“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason…Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.”

This is a perfect exposition of the central doctrine of the religion that William Herberg called “The American Way of Life” and what Reinhold Neibuhr called “the civil religion of America.” That religion in one word is “democracy.” Obama’s novel augmentation of this concept becomes clear when we remember what President Eisenhower said: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” What Obama is making explicit here is what Herberg believes is the shift from “religions of democracy” to “democracy as religion.” No longer is religion conceived as a necessary symbiote with which the natural tenets of a democratic society co-exist. Though we still believe that “to have faith” can properly have no object in America, what Barack Obama has advanced here is the permutation we have anticipated since our founding. Here, religion only has value as it can be universalized according to American values. This must inevitably lead to a leveling of the distinctions between religions that ultimately vitiates all religions. If all religious beliefs must conform to democratic principles, then religion has not constructed our democracy’s values, democracy is our religion. Freedom of religion need never be challenged; the religious have abrogated religion in service to democracy.

Barack Obama has positioned himself as the most perfect expression of the hero of American civil religion. The American way of life is itself the common belief of Americans in idealism. We form a spiritual structure around the ideals we cling to in a way no other people group does. We apply this idealism to everything: free speech, home ownership, getting a raise, educating children, eating a hamburger (or not), etc. Everything in an American’s life has a moral value, and because that creates enormous pressure on us as individuals, we gravitate toward symbols of our idealism to reduce our cognitive dissonance. And because we are so idealistic, “[we] tend to confuse espousing an ideal with fulfilling it and are always tempted to regard [our]selves as good as the ideals [we] entertain.” Though not a quixotic individual (despite what his detractors say), the force of our president-elect’s rhetoric has appealed primarily to our ideals for what America should mean and what a president should look like. The panegyrical frenzy of this post-election day is an expression of the religious ecstasy enrapturing the denizens of the civil religion, the parochial qualities of our formal religions adumbrated by the refulgent catholicity of the personified ideal. And lest I appear partisan, suffice it to say that McCain was not an anti-hero, but simply a rival for the same seat.

We have separated church and state so successfully that the state is now a church. A nation desires unity in what it values most deeply, and a system that functions both to organize those beliefs into a coherent rubric and to disseminate a sanctioned constellation of valid actions. Democracy is that system, not the aggregate of our variegated religions. Even if parts of Christianity were allowed into the public realm (as they ostensibly are), we would be allowed only the disembodied ethic and not the theology driving the ethic. More importantly, the supremely sanctioned act, the most cherished sacrament of democracy which needs no other religion’s support, is exercising the right to vote. The sanguine glow on the faces of Obama supporters these days is the radiance of a common desire to realize our ideals compressed into that single, cathartic act of voting.

So why didn’t I vote? Quite simply, because my religion is specific. A peculiar God chose one man, Abraham, to form a people he would favor above all others, with whom he would have direct contact. He nurtured personal encounters with only a few of them, episodic theophanies giving way to a sustained revelation of his presence in Jesus Christ. Jesus chose twelve men to confide in, three were his closest friends. He died once, in an obscure corner of an empire that has been gone for centuries, in an age where the only way of documenting such a life was word of mouth and papyrus. For centuries, people have had ineluctable encounters with his Spirit, often unable to explain or translate what they experienced. And this same group of people, serving the same God, is being asked to universalize their beliefs by abandoning the experiences that created them?

Democracy has demanded an impossible thing from us.

Author Bio: Christopher Brenna is a graduate student in History of Christianity at Luther Seminary and holds a master of divinity from Bethel Seminary. He was a member of Missio Dei in the early years, but now lives in Rochester, MN.

1. There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
2. Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
3. Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
4. Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
5. A rebel [especially of the nonviolent sort] can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
6. Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
7. A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
8. People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9. A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
10. The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
11. The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
12. The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
13. It is often no the largest but the best organized and most articulate group the prevails.
14. All debate momentarily ends with an “enforced silence” once the first shots are fired.
15. A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
16. Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
17. Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
18. People motivated by fear do not act well.
19. While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
20. Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
21. Once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper,” without limits.
22. Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation–which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
23. Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
24. The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
25. The hard world of beginning a movement to end war has already begun.

I realize that some of these lessons require some context to be fully understood, but do you disagree with any of these? Any of them that trigger deep affirmation in your soul? Any that you’d add?

The First Letter of Peter can, at first blush, run against the subversive and countercultural current of the rest of the New Testament.  Where Paul builds his gospel and theology by reworking imperial rhetoric around Jesus, by claiming that this Jesus - not Caesar - is the world’s one true lord,[1] Peter startlingly tells his readers to honor the emperor not once, but twice! Peter tells slaves to stay in line, but doesn’t follow Paul in insisting that masters also love their slaves.  Where is the justice in this?  For all his meditation on suffering, Peter doesn’t always seem to present an explicit way to overcome it.  Instead, it can feel, the Christian is to be passive and just let bad things happen; as David Bartlett has said, “1 Peter can be seen as profoundly unliberating.”[2] Indeed, Jesus and Paul stand up to the powers in the name of love and justice, and all Peter asks is that we not rock the boat! The activist impulse of Christians across political, cultural, and generational lines (not least here at JM!) will saddle up along 1 Peter with no small anxiety.

In keeping with Mark, Jason Barr, Sarah Lynne, and other JMers’ efforts to show how proper interpretation doesn’t just help dismiss the New Testament’s so-called “problem passages” for radical Christianity, but resoundingly underscore it, I would like to tackle these thorny passages from 1 Peter and see what groundings may be found therein for nonviolence.  (this article is a mildly revised paper I wrote in seminary)

I will show that 1 Peter arrives at and advocates a dissident, countercultural spirituality rooted in Isaiah-draped reflections on and applications of Jesus’ suffering love and cruciform victory.  By following the Messiah’s Way, suffering Christians can overcome pagan malice with enemy-love, evil with nonviolence, and injustice with redemptive submission.

Primer on 1 Peter

Peter is writing to the dispersed elect throughout Asia Minor, people whom he designates several times as being in some sort of exile (1:1, 17; 2:11; 5:10).  The language of exile likely means that they are spiritual-political exiles in the similar way that the Jews were under the four empires - “strangers in a strange land (all the more strange because it used to be home).”[3] Instead of a systematically persecuted community, the church of Asia Minor is likelier to be facing slander as a peculiar people that do not join their neighbors in their evil ways.[4] Therefore Peter’s imagination, intentions, and audience are more in keeping with those of Jesus than Paul.  Both the Lord and Peter are addressing a people (Israel-in-exile and the church-in-exile) who are 1) theodiceally trying to resolve their present sufferings with their allegiance to the sovereign God, and 2) in need of teaching for how to be God’s eschatological people still under the boot of exile.  Restated, Peter and Jesus alike address two questions: ‘What is God doing with this suffering?’ and ‘How ought we respond to this suffering?’.  These are twin questions we will trace his answers to in due time.

