Reflections on Faith and Politics: Part 1, Between Nihilism and Idolatry

I've been ruminating, again, about faith and politics. A topic, given our times, that I come back to again and again.

In this post I want to talk about how God always gets pulled into idolatrous projects, and will be perennially pulled into idolatrous projects. But also how attempts to remove God from public life creates its own toxic and dysfunctional outcomes. In short, God always sits between nihilism and idolatry.   

The case about idolatry is easily made. Humans are religious and worshipping creatures. As James K. A. Smith puts it, we are Homo liturgicus. Paul Tillich describes how we live with a horizon of "ultimate concern." These ultimate concerns imbue life with sacred fulness, purpose, and meaning. We pursue life within an existential arena of heroic moral action. 

The trouble is that humans are also sinful and broken. Consequently, the religious and sacred is co-opted to provide divine justification for the protection and pursuit of my interests. God baptizes my way of life. God legitimizes a world that privileges and serves my needs and agendas. This happens at all different scales. At the individual level I use God to justify or rationalize selfish choices. At the group level God stands with Us over against Them. This is how God becomes pulled into racial, political, and nationalistic ideologies. 

What I'm describing isn't new. We all know that this happens. My point here is simply to say this always happens and will always happen. In fact, I'd suggest that this the default situation. I know that is a very harsh and cynical thing to say, but I don't know how an honest reading of Scripture leads to any other conclusion. Read 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. Idolatry was the default. Read the gospels. Jesus declared the temple in Jerusalem to be desolate. Again, idolatry was the default. Read Revelation. Idolatry is the default. I think Jesus is clear on this point: "Narrow is the way that leads to life, and few find it."

Few find it. Idolatry is the default.

If that's true, then it stands to reason that most of the "Christianity" we observe in America is false worship. "Christianity" is used, just like every religion gets uses, as divine legitimization for individual, political, and nationalistic interests. Consequently, there is nothing strange or shocking when we see Christianity being pulled into ideological movements. This is precisely what the Bible expects will happen. Again, on the pages of Scripture idolatry is the default. That holds for us. Much of the Christianity we observe in the culture will be counterfeit. Something that is true of all religions in all cultures throughout history. Our time and place is no different. 

Given this situation, how religion comes to sacralize material, political, ideological, and nationalistic self-interests, many are tempted to jettison the sacred altogether. God is just too dangerous. Transcendence is a cancer. The divine is poisonous. The safer course would seem to be to reject any role for religion in public life. God needs to be amputated from "God and Country." We need a wholly secular politics based upon liberal, humanistic, and Enlightenment ideals. 

The problem with this is that nihilism has its own toxic and dysfunctional impacts upon society. If you evacuate human life of sacred, ultimate, and transcendent significances what remains behind is a existential wasteland. Life is evacuated of heroic meaning and we are left unmoored, rudderless, and set adrift. 

On this point, Fredrik deBoer has recently argued that political violence is increasingly being produced by nihilism. Violence becomes a way to construct meaning. Here is a bit from deBoer's much commented upon piece:

This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available. The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.
I also think there's come reciprocal causation going on here. Nihilism creates a hunger for meaning, and that hunger makes people vulnerable to ideological radicalization, which has its own temptations toward violence. 

And beyond violence, there all the mental health consequences caused by nihilism and its crisis of meaning. 

The point here is that you might be afraid of God and how God is chronically used to justify bad things. And Christians are rightly demoralized by toxic manifestations of Christianity. But you should also be afraid of the Void. 

What I'm suggesting here is that human life is lived between nihilism and idolatry. Because humans are sick, sinful, and self-interested our religious beliefs tend toward the idolatrous. Much of the Christianity we behold in America is fake. And will always be fake. Again, this is the Biblical expectation. This was the explicit teaching of Jesus: "Few find it."

Beholding the political uses of sacred legitimization, many run away from God. This seems to be the safer path for our shared, public life. Christians, therefore, come to renounce Christianity. Secular elites view religion as a civic enemy, as a threat to democracy. But there is no safe harbor to be found in this direction. If you evacuate the nation of the sacred you're running headlong into the Void. 

So this is what I think. The Christian political witness is a dance between nihilism and idolatry. Our ultimate concerns will always tip toward self-interest. Idolatry will be our default state. False religion will dominate our cultural life. And since Christianity is the majority religion in America our false religion will be Christianity. There is no escaping this. And yet, efforts to address this idolatry that strip ultimate concerns from our social, political, and national life will create their own dysfunctions, ranging from nihilistic violence to mental health crises to heightened vulnerability to ideological radicalization. The Void is no answer.

Consequently, I believe the fundamental task of political theology isn't really about the shape of Christian political engagement or the content of policy debates. The fundamental task is, rather, prophetic and existential, providing us the tools necessary to navigate between nihilism and idolatry, between false religion and the Void. 

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