was almost
always wrong and even when he was right, still stood on the wrong ground and
for the wrong reasons. Despite his claims, he cared little for the Bible and
what it teaches. It was America and power that were his god and gospel.
But he was initially
right in that the Church's calling is not to politics but to matters spiritual.
Recognizing the reality of sin and the curse, the Church tells the truth in a
world of lies. We don't politic and caucus for political control. Let the dead
of Babylon bury their dead. We are strangers and pilgrims from the land of Truth.
We proclaim the truth and declare the true nature of reality. We proclaim the
coming Judgment and the Eternal One who can either be your Judge or your
Saviour.
Rejection of
political activism is not retreat. It's a rejection of the model part and
parcel. It's a rejection of the notion that somehow Babylon can be transformed
into Zion. Always an embattled minority we don't fight our battles using the
weapons of the world. We will always be rejected, spat on and persecuted but
we'll never stop declaring the truth to the world. We'll speak of the heavenly
Zion while at the same time we expose and denounce the deeds of darkness at
work in the world.
But
especially when those dark forces are at work in the larger context of the
Church.
If the "Church"
has embraced the world than we have to expose the world in order to wake up the
Church. If the world doesn't like it and lashes out at us, or the
world-embracing Church feels threatened and calls upon the state to silence us,
then so be it. You can bruise us but you cannot silence us.
While we can
to some degree appreciate and admire the leaders of the Civil Rights movement
we cannot go along with the ecclesiastical-political synthesis... the very
thing championed by Falwell's Christian Right.
There's a
difference though. The dominionist fusion enacted by Falwell was a deliberate
ideological platform formed by the theology of Francis Schaeffer, and thus
ultimately found its origins in Kuyper and Calvin. The Falwell/American
Evangelical variety was modified but found its primary impulse in Protestant
Sacralism. It was just an old hydra rearing its head in a different context.
What
happened within the American Black Church and Polish Roman Catholicism was a
bit different. In both of these cases the Church was the one institution that
was still free from the oppressor. It was the one institution the state could
not fully control or penetrate. Of course the Church isn't an institution let
alone a political club. That's what it was turned into and the theological harm
has been palpable.
Polish Roman
Catholicism had already been apostate since (at least) the Counter-Reformation
but the American Black Church soon fell into a trap... a gospel of empowerment
and self-esteem. It has yet to emerge from this theological mire.
This is not
to suggest that we wish African-Americans had stayed socially inferior. They've
made some deserved gains but at a great spiritual cost. If the country had
truly been Christian to begin with we wouldn't have had slavery nor the
subsequent century of racial oppression. Christians would have ignored Jim Crow
and turned their backs on the racist churches of the South. Sadly it was often
the liberal "Christians" who had rejected Scripture and embraced the
Enlightenment who ended up acting virtuously and with moral conviction. Their
Christianity was fraudulent but even its humanistic ethics (often couched in
Christian language) shamed the so-called Bible Belt.
But once
it's all politicized, the theology and ethics of the Bible are quickly
abandoned. Any political operative will tell you Scriptural principles don't
work. Thus we end up with myriad of "Christians" running about
claiming to speak for the Christian position... and yet the true Biblical
witness is all but silenced.
Christian
Truth and its manifest doctrines are not meant to 'work' in a practical
application or political sense. They are spiritual ideas and consequences. They
lead to antithesis and opposition, to meekness and persecution.
If it was
legitimate for Poles to utilize their 'church' to resist the Warsaw Pact then
it was perfectly legitimate for the Black Church to organize in order to resist
Jim Crow. And yet the Truth as revealed in Scripture ultimately rejects these
models and certainly rejects those who think they can manipulate theology and history
to serve political ends.
As usual the
truth is more nuanced and far less pleasing to worldly ears.