Commentators on 1 Peter frequently date it before Domitian’s reign (81-96 A.D.) because, the logic goes, Peter would never have instructed the honoring of the emperor (2:13, 17) in a time in which he is commanding blasphemous worship of himself.[5] This is granted: Peter would have been far less likely to write such a thing when the worship was coerced.  Yet since the time of Augustus Caesar, Roman emperors had been heralded as the ‘son of God.’[6] This and its corollary cultic claims were esteemed as blasphemous by Jews and Christians since well before Domitian.  That Peter and his readers are under a blasphemous empire will be of subsequent interest to the arguments of this essay.

Suffering and Enemy-Love

That 1 Peter was “written to a suffering church”[7] begs that whenever he gives counsel, the reality of that exilic suffering be kept at the front of the reader’s mind.  Whether putting away malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander (2:1), or abstaining from fleshy impulses (2:11), or submission to authorities (2:13-25), or facing physical attacks (3:8-17), that his advice is given amid suffering and exile cannot be ignored.  He’s not just concerned about in-house quarrels, but about how God’s pilgrim people when reviled by the outside world, respond.  When Peter talks about how to deal with suffering, he is talking about how to deal with exile.

The Jews, of course, had no shortage of wisdom and literature concerning how to deal with suffering and exile.  Throughout their exile, both physically exiled in Babylon for 70 years, and spiritually exiled in their own land for over 400 years, the Israelites thought and wrote much about what this suffering of the righteous means amid God’s bigger purposes.[8] Their most sustained and moving musings are Isaiah 40-55, where God’s kingdom program is brought to birth by God’s Servant[9] (who is interchangeably Israel or an individual).  The climax is reached in 52:13-53:12, the fourth Servant Song, where the sins which kept Israel in exile are atoned for by the suffering and death of the Servant, and so brings them redemption, victory, and shalom.[10] “The kingdom would come through the suffering of the righteous,” says N.T. Wright.[11]

This connection between the suffering of God’s people and the birth of God’s kingdom would have been at the fore of Peter’s mind, if we are to imagine him credibly as a first-century Christian Jew.  And indeed, that fourth Servant Song, so full of suffering and hope, is interwoven throughout his exhortations to Christian slaves in 1 Peter 2:18-25 (esp. 2:21-24).  Bartlett says that “the passage presents themes from Isaiah’s passage to illuminate ways in which Christ served as an example for suffering household servants and for all suffering Christians in the communities to which 1 Peter was written.”[12] Therefore just as Isaiah’s Suffering Servant embeds meaning to Jewish suffering, so also Jesus as that Suffering Servant embeds meaning to Christian suffering.  Thus:

Israel’s suffering anticipates » Jesus’ redemptive suffering « Church’s suffering commemorates

As Winn says, there is a “mystical link between the suffering of Christians and the suffering of Christ.”[13] Indeed, the latter is both tied to final hope and present formation, as in 4:13f. - “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.”  Both sufferings are interwoven.

The answer to how to deal with suffering, with unjust authority, with exile, is found in following Christ’s example.  The twin questions above of ‘What is God doing with this suffering?’ and ‘How ought we respond to this suffering?’ turn out to be bound up together.  How God dealt with suffering in Jesus is how the Christian is to continue to deal with it.  The victory of God on the cross is to be implemented and commemorated in the lives of Christians on the same terms as it was accomplished - nonviolently and with love.  “Christ’s passion is the path Christians take”, says Bartlett of 1 Peter.[14] His passion has “direct social consequences”[15] for all who suffer, in Peter’s mind, and takes the shape of that cross (cf. 4:1: “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking…”).  Richard Hays says, “1 Peter holds up the suffering of Christ as a paradigm for Christian faithfulness”.[16]

Jesus taught a heart orientation by which to live this way: enemy-love, which 1 Peter picks up explicitly.  In 3:8-17, the author echoes Paul[17] in writing:

“Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.  For

“Whoever desires to love life and see good days,

let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit;

let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.

But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” (3:9-12)

From this passage it is resoundingly clear: Christians must practice non-retaliation as enemy-love.  Yet here it is not grounded in obedience to Jesus, or to participation in his suffering, but in hope for a future blessing.  That is, Peter “orients his discussion of enemy-love around hope.”[18] Just as Jesus’ obedience to nonviolent enemy-love on the cross were vindicated in his resurrection, so also the suffering Christian’s nonviolent enemy-love will likewise be vindicated on the day of their own resurrection.

Additionally, “1 Peter joins loving the enemy with “seeking peace” in a degree of explicitness not found in any other biblical writer.”[19] To Peter, Christian nonviolence and enemy-love are not only grounded in obedience to Christ’s past victorious example and hope for Christ’s future return, but in seeking that future shalom in the present.  Suddenly, the arms of Peter’s imagination stretch in both directions to bring both past victory and future hope together as the suffering Christian nevertheless seeks peace.  Motivated by Jesus’ nonviolent victory, assured of future blessing, the Christian’s task is to transform the present with God-empowered enemy-love.  Past, present, and future inspirations for nonviolence in the face of suffering all burst forth from Peter’s heart.

This way of responding to suffering is deeply subversive.  Instead of following the wisdom of this age and responding to violence with violence, Peter’s solution follows the wisdom of God as demonstrated in Jesus Christ.  The demonic logic of hate, which lies behind impulses of retaliation, violence, and injustice, is neutered by Peter’s flat insistence on the power of love.  To the tyrant’s chagrin, the suffering they mean for evil is to be joy to the suffering Christian (4:13).  If Christ’s suffering is victory, is redemption, then Christian participation in that suffering by modeling his enemy-love in the present points to God’s redefinitions of power and victory.  Allegiance to power and victory over suffering through suffering marks all human institutions of government and power as parodies at best and blasphemies at worst.  Yet the way of salvation, as we shall see, to Peter does not permit flippant disregard for them.

Salvation Up-ending Evil

The shape of salvation in 1 Peter is one of community holiness (1:13-25), cruciform obedience (2:18-25; 3:13-18; 4:1), and enemy-love (2:13-18; 3:8ff.).  Though these three are tightly woven, it is worth briefly summarizing each within the contexts of salvation and this paper’s broader meditation on 1 Peter’s subversive spirituality of nonviolence.

