TIM COSTELLO, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, says seeking political power to impose and enforce a religious vision is a growing problem around the world…
Melbourne, Australia
Be careful what you wish for!
As a young fervent evangelical Christian in the 1970’s, I was frustrated by my own mob. To me it seemed they were quiescent and removed from political and justice issues. I was indebted to their teaching to live a law-abiding, charitable and family-centred life and it formed my core values. But why such focus on evangelism and getting people to Heaven and not equally on social justice issues? If the meaning of the Cross was an ethical vision from the perspective of the victim and the vulnerable, why were they not speaking out on Indigenous issues, reconciliation, refugees and poverty?
A scene outside the US Capitol on 6th January, 2021. PICTURE: lev radin/Shutterstock
I had been taught when young that this was just politics and a dangerous diversion from getting people saved and Heaven-bound. But later I took that dangerous and diversionary path and, along with a group of others, championed the rights of the poor in our area. In fact, I become Mayor of St Kilda in Melbourne (as a Baptist Minister) and we pushed for historic local government investment in public housing (the first council in Australia to break that ground). We stood up for the homeless and addicts and defended the rights of sex workers in St Kilda’s red-light streets. There was a spate of these women being attacked, raped and even murdered with impunity. I saw this as the Jesus thing to do in politics.
“I now have reason to pause and rethink my wish that Christians engage in politics. They have engaged – from Scott Morrison to Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis. Not to mention that 81 per cent of US evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020.”
I was still an orthodox believer but I wanted a faith big enough for the big political and social issues, not a small faith just for personal morality and a quiet life. If the resurrection vindicated the victim of Roman militarism and racism by raising that victim Jesus from the dead, then my faith could provide hope that God sides with today’s victims. The perpetrator, like Pilate, does not always win. It was around that time I began my campaign against state-sponsored gambling that continues today. A predatory industry exploiting the vulnerable and with the highest per capita gambling losses in the world – a blind spot in Australia just as guns are to Americans.
But I now have reason to pause and rethink my wish that Christians engage in politics. They have engaged – from Scott Morrison to Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis. Not to mention that 81 per cent of US evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020 (If they stepped away from him today, he would be politically finished. Yet he may again end up as the Republican nominee thanks to millions of Republican-voting evangelicals. And are the alternative evangelicals of Pence and DeSantis any better?)
I have seen white Christian nationalism surge in the US, stridently emanating from the mob I identified as my mob. Part of my struggle is theological because how do you read the Bible and then storm the US Capitol on 6th January? How do you preach Jesus’ love of enemies and defend gun ownership or separate children from parents and place them in cages at the Texan border? And how do you reduce the Gospel to securing Supreme Court appointments simply so they will overturn Roe v Wade? Why would you suppress telling the truth in schools about US racial history by dismissing it as “woke”? You do all that by engaging in a political Christianity that wants to rule.
And I have watched in dismay the politicisation of other dominant religions. There are different strands of political Islam, from ISIS to Syria and Iran or Erdogan’s authoritarian democratic model in Turkey, but political Islam is dangerously repressive of freedom. There is also political Hinduism practiced by the scary RSS and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP, where minorities in India like Christians, Muslims, Jains and Sikhs are now feeling threatened. Its Hindutva agenda – that to be Indian is to be Hindu – offers a repressive justification that Allah, Jesus and all other gods can be included in Hinduism’s pantheon of gods, so religious toleration is guaranteed by becoming Hindu. It is the secular constitution of India that protects all minorities and they are demolishing that.
Equally, I observe political Judaism with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing religious coalition in Israel. They are furiously building illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, oppressing Palestinians and destroying any two-state solution, all based on their religious vision that God gave Abraham’s children all of Judea and Samaria – including the West Bank. And now Netanyahu is attempting to neuter the Supreme Court, which has been a mild check or restraint on their vision.
A fellow Baptist, Billy Graham, learnt a painful lesson through his engagement and co-option by President Richard Nixon. That is why he subsequently refused to heed Rev Jerry Falwell’s pleas to join the Moral Majority and back Ronald Reagan’s campaign. He prophetically said he feared the day when political conservatives and religious conservatives wedded as the political right would only manipulate and co-opt the religious.
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Religious visions are not the problem. Seeking political power to impose and enforce them is the problem. Plenty of secular visions demonstrate the same danger. The Nazis believed they could create a new perfected human embodied in the Aryan race. Communists believed they could abolish inequality, class and even government with a new workers’ proletariat. Implementing and imposing these visions through seizing power is the threat.
The last question asked of Jesus by His disciples before He ascended to Heaven was: “Is this the time you will restore the Kingdom of Israel?”(Acts 1:6) In today’s idiom that would be, “Is now the time you will make Israel great again?”
American MAGA evangelicals, take note that Jesus rejected a nationalistic power play out-of-hand and insisted to His disciples that their power would be given by the Spirit to be witnesses throughout the world, to all cultures about “the good news for the poor”, and that God’s Kingdom is for all – particularly the dispossessed and vulnerable. Witness, not rule, was Jesus’ vision of an age to come where the first will be last and the last first among God’s children, not a nationalist political play.
Visions of the future are necessary to give us hope. But squeezing the present by politicising faith and striving to rule just undermines that supposed future. Ultimately, it is counter-productive and parodies true faith because it ignores the ambiguity and irony of history.
Tim Costello is a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. Tim is also a member of the Sight Advisory Board.
