Opinion

Why It Makes Sense To Preach Christ To The Political Choir

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Alan Keyes Former Assistant Secretary of State
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Lately in emails and comments I’ve encountered criticism for writings that think through the challenges America faces on a basis explicitly Biblical and Christian. Once upon a time people chided me for preaching to the choir. Now it seems they are upset at me for preaching at all, when it comes to politics. I think this is directly related to the support some self-professed followers of Christ are proclaiming for the Trump mirage (as I call his con artist bid for the presidency). It’s hard for people who support him logically to justify what they’re doing in Biblical terms, so they’d just as soon forego discussions on those grounds.

For most of my public life I’ve analyzed the ever more fateful crisis of America’s political life in Biblical terms, so the fact that I do so now has nothing to do with the Trump Mirage. His “Wizard of Oz” presidential bid is just the presently most telling sign that the crisis is nearing a conclusion fatal to rightful liberty. I bring the Bible into the discussion because concepts drawn from the Biblical perspective were the essential basis for America’s hitherto successful experiment in republican self-government. In particular, the assertion of God-endowed unalienable rights, for whose sake Americans waged their war for independence from British rule, makes no sense except in the context of Christ’s understanding of right action.

Though much America’s elite rejects, or deeply discounts, the importance of Christian ideas in our politics, the behavior of our politicians at election time suggests that they know better. They still take it for granted that some appeal to Christian conscience is needed as they address the issues of the day. Few if any are taken in by the demonstrably false notion that “most Americans” have abandoned the Christian perspective. The left sells its socialist programs with rhetoric about helping the poor and voiceless. But until the Christian era such powerless people were considered irrelevant to government, except as fodder for the incessant warfare of their overlords.

Then Christ made charity the essential ingredient of true obedience to God. So how a society treated the poor and powerless became a litmus test of both decency and strength among people who professed to accept the Christian standard for justice. The most assiduous proponents of God-denying materialism, like Karl Marx, nonetheless vaunted their concern for the downtrodden. Their ideological vehicles are fueled by it. Though raw power is the key to their understanding of reality, the material forces they profess to rely upon are constituted and carried forward by morally indignant individuals, much the way data is now conveyed by informing a stream of energy in a certain way.

Moral indignation depends on respect for a moral standard, in light of which one reacts for or against events that affect the human condition. The standard of conscience that was, by and large, responsible for the democratic impetus that shaped human events in the nineteenth and twentieth century, owed its substance and propagation to the challenge from Christian evangelists. By preaching the Gospel of Christ, in word and deed, they confronted the elitist moral perspective that had for ages informed views of good and bad, right and wrong, noble and ignoble in most parts of the world.

According to those views people only counted for something in relation to the elite they served. The members of that elite were like the flowers of humanity. All others labored as leaves, branches and sap, to contribute to their flourishing. (Flourish: from the Latin florere “to bloom, blossom, flower”). But Christ said to His disciples “I am the vine, you are the branches”. This gives pride of place to those who serve, as being closer to the fountainhead. Christ thus gives precedence to the good will of those who produce the final result, even though they do not share in its fine appearance. He thus implanted the seed from which spread the egalitarianism that eventually took over the ground of conscience, so that, in the course of the twentieth century, it seemed for a moment poised to cover the whole earth.        

Though people see essentially materialistic ideologies like Marxism as egalitarian, this is a misconception. Among individuals, material power is in no way equally distributed. The agglomeration of human power also depends on factors (such as strength, intelligence, and skill) that make equal distribution unlikely, to say the least. However, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes may have hit upon the key to surmounting this obstacle when he observed that “there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything than that every man is contented with his share.”  

Hobbes seems to apply this observation to human intelligence, but it more aptly applies to the human power of imagination. When imbued by passions readily available to all, it comes close to fulfilling his famous dictum. Da Vinci’s visions of beauty may be more impressive to some than the average man’s dream of a good dinner, but not to that man as he is imagining it. Nor is the product of our passionate imaginings always in vain. When we react, in our imagination, to some good turn we see ourselves doing or receiving, the pleasure we experience within is as real as good taste, or touch or smell.  

Just as we may be moved to eat by the imagined dish a good smell brings to mind, so we are moved to applaud ourselves and others at the imagined prospect of some noble deed. Even if we lack the means to implement our thought, the will to do so has an effect that can, in the right circumstances, translate to a real disposition to act, or else support the actions of others.

The true idea of democracy depends upon this power. For it is a power within the reach of any, however materially bereft, who do not withhold from others the good wishes that are, in spite of all, within everyone’s capacity. As the good news of Christ’s way of living spread, it dispelled the contempt that prevailed in elitist cultures against this power of mere goodwill. For once it is accepted that the favor of the highest Sovereign unlocks the highest good, the poor who are willing to seek His favor become more than the equals of those whose pride keeps them from seeking it.

Indeed, because they have nothing to lose, and no power to extort some gain from others, the value of their sincere good will may be portrayed as the purest vote of good intention, reflecting the standard of disinterested right that Jesus points to as the standard of God. This is the goodwill that moves the poorest mother to feel and take responsibility for her child, even though the child has no power on earth to enforce that responsibility upon her. That mother’s goodwill cannot be taken for granted, but neither can it be taken away. In respect of it, a sense of right distinguishes itself. It appears where God’s provision intersects with human self-determination to produce the rightful liberty that every human heart is capable of.

This liberty comes from God. It is cast away by human pride and self-sufficiency. It comes again as God makes good the sacrifice of innocence by which His good intention for humankind is revived. This revival is the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. It is the liberty of unalienable right, which all are able to exercise provided only that they are willing to accept the good seed sown, by God’s grace, within them. This is the unalienable right of liberty to which the American Declaration of Independence refers. How can that liberty be reclaimed unless we remember to ponder the Word in which it is proclaimed? And why are those who do remember blameworthy on that account?

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Alan Keyes