Community holiness as part of the way of salvation means living under a new lord and new sense of holiness - no more living in “former ignorance” (1:14), futile ancestral ways (1:18), flippancy to authority (2:13-17), violent retaliation (3:9), or recreational debauchery (4:3-4).  Instead they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (2:9a); Peter’s readers, in continuity with national-ethnic Israel, are to live as an obscure people reflecting the holiness of God among the world for the world.  “They are to forge for themselves an identity that sets them apart without necessarily setting them in conflict with the pagans around them.”[20] Their love for one another and their holiness, ironically, only add to their sense of exile.[21] This is the kind of salvation they have entered: into the community of “eschatological reality,” marked out below the emperor and among the pagans by their countercultural holiness, their primacy of love, and self-induced obscurity.[22]

Salvation to 1 Peter also entails cruciform obedience and enemy-love, which we have covered earlier as being the threads which hold together suffering to God’s sovereign solution.  Salvation cannot but mean engaging in this subversive work of nonviolent enemy-love.  Indeed, as William Klassen says, salvation as eschatological reality “takes the form of seeking peace by loving the enemy.”[23] It is the spiritual milk of the good Lord (2:1-3) that grows the Christian up to salvation.  Without enemy-love, the shape of salvation is skewered;[24] it loses its subversive power to call the present age to account, it is severed from the sufferings of Christ, and it retains the former ignorance.

First Peter’s idea of holistic salvation, then, is necessarily subversive.  Its challenge of relationally-bonded holiness draws out the consternation of surrounding pagans; its cruciform obedience under suffering neuters the power of the unjust, the mocker, and the tyrant; and its enemy-love looses the cords of final salvation for even the enemy (2:12, 4:12-18).  Peter’s doctrine of salvation, like the resurrection, breaks out of the hope at the horizon of the future, slams into the present and up-ends relationships and structures of hostility and suffering.

Submission to Evil as Subverting Empire

Jesus’ solution to exile-under-empire was submission as an expression of nonviolent enemy-love.  So also Peter does not call for flippant disregard or armed rebellion against government. Rather, the Christian response of enemy-love, honor, and submission call those institutions to account and allegiance to the one who is truly lord: the one whose death and resurrection have now redefined the significance of suffering.  That new definition takes concrete shape before the powers in submission.  Thus Peter’s answer to oppressive structures, be they empire or slavery, is submission (2:13ff.) held in paradox with allegiance to the person and ways of the one true lord (3:22).

But Peter’s comments in 2:13-17 are not an approval of the emperor’s legitimacy, his authority, his values, or his actions.  No: They are couched in a broader argument that the holy love of God extends even to the emperor, and so should the love of the holy community.  In the same breath, Peter tells his readers to honor everyone, and to honor the emperor, as if to say “Honor everyone - yes, even the emperor!”  This submission-allegiance paradox has more to do with the Christian’s response to the Lord Jesus’ own enemy-love than it does any merits of the emperor’s own.

The emperor, it was noted earlier, was competing in Peter’s time for the title of ‘lord of the world’ with Jesus and YHWH - a flaring blasphemy to all Jews and Christians.  Yet even this blasphemer par excellence deserves the love of God as embodied in his people.  Far from a bent knee to this sort of blasphemous ruler, 1 Peter’s insistence on honoring the emperor grows out of a love for and an allegiance to the true Lord, thus subverting and denying any claim by Caesar to that title.  It cuts to the epistemological heart of Caesar’s claims and controls, and gives it to Christ.

The life of God’s sojourning people perplex and offend Caesar and his governors as they give respect and limited obedience to them, while giving worship and total obedience to the risen King.  Indeed, as Peter has argued for, their respect for the former is only in response to the latter!  More threatening still: their nonviolence is not just a benign act of compliance, but a re-enactment of God’s own victory over empire, evil, death, and suffering.  Thus, in a very upside-down way, 1 Peter’s nonviolent enemy-love toward Caesar is in reality an act of outright sedition and subversion.  This is a submission which, in God’s economy, subverts the empire.

Conclusion

First Peter has been a book of paradoxes - salvation entails suffering, subversion includes submission.  Neither the revolutionary nor the status-quo can easily hold their ground before its wisdom and inspired meditations on the social outworking of the crucified God’s victory.  Peter’s epistle is miles from the civically flaccid status that many have esteemed it with, and burrows with bleeding rigor to the heart of Christian civic duty, but re-imagined around the cross and exile.

As John Howard Yoder wisely penned, “The willingness to suffer is then not merely a test of our patience or a dead space of waiting; it is itself a participation in the character of God’s victorious patience with the rebellious powers of creation.  We subject ourselves to government because it was in so doing that Jesus revealed and achieved God’s victory.”[25] Truly: let us continue in 1 Peter’s wisdom and God’s power to subvert today’s empires with deep love, and receive what suffering that may come with joy as our very salvation.

(Image credit: AlbinoFlea)

[2] Bartlett, David. L. “The First Letter of Peter: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections”, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XII.  (Nashville, KY: Abingdon Press, 1998), 240.

[3] Ibid, 236.

[4] Ibid, 234.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Wright 2000

[7] Winn, Albert Curry. Ain’t Gonna Study War No More: Biblical Ambiguity and the Abolition of War.  (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 167.

[8] Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God.  (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 589.

[9] Ibid, 602.

[10] Wright, N.T.  The New Testament and the People of God.  (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 276-279.

[11] Wright 1996, 601.

[12] Bartlett, 282.

[13] Winn, 168.

[14] Bartlett, 282.

[15] Yoder, John H.  The Politics of Jesus.  2^nd edition.  (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 236.

[16] Hays, Richard.  The Moral Vision of the New Testament. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996), 332.

[17] Romans 12:14-21, 1 Thessalonians 5:15.

[18] Klassen, William.  Love of Enemies: The Way to Peace.  (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 122.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Bartlett, 241.

[21] Ibid, 238.

[22] Klassen, 122.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Piper, John.  “Hope as the Motivation for Love: 1 Peter 3:9-12″. NTS 26 (1980), 212-31.

[25] Yoder, 209.

I believe that God has brought his gentle rule into our world by sending his Divine Son to become the real human being Jesus of Nazareth, letting us kill him unjustly, and then raising him physically and verifiably from the dead. In these acts, God our Father has provided, and Jesus his Son has accomplished, atonement for our sins; the Holy Spirit applies this salvation to people when we believe, spiritually uniting us with Jesus.

God is advancing his mission of world rehab, not through any kind of coercion, but only through this simple message, empowered by his Holy Spirit: God loves humanity, hates death, and is restoring us to him and to each other through Jesus. As the Word of God become flesh, Jesus is the embodiment of God’s message, the focal point of his mission, and the focus of his inspired scriptures.

The Old and New Testaments are the word of God, which he exhaled in both their content and language. Rightly interpreted, they are completely trustworthy in all they teach, and are Christians’ only authority for what we must believe and how we must live. The Bible is not a rule book or an answer book, nor is it an epistemological foundation for justifying claims to knowledge. Rather, God’s word preached is useful as the Spirit’s tool in cutting through our resistance to God’s message and triggering faith in our hearts. The Scriptures are God speaking words of life into human history. No ideology and no other message besides the gospel which these Scriptures announce to us has the power to break down the dividing walls of hostility that exist between people groups, or to break down the imperialism rising from within every human heart that leads nation (or neighborhood) into war against nation. Because of my confidence in the usefulness of Scripture, interpreting, communicating, and applying this living, powerful word of God will be the focus of my ministry.

In the American political context, there is a desperate need for believers to articulate how the Christian message meets the challenges of human poverty and violence. Rich and poor, black and white and Hispanic, urban and suburban all want these intractable social problems solved, but none of us seem to know how to solve them. I don’t pretend to have the answers either, but I do know that in Jesus’ ministry, his message about God’s rule coming to earth had everything to do with people trusting in God for salvation in this world instead of hording wealth away from the poor or resorting to violence in order to make things right.

There is a sense in which every church must refuse to be political. Everyone needs the gospel, not just rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. Jesus did not allow his most ardent disciples and excited crowds to crown him king. He said that his kingdom was from another world and that it was for this very reason that his followers did not use violence to prevent his arrest and crucifixion. The cultural transformation that the gospel brings does not advance with the coercive arm of the state, the protection of police and military forces, or any use of violence. Every time the church has attempted to use these means to aid in the propagation of the gospel, it has backfired. For example, in our American context, we must be careful never to use evangelism as a back door strategy for creating a voting block that holds power over non-Christians.

But this does not mean that the Christian message about God’s rule on earth in Jesus has nothing to do with politics. As the parallelism in Jesus’ prayer teaches us, the coming of his kingdom means God’s will being done on earth as it already is done in heaven, and God’s will involves those things we often think of as political values: liberty, social order, peace, human equality, and justice. The most basic sins that spring from the human heart, such as pride, greed, malice, and vengefulness, lie at the root of social and political misery. Further, evil becomes systemic within cultures through spiritual forces, human leadership, idolatrous ideas, and poorly designed structures. Feeling hopelessly trapped by these systems, people often become fatalistic, bitter, and self-destructive.

Even though he refused to accept political authority or use political power to advance his cause, Jesus did have a political agenda. Jesus tried to persuade his fellow countrymen to follow him in loving their enemies, the evil empire of their day, instead of violently fighting for their liberty. When it became obvious that they would not accept his spiritual leadership, Jesus warned them that their chosen path would lead to the destruction of all they hoped to preserve. The gospel about God’s rule that Jesus announced was his alternative story about Israel’s past and future, a story that centered on him and functioned as a replacement to the violent and moralistic stories all the other would-be leaders were telling.

Moses had warned that if Israel abandoned the Lord’s covenant or rejected his covenant representative, then he would abandon them to imperialistic violence. But even though Israel rejected him, Jesus offered himself as a victim to the violence of empire, handed over by those he came to save. As Israel’s representative before God, and through Israel representing all the families of the earth, Jesus absorbed on the cross the covenant curse we all deserved. In his resurrection, God vindicated Jesus as his chosen man on earth before his followers, his people who rejected him, and before the empire that sought to crush him. Jesus’ resurrection also vindicated his message, the gospel, as both true and victorious: we’re not crazy to think that God’s rule of peace and justice could come into a world plagued by violence and poverty through a man who refused to use the political violence of empire to advance his cause.

The church in America today needs prophetic voices that will challenge the ideologies of empire with the truth of the gospel. Young boys playing video games and being recruited by gang leaders and military recruiters need to be told that mastering the skillful use of violence does not make them more manly or human. What about the common idea in political science and philosophy that violence and war are essential components of human progress and development? Should we think about the struggle between good and evil in terms of benevolent empires extending the efficient violence of order into a world of chaos?

It’s never legitimate to get what you want through war or extend your power and influence through violence. Human history does not make progress through violence and war. War should never be used to determine who governs any part of the world, whether that means removing a government through violence or establishing one. Violence is only legitimate when an existing government must use it as a last resort to enforce justice and protect human life—never to extend the reach of its law enforcement jurisdiction, its geopolitical influence, or its territory. Violence is not a legitimate means of state building or seeking political legitimacy.

When human pride makes us discontent within the spheres of influence and responsibility God has given us, we begin to build empires instead of communities. One of the first symptoms of this dysfunction is poverty. In Jesus’ teaching as well as the rest of the Old and New Testaments, we find repeated those who have more than they need to live and enjoy life are responsible, both personally and corporately, to provide for those who do not have enough to live or enjoy life. In America, our racial and class history has created an environment in which most of us look down on poor people for the way they under-value work and education, but we refuse to recognize that we have made it next to impossible for them. Rich and middle class whites and blacks have fled poor and working class communities, and we use exclusionary zoning and opposition to Section-8 housing to make sure they can’t follow us. This process perpetuates itself because the drain of economic resources, political clout, and family stability makes it harder on those left behind who feel trapped, angry, hopeless, and alienated from the system that is helping everyone else get ahead. Eventually, any individual who succeeds moves away, which further hurts the community. No wonder those communities don’t value individual success and make fun of kids for acting white or uppity! The same issue is afflicting rural communities where any kid who succeeds moves away–hence the meth epidemic.

Part of the solution is to rule out the use of exclusionary zoning, which imprisons poor people in ghettos far away from job opportunities, with unreliable transportation, in dangerous neighborhoods where the rest of us don’t want to live either. Another answer is for plain heroism: large numbers of people willing to buck environmental and economic incentives and start valuing poor people the way we should. If we want poor kids to heroically face peer pressure and value work and education in ways that make them stick out, then we need to be willing to stick out, too, even if that means living closer to or even in unstable neighborhoods. We shouldn’t become little rich messiahs come to save the day, just the good neighbors our “people” have failed to be for too long. Simply by including poor people in our social and friendship networks, and by opening our lives up to their involvement, we can do a little bit toward overcoming the great gulf that class has become in our society.

True human development is essentially a peaceful process of creating beauty out of normality, complexity out of randomness, and culture in harmony with nature. God made this world, filled it with abundant resources, and set us humans on a track of peaceful development. That’s why we should participate in his fight against poverty and violence; they don’t belong in his world! Pastors should make it their central mission every opportunity to explain how the good news about Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and future coming spell the end of evil and misery in this world, especially the violence and poverty in our neighborhoods and among the nations. Jesus is calling rich and poor people alike, powerful and powerless, liberal and conservative to turn away from their pride and the ideologies they have come up with to solve their own basic problems and, instead, put their trust in the gospel of his Kingdom.

