Constantinianism refers to the time in church history when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine. The political theologians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas have described this moment as the beginning of a long, dark history for the Christian church. Sometimes this moment is called the "Constantinian heresy." According to this view, the witness of the early church in its first three centuries of existence, which was essentially pacifistic, was lost and obscured. After Constantine, the church became conflated with Imperial power. Everything since Constantine, what we call "Christendom," is contaminated by the marriage of church to Empire.
Constantinianism was all the rage during the Bush administration because it was a theological tool to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. During those years, Christian blogs and books would routinely describe the United States as an "Empire," drawing a historical equivalence with Rome. That comparison, however, hasn't held up all that well. Mainly because the US isn't an Imperial power. America is a democracy. We don't have a monarch, but a president we can vote out of office. The political issue isn't Constantine, but July 4th, 1776.
Simply put, Americans have the power of the vote, a power that gives us some say in our political future. Christians, however, have disagreed about how to use that power. A related issue is Christian participation in the state, especially as police and soldiers. The earliest Christians quit the Roman army upon their conversion, considering it impossible to be a solider and obey Jesus' commands in the Sermon on the Mount. After Constantine, that bright ethical line became blurred. When the Empire became formally Christian it was unseemly for Christians to push the killing required by the state onto pagans and infidels. If Christians wanted to lead the state they were going to have to get their hands dirty. And so Christians, for the first time in history, picked up the sword as a necessary evil.
This history brings us to two different views concerning Christian political engagement.
There are some Christians, like some within the Anabaptist tradition (and even within my Church of Christ tradition), who follow Yoder and Hauerwas in arguing that the church has to extract itself from involvement with the state and return to its pre-Constantine purity. Christians shouldn't pledge allegiance to the flag, serve in the military, or vote.
Other Christians follow thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr argued that after 1776 Christians have to assume their share of political responsibility. You have a responsibility to vote. And Christians have to do their fair share of the police work and soldiering. We can't pass the buck to non-Christians in an effort to keep our hands clean. Sure, Christians carrying guns will taint the "purity" of the early Christian witness, but history has called us to assume our political responsibilities.
Niebuhr's view of politics is often called "Christian realism," as it rejects the view that a "pure" Christian witness in regards to violence is morally responsible. Further, Christian realism admits the pessimism I expressed in earlier posts by recognizing that the kingdom of God cannot be fully realized on earth due to the fallenness of persons and institutions. We must be "realistic" and accept that we'll have to reconcile ourselves to political approximations of the moral goods we aspire to as Christians. As I've described in this series, a nation state can't embody the sacrificial love of Jesus in its policies. Christian moral ideals are not politically realizable for a nation state. But a state can be more just, inclusive, and fair. Justice, for example, is our best political approximation to Christian love of neighbor. In this view, given that we can make things better through our political involvement, Christians are called to this work, even if they get their hands dirty.
I've rehashed the Yoderian versus Niebuhrian views to finally bring us in this series to the question of Christian political involvement.
My position about Christian political involvement is easily stated: I think both the Yoderian and the Niebuhrian positions are viable options for Christians.
Personally, my sensibilities lean toward Yoder, but I can't argue with Niebuhrian involvement. Mainly because, pace Yoder, I don't think we're dealing with Constantinianism. We're dealing with 1776. We're not dealing with Empire but with liberal democracy. I think you can make a good argument for why Christians should vote for change and serve alongside non-Christians in policing and going to war. True, Christian involvement with killing will muddy the purity of the Christian witness. Christians will be visibly acting within history in ways that are contrary to the Sermon on the Mount. But I'll admit that a good argument can be made that Christians shouldn't push the work of killing onto non-Christians in order to keep our hands clean. We have to shoulder our moral responsibilities.
As a historical example of some of these tensions, I think a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he seemed to be pulled in two different directions. I'm not a Bonhoeffer scholar, but (I think) you can see a tension between the purity of his pacifistic moral vision in The Cost of Discipleship (a reflection on the Sermon on the Mount) with his later Ethics and involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Purity of moral witness versus taking responsibility for history and shouldering the subsequent guilt. Perhaps moral purity is not possible within history. We will always be guilty of something, for acting or not acting. In the framework of Bonhoeffer's Ethics, the ethics of the ultimate (heaven) break down here in the penultimate (history). Facing these choices, I think Bonhoeffer was conflicted. I share that feeling, as I think we all should.
Beyond issues of violence, there's also the the possibility of effecting change through political engagement and activism. I think a lot about the tensions between a quietistic approach toward politics and the great social goods that can be gained through political engagement and activism, like we experienced during the American Civil Rights movement. My Yoderian instincts are to stay out of the political mud, which, while a principled stand, is also very convenient given my social location as a white male. Standing on the sidelines while John Lewis marches into tear gas and beatings on Bloody Sunday in Selma isn't a good look for a Christian either.
So, what should be the shape of Christian political involvement?
As frustrating as this will sound, I think it could look a lot of different ways, all of them compromised in some critical way. It all goes back to my argument for political pessimism and our embrace of "the long defeat." No matter what we choose, guilt will be our destiny. I think of Dorothy Day who, because of her pacifism, protested World War II. As you can imagine, that was a very unpopular decision. Can you escape guilt by being a pacifist during the Holocaust? At the same time, can we avoid guilt when we look at the dead bodies of the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What, exactly, is the "Christian" play here?
If you feel "stuck" pondering all this, that is exactly where I want us. Stuck. Conflicted. Torn between bad choices and searching for "lesser evils." That's the shape of political engagement in the Fall, searching for lesser evils. How do we apply the ethics of heaven here in history?
Here's the conclusion I want to draw from all this: Christian involvement in the state, given the fallenness of the state, inevitably eclipses the Christian witness. That this involvement is a moral duty, I'll grant you. But this involvement, while a responsible and "realistic" choice, never closes the gap between current political arrangements and the "kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." As Bonhoeffer saw, if we shoulder the responsibilities of history we will incur guilt. There is no clean place to stand.
In short, a "Christian" nation, even if it could exist, will stand guilty before the Judge of History. Like all nations, a "Christian nation" stands in the dock with bloody hands. Knowing this, Christian political engagement boils down to minimizing this guilt as much as possible. And we each, in principled ways, weigh this guilt differently. Who was more guilty during World War II, Dorothy Day or Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I can't say. It seems that their choices were both agonizing and haunted. And for me, that's the whole point. Specifically, while I cannot claim to know the exact shape of Christian political engagement, the point of this series is to share that I do feel convicted that I know the emotional tone of Christian political engagement: Haunted.
For me, that is the main task of Christian political theology:
The haunting.
