Wanted – a Christian political philosophy

James Skillen of the Center for Public Justice reviews three recent books on Christian political responsibility (via Byzantine Calvinist). He helpfully distinguishes someone like Jim Wallis as a “civil-religionist of the left” from the more counter-cultural stance of someone like Stanley Hauerwas.

Skillen criticizes Wallis for essentially cherry-picking quotes from the OT prophets as though they were direct policy prescriptions for today. Rather, Skillen argues, Christians need to pay attention to the whole Bible and the normative guidelines that arise from it in order to apply them to contemporary situations.

Wallis has no