Author Bio:: Bill is a senior at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis and is passionate about applying non-violent theologies of liberation to the context of planting churches in U.S. cities.

That’s probably why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a New Yorker article I just read: “Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why do so many evangelical teenagers become pregnant?”

While I’m not an evangelical, I am a Christian, and I know a thing or two about how religion shapes our earliest understanding of our sexuality. I also know something about the kinds of consequences those perspective can have down the road. I actually blame my divorce, in part, on some of those understandings, but I’ll get into that later.

Being the mother of three girls, ages 8, 10 and 12, also makes me extremely interested in this subject. Our youngest began asking questions about how babies were made more than a year ago, soon after Jason and I got married. Her logic was “you’re married so that must mean you’re going to have babies soon.” She’s a scientifically-minded girl, so we decided it was time to get technical in our explanation of baby-making and birth control.

At any rate, all three of our girls are inquisitive and somehow exceptionally cute, so Jason and I are already bracing ourselves for when they’re 12, 14 and 16. We do not take the subject of sex education lightly, and we’re convinced there must be a better paradigm for sexuality than the one most Christian children are inheriting from their parents.

Pregnancy & marriage statistics are tied to red & blue states…

What I found so fascinating about the New Yorker article was how clearly the statistics back up what I’ve long suspected. The five states with the highest divorce rates, the youngest marriage age, and the most teen pregnancies are all traditionally red states (by traditionally red, I mean pre-Obama, 2008). When you reverse the statistics, you get all blue states, with the exception of North Dakota, which had one of the five lowest teen pregnancy rates.

Here’s how the article’s author, Margaret Talbot, summarizes the red state-blue state divide when it comes to teenagers, sex and pregnancy:

Social liberals in the country’s ‘blue states’ tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in ‘red states’ generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

My own story, and the one I want for my daughters…

As someone who grew up in a blue state and a “blue family” that went to church every Sunday, my own experience fell somewhere in between the extremes. The biggest problem, looking back, was that sex simply wasn’t discussed much–at church, home, or school for that matter.

I knew, though, that my parents would be greatly disappointed in me if they knew I had sex before I was married. I also connected that viewpoint to their religious beliefs.

It follows, of course, that living with my college boyfriend after we graduated was also not going to be OK, which is the main reason I got married at 22. How long can healthy young adults be expected to exist without sex? Or how long can they sneak around trying to hide the fact they’re having sex, whichever the case might be?

I know LOTS of people who married young for essentially the same reason–they were either tired of waiting to have sex or they were tired of living a lie and feeling guilty about it. My second husband, Jason, is one of those people, too. Unfortunately, as the New Yorker article points out, “women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later.”

That doesn’t mean everyone who gets married too young gets a divorce, or that I directly blame my parents or our religious beliefs for my early marriage and divorce. It does mean, though, that encouraging my daughters to not get married too young is a greater priority to me than encouraging them to hang on to their virginity, at all costs.

Encouraging waiting, while proclaiming: “sex is good!”

It is also very important to me that our kids understand their sexuality as a good thing, not a bad thing. When parents pound the “sex is bad” idea into their kids’ heads, in an attempt to convince them to avoid it, it can seriously backfire. Not only does it not keep them from having sex, but it develops in them a deep sense of shame and guilt in relationship to their sexuality. I suspect that issue played a complex, negative role in the problems in my first marriage, too. It’s time for churches to break the guilt-spreading cycle!

There’s no doubt that this issue is more complex even than it was when I was growing up. Here’s another good summary of the problem from the “Red Sex, Blue Sex” article:

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon.

It’s confusing. I do really want my daughters to wait–to respect their bodies and their sexuality, and to take every decision they make very seriously. I want them to be extremely cautious and safe. I don’t, however, want them to mess themselves up in the process of waiting.

So I’m not sure how I’ll tackle the problem with my girls in the coming years. What I do know for certain, though, is that not talking about it is not the answer. Continuing to blindly present sex to our kids in the same way it was presented to us in our churches and homes and schools is not the answer, either.

Honesty and lots of information are always good places to start, as parents. Maybe I’ll just say to my girls something like this: “I love you so much, and I want the best for you. It’s really complicated. There are so many angles to consider, some which will affect you now, and some which will affect you down the road. Here’s how I messed up, and what I learned. Here’s a vision of the hopes I have for you.”

And then maybe I’ll let them read this post, too. Is there anything to lose in that?

Author Bio:: Kristin Tennant is in the business of daily defying what it means to be a divorced-Christian-liberal-remarried- Midwestern-mommy-writer.

She is a freelance writer and author of the blog Halfway to Normal. She and her husband and their three daughters live in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

At the tail-end of our conversation (which took place on election day, no less), I asked him why we (the established churches in Chico) don’t support more, both financially and with our lives, the kinds of programs he has started and will continue to bring to fruition. I mean, how can we spend so much energy and time and money on elections, for example, and then have nothing left to give when it comes to poverty and homelessness in Chico? He rightly told me that individual Christians actually do form a large base of the donations they receive, but that business folks and secular organizations/individuals also pick up a significant share. (Aside: one of the youth I used to work with really loved going to serve with me at the Jesus Center. He saved up his money for weeks and then gave more than what was required for him to participate. The fact that he was not a Christian (at all!) did not matter much for his motivation. His reasoning was much more concrete than that: after having been homeless, he wanted to give back to the community!) Perhaps the “secular” community actually keeps alive the work they do at the Jesus Center more than we think.

Bill made the point that the Jesus Center isn’t simply a place for folks who are hungry to eat food, but also a place where the community is engaged and, ultimately, is imagined differently. Rather than offering a specialized definition of what it is they do, Bill has attempted to assert a more holistic and radically-shaped mission: hospitality in the name of Jesus. The whole of the community, to make it plain, is involved in that, not simply the homeless. As Shane Claiborne has said, the way of Jesus offers liberation from the ghettos of wealth as well as the ghettos of poverty. It takes place through friendship and community, and, most obviously, through service to one another.

One of the most exciting new ideas Bill mentioned during our conversation had to do with employment and housing partnerships among community members. He dreamed that one day the folks who need a hand (but don’t have all the necessary paperwork or history or addresses) will be able to get connected with local apartment owners and employers/apprenticeships (all vouched for and subsidized through Jesus Center staff). I was literally stunned when he said that. For starters, what a completely revolutionary and subversive idea. How unlike the ordinary political and, dare I say, governmental approaches. I know there are similar programs available for, at the very least, our area’s youth (funded through our county governments) and those folks do a great job. An awesome job! But in order for that to happen, an enormous amount of red tape and rigmarole must take place. With Bill’s plan the local community funds the endeavor and, even better, gets to participate.

