Worship as a Political Act

The post from Keith at ATR on the political significance of the sacraments reminded me of this essay by Peter Leithart from a few years ago.

The problem with injecting politics into the church’s worship, according to Leithart, is that it presupposes that worship, considered in itself, is apolitical:

My insistence on the inseparability of liturgy and politics is not an endorsement of trendy efforts to make Christian liturgy “more relevant.” Liturgies for the homeless, for AIDS victims, for the oppressed peoples of the earth, for the whales, for an end to Florida’s recounts, for whatever are objectionable not only because they are kitschy and not only because they bind worship to a political agenda. More fundamentally, they are objectionable because they assume that the liturgy itself is apolitical and needs to be made political. Those who wish to purify the liturgy of politics and those who want to inject contemporary politics into the liturgy share a common basic outlook: both assume that politics and liturgy are separable zones of life, which can be mixed or not mixed as we please.

Worship is a political act because it orients us to our citizenship in the heavenly city which trumps all earthly allegiances:

Paul did not require that Christians renounce all rights as citizens—he himself made use of his rights as a Roman to advance the gospel—but the fact that the Corinthians ate at the Lord’s table meant they were citizens of the Lord’s city to which their citizenship in Corinth had to be subordinate. This was not an apolitical act or a renunciation of politics, but a sign that the Church was a different sort of political order. As such, it was a direct challenge to the claims of the pagan political order.

This challenge requires that Christians maintain a critical distance from all earthly politics:

The Eucharist was a sign of the Church’s distinctness from the world, a sign that she constituted a new “city” that had invaded the ancient city, a sign that, contrary to Aristotle, the virtuous life was lived in the Church rather than in the Greek polis. By participating in this ritual, Christians were committing themselves to maintaining a critical distance from the political system. They were committing themselves to what Rowan Williams has called the “fundamental Christian vocation of not belonging.” And that commitment, enacted liturgically, is emphatically political.