Sadly, however, it did occur to me that, given the fiscal budget of each Christian community in Chico, we could have easily funded this project already. This is the Big Elephant shitting on the carpet, my friends. I found myself asking, Why hasn’t this happened yet? Why haven’t we even thought of supporting this kind of economy (versus our blind allegiance to the consumer economy)? I think it has to do with imagination. Right now, our imaginations are captivated by Youtube, NBC, and national voting. Never before in history has there been a culture so defined by mass media and the cult of imperial consumerism. If we weren’t given the options (on our voting day’s ballot) we apparently wouldn’t know how to embody the peculiar politics of Jesus. Kind of sad, don’t you think?

The more I think about it, Bill’s approach represents a completely different way to do church. Moreover, like I imply above, it’s a different way to go about politics. It is a body politic so to speak and it centers itself on the enemy-loving, self-sacrificing way of Jesus. This won’t go over well with folks who want America–”the Christian nation”–to be great. But the world and every kind of household within it seems to be urgently waiting for a response from Christians who seek the Gospel of the Kingdom–the true gospel of “hope,” “change,” “reform,” and “security”!

Like was already said, as a nation, we just got through spending an obscene amount of time, money, and energy both loving and hating national politics and its politicians. Frankly, it’s disgusting how little of those efforts will find their way into our local communities, not to mention into our debts or toward loving our enemies. And how shameful is it that our distinctive Christian imagination has lost its radical nature in the allure of totalizing politics, economics, and faith? I suspect the only way to get back our captivated imaginations is to re-member the peculiar Way of Jesus as local members in communities and places of faith. Perhaps then we won’t look for a savior on Capital Hill, but instead will look, with the folks at the Jesus Center, to the least among us. Perhaps, instead of wanting to elect a candidate, we’ll have an encounter with the difficult-to-elect God of grace, becoming rooted and secured and at home with our Commander-In-Chief and His peaceful Way.

Author Bio:: Jason leads a small faith community in Chico, California. His day job is as a social worker and therapist. He and his wife are expecting their first child in December! You can read more from Jason at www.waysofresistance.com.

He said, “Yes, there are other interpretations [read: opinions] of the end times but the reason I ascribed to dispensationalism is because dispensational eschatology determines the ecclesiology [doctrine of the church] I practice.”

I hesitantly agreed and told him I wanted to chew on that for awhile. After a few moments of contemplation I became increasingly unsettled in my agreement. Questions began to arise in my mind…

Does my lack of an certain eschatological view influence how I do church? And should that matter…?

What are the different views of end-times? And what church doctrine follows these different/competing views?

Have we founded our practice of church [our ecclesiology] on pillars of opinion, rather than on Jesus?

These questions fueled a vicious appetite for knowledge on eschatology, on doctrine, and on Jesus… After a heavy dose of Dispensationalism in grad school, I skimmed around some Post-Millennialism and Amillennialism doctrine, and after this confusing foray I decided to balance the scales and dig into the Gospels, reading and re-reading in different formats, translations, and paraphrases what Jesus had to say on the “end of the world.” In the search I hung on Jesus’ commentary on the Kingdom of God, a central topic to the dissonance found in the eschatological debate. The Kingdom of God, which most Dispensationalist offer as the ‘coming Kingdom,’ seems to be more than We have been brought up to know.

We being most Westernized Protestant Christians.

In dispensationalism the ‘coming King’ is central to the story of tribulation, doomsday economics (wars, famine, one-world government, et cetera) and the final judgment. Of which the ‘coming King’ rides in on a white stallion with a sword of truth cutting down the enemies of truth… staining the ground with blood and covering his robe with the evidence of disobedience. If this interpretation is true, Jesus is a dichotomist in his ways. How can he die on a cross for us (the sinner) taking with him the burden of sin, only to come back and murder all who have not spoken his name in a prayer. He comes first to love the prostitute, the tax collector and the sinner and second to kill them…? It just doesn’t fit. I have struggled with this duality for some time and may not be any closer to an answer, but I can tell you that my ecclesiology will not be influenced by a “death threat theology.” It seems that we have shrunken our view of Jesus, and bloated the perception of our own reflection… Creating a very self-centered gospel message. A message that focuses on the eternal fate of our soul rather than the present state of our neighbor. In this vein it is easy to ignore the social, environmental and political atrocities that are happening around the world and even in our suburban backyards. This ignorance drives Duane Clinker to realize that,

“specific evil action is not required to wipe out vast sections of humanity, but simple apathy.”¹

Apathy. We proselytize. We don’t familiarize.

Familiarize - familial, family, group of people relating to one another. When we focus on conversion rather than being familial - we cut short the full meaning of the Gospel. But a familial lifestyle is hard to live out — I don’t want to make sinners apart of my family. I don’t want to love the addicted, the depressed and the broken… It is easier to lead someone in a prayer than lead them down the road to recovery and victory over sin. We are called not to the “coming Kingdom” but to bring the Kingdom here and now… Your kingdom come, Your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven is present tense!

Reality: This world can be a bad and ugly place…

Optional Response #1: Do not worry about the bad and the ugliness of this world… because once everyone hears about Jesus (through evangelistic messages and cool Jesus video’s)… Jesus will come back to judge all, giving a shiny new world to the good and throwing the bad into an eternal furnace of fire.

Optional Response #2: Blessed are the spiritually poor - the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed are those who mourn, who weep about sin and long for how things are supposed to be - they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek and gentle - they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness - they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful - they will be shown mercy. Blessed are those who are pure in heart - they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers - they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness - the kingdom of heaven is theirs. And blessed are you, blessed are all of you, when people persecute you or denigrate you or despise you of tell lies about you on My account. But when this happens, rejoice. Be glad….

You, beloved, are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes bland and loses its saltiness, can anything make it salty again? No. It is useless. It just lies there, whit and bland and grainy. It is tossed out, thrown away, or trampled.

And you, beloved, are the light of the world. A city built on a hilltop cannot be hidden. Similarly, it would be silly to light a lamp and then hide it under a bowl. When someone lights a lamp, she puts it on a table or a desk or chair, and the light illumines the entire house. You are like that illuminating light. Let your light shine everywhere you go, that you may illumine creation, so men and women everywhere may see your good actions, may see creation at its fullest, may see your devotion to Me, and may turn and praise your Father in heaven because of it.²

Option #1 is easy… Invite a neighbor to church on “Invite a Friend Sunday” but never actually get to know their needs.

Option #2 is tough… It’s hard and self-sacrificing to go to a homeless shelter, a prison, an orphanage, or a neighbor and share with them the love of God; loving hands of service, loving words of encouragement, loving loaves of bread, and loving clothes for the head.

So I guess, my mentor was right - my eschatology does affect my ecclesiology.

Someday I am going to die, it may be tomorrow or it may be when I’m 90… and that will be the end of my time - my eschatology. And at this moment of judgment I will hear a remark on how I did community/church/family - my ecclesiology… And my hope is this will be the words that flow from my Father’s lips:

“Well done, good and faithful servant. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”³

________
1. Duane Clinker, Social Holiness; unpublished manuscript, found in “Everything Must Change” by Brian McLaren, pg. 244.
2. The Voice of Matthew by Lauren F. Winner - the beatitudes; Matthew 5:3-16
3. Matthew 25:35-36

Author Bio:: I am constantly wading through the gray areas of life, looking for crayons, with which to scribble the beauty of God’s love… I blog at www.duregger.net. In the daytime I work as a project manager for LifeChurch.tv’s Digerati Team.

1. Breaking away from the “Christian” music industry
2. Making anti-nationalism a theme on all three of his solo albums
3. Challenging the political and religious status quo
4. Giving away music for free

…runs a site called Noise Trade, where albums from independent artists (including Derek) can be downloaded for free (if you provide 5 e-mail addresses) or cheap (pay what you want).

Today, just in time for the election, Derek re-released his 2005 political manifesto, “Mockingbird,” on the site for free. Included in the download is a bonus track worth the price (or not) of download called, “How then shall we vote?”

The sermonette-followed-by-a-song is a concise and poignant reminder about Who we serve for real and a strong suggestion that for many, voting just might be a violation of conscience. He says that under no circumstances should we violate our consciences, no matter what our culture tells us are our “rights” not to be taken lightly.

Derek is out there sounding the trump, folks. Let’s support him by passing along the news of his CD re-release, pointing people toward his subversive music store, and serving the King of Kings.

Author Bio:: Steve Holt! is a disciple, writer, husband, and proud father to an apricot mini poodle, and he lives and conspires in East Boston, MA.  You can find his musings about faith, culture, and mission at harvestboston.wordpress.com.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally posted

The day after the election may be a downer for people like me who were seduced by the adrenalin of this election season. Mornings will continue to dawn and the progress of late fall to winter will continue. Eventually I will be coaxed into looking around at the world we live in and reminded that a few things may be different, but a lot stays the same, a nation that controls half the world’s military might including nuclear arms, a global economic crisis, an impending world food crisis and serious environmental challenge are in front of every one of us. Some people are praying and this will help. Activists some of whom pray too, will be wise to take a few moments to reflect on what their priorities should be. Unless I have a longer view I may fall into a very long depression because so little has changed. 
In the 1968 election between Nixon and Humphrey I refused to vote and to this day friends challenge me for this act of civic mistrust in the hard won right to vote. Although I didn’t believe elections were a bad thing I was so disappointed that Hubert Humphrey, the nominee, persisted in the rhetoric of war. The Viet Nam war seemed to have no end despite the intense work of that pivotal year, 1968. When Richard Nixon was elected with even fewer credentials for peacemaking and a “secret plan” I got depressed.

Admittedly some of my depression may have been due to working in a war situation for many years and my unrelenting pace to get it stopped. Depression of course has many sources not all of which can be blamed on an election or a war. All in all I think that constitutional change based on one person one vote that is actually counted, preferably without the need for lawyers, is a better way to move forward than relying upon the whims of a combination of oligarchs, big money, and military power. Those big three already have disproportionate influence even when one person one vote works reasonably well.

But that is the big challenging picture. I am not powerless nor am I ready to cede important matters to the elected ones. Real change largely comes from the bottom and the participation of people, which at the same time, is not to say that all local change work is necessarily good. A group of thugs, land grabbers and polluters can change a community to function out of sickness or fear. It is one thing to have a long term vision. Doing the nitty gritty work to get there is another. It takes people who are devoted enough to attend meetings, do all kinds of messy tasks and put forward an authentic face of hope. This election has already shown that realistic, disciplined organizing works.

We shouldn’t have to wait for elections to get down to work, nor should we have to wait for elections to ignite our hope and vision. Elections are messy and often imperfect. So are our local efforts for change and we easily run out of energy. Closing a local military base or recruiting office, pressuring an irresponsible corporation to stop producing toxic products or overturning terrorist style interrogation tactics - takes five to twenty years or more. It transcends election cycles. Abolition of slavery took more than 100 years and in fact it is still not over. The U.S. still has to make good on the 40 acres and a mule promise. Change comes from good strategy carried out by a trained team of people who try all kinds of tactics from delegations and discussion, to education, and nonviolent direct action.

Most change work has to do with various arts of communication. Some can be learned in institutions with respectable names but the integration of symbols with words, actions, humour, and perseverance is always being written in a fresh way in the field. Much of the real work is done by people who have not benefited from studying in respectable institutions. Together we invent on the fly in real life situations.

I have a simple rule for myself in the development of tactics that build on a long term strategy. Two questions keep me on track. Will my words or actions give the people on the other side something to think about or even talk about over coffee? And, will my actions awaken positive and uplifting emotional responses from the heart? Maybe you could call this the Stoltzfus Rule of Hearts and Minds.

The long term personal demands of the work should not be easily glossed over. Hard facts of injustice must be rigorously researched, judgements need to be made and a vision articulated so that it can be grasped by people. Negotiations and change only comes at the final stages when money, wealth, power, policy and the common good are put in their proper place. Along the way I may be tempted to engage in diatribes about how evil someone has become. I hope that I don’t choose that track but when I do I know another voice within will remind me that the spirit of nonviolence has been violated and I have capitulated to messages worthy of negative political advertisers. With time and good critics I will get back on track.

At least as big a challenge will be the fashioning of a real team to get on with the work. Genuine team players recognize strengths and weaknesses within themselves and co-workers. Team diversity hopefully includes people who are good at organizing the data, doing competent analytical work, maintaining team life and at least one out front visionary and coordinator who sees the road ahead. The more diversity of age and ethnic life in the context of gender balance, the more competent the team will be over time. Team members also need to understand how they and others behave in crisis or emergency moments of opportunity. There are ways to train together and prepare for this.

It is a rare local community that does not have at least one expression of the four global threats that are upon us, militarism and the environmental, economic, food crisis. If twenty percent of our congregations, mosques, and synagogues would determine as a highest priority to form and support action teams, in five years the world would be on the road to recovery. Over ten years we would see larger solutions beginning to form out of a collage of our efforts. There would be fewer corporations and money managers who try to corner destructive control for quick profit, fewer military bases, more protection for the earth, and the pain of hunger could be narrowed. We will know that the spirit is in this by the fruits of these efforts.

Author Bio: Until 2004, Gene Stoltzfus was the Director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a program of Brethren, Mennonite and Friends churches and other affiliated organizations that places teams in high conflict zones like Haiti, Hebron (West Bank), Iraq, Colombia, and Mexico. In addition CPT violence reduction projects have been developed in urban North America, with Native people on the highly conflicted border between Mexico and the United States. CPT includes 40 trained full time peacemaker corps members twelve staff people and nearly 150 reservists (persons trained to work in CPT settings for up to three months each year) who emphasize human rights protection, nonviolent action, peacemaking campaigns and documentation.

I’ve received dozens (perhaps hundreds) of blog comments, emails, Facebook messages, etc that challenge this position of mine as being “unintelligent” or “moronic” or “lame” or “stupid” or “un-American” or “un-Christian” etc. As far as I can tell, the only one of these adjectives that fit me is the one about being “un-American.” 

Unless the election is closer than we think, all of this talk about non-voting will soon be over–at least until the next major election. This post is intended as my final post about this issue for the election season. So take it for what its worth.

Electing Not to Vote

One of the more interesting political books this season is Electing Not to Vote, edited by Ted Lewis from Wipf and Stock. The book includes chapters from a variety of folks (Catholic, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal) exploring the viability of non-voting. As you can imagine, most of the reviews have been negative. Like this recent review from Christianity today:

No, this is primarily a book about feelings—the essayists’ feelings, their strenuous moral wrestling, their evolution to their present stage of enlightenment. I read a lot of books. I can’t remember the last time I read a book as smug as this one.

The whole review continues in this theme. John Wilson, reviewer, never actually engages the ideas. Instead he acts as though it has no intellectual merit and attacks it for being too “emotive.” Interesting. The review is actually reminiscent of a Sojourners review from Lauren Winner who, in an uncharacteristic lack of intellectual honesty, seems to have written a review that doesn’t actually engage the ideas in the book. Instead she dismisses the whole book as advocating a withdrawal from political engagement:

The contributors to this volume see not voting as a compelling act of faithfulness, witness, and politics. But, especially in a world where love of neighbor is tied to citizenship, not voting may be equally seen as a kind of quietism—quietism that a Christian who must be active in the world cannot afford.  

If you’re interested in a rather scathing response to Ms. Winner’s review, check out what Halden has to say here. 

So far, I’ve only found one positive review from the mainstream sources. William Willamon wrote a generally positive review of the book on Christian Century:

Even more troubling for Christians, voting attenuates the church’s political imagination and deludes us into thinking that we have actually performed some worthy social action when we have pestered church members to get out and vote. If voting is not a definite evil, argue a number of these authors, it is at best the weakest and most ineffective form of Christian political action…

Sadly, this book has robbed me of any theological rationale for my furtive actions in November; I just vote out of habit. It’s what people in my economic bracket do. My church even encourages me in it.

I agree with most of the authors who warn that voting only encourages the functionaries of the modern state to think that the people (who are now the functional equivalent of God) have given them some sort of popular mandate to do as they please to defend the state and its power. For the most part, I found their arguments to be biblically radical and curiously compelling.

Still, despite the wonderfully biblical and theological arguments of the essays in this little book, I confess that I expect to slither secretly into a voting booth in November and cast my ballot.

The most interesting thing for me this election has been the amount of anger I’ve received. People often assume that I’m getting itno people’s faces about this. I am not. Just for the record, almost everyone in my intentional community is voting–including my wife. It isn’t something I get frothy-mouthed over. In fact, it isn’t even something that I’m all that passionate about in the grand scheme of things.

Why do I keep writing about it? Because it raises all sorts of interesting issues. For example, I find it interesting that people often tell me that “if I don’t vote, then I have no right to complain.” This sort of sentiment reveals the myth that voting is the primary, most effective way of bringing about change. Folks almost ALWAYS make a leap in their thinking from non-voting to disengagement. That is why in the Winner article I referenced above, she mistakenly assumes that non-voting is a quietist position. 

If someone didn’t know I was a non-voter, they might draw the conclusion that I’m very politically active. After all, protesting against ATK (who makes clusterbombs) is one of my weekly rituals. I also talk about politics a fair amount–often challenging people to rethink what it means to bring change in society. And Missio Dei is increasingly involved in neighborhood political and justice issues. In the future, I see myself taking increasinly proactive positions on poverty, homelessness, war, and immigration. But my primary way of doing this will never (I hope and pray) be voting. 

Voting isn’t the most direct or effective way of electing for change. 

Sure, but that doesn’t equal non-voting

Some folks tend to be very sympathetic to my political sensibilities. But many of them (like the folks at Missio Dei, my faith community) are still planning to vote. If someone wants to vote as a lesser “weapon” in their arsenal of political engagement, I’m not goint to gripe about it too much. In my mind, voting is an American sacrament that affirms a fallen system that often stands in opposition to the reign of Christ. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is idolatrous or sinful. 

Some of my friends have argued that the most socially just way to vote is to vote for third parties. In fact, when my friend Becky Garrison visited, she raised this point several times, suggesting that the Green Party (which has multi-ethnic female runningmates) is much more prophetic choice. 

Meanwhile, my economist friend (who also has theological training) dlw advocates a New Kind of Third Party. He argues that local third party movements are a great way for Christian Radicals and Christian Anarchist types to engage the system. In a recent forum discussion on Christarchy, he writes:

This is the sort of decentralization of authority that is feasible in our world and, as a Christian, I believe that the early Christians were political outsiders, not unlike how third parties in a two-party dominated system are outsiders and so that should be our preferred location for political activism as a critical but not central part of our holistic witness to others.

He argues for strategic voting, seeking to create third party places, decentralizing the political system, and finding ways to organize local communities around third parties that resist the dominance of the two party system. If I were to become a voter again, this is the sort of approach I’d take. In fact, it tends to be the way I think about local engagement (see dlw…you have made at least SOME impact in my thinking).

If you’re going to engage the political system through voting, make sure you’re being shrewd as a serpent. Don’t buy into the hype. Be informed. And don’t be deceived–voting is indirect, ineffective, imagination-stealing, and often takes up more of our energy than its worth. 

For another interesting take on voting, check out Shane’s thoughts on the God’s Politics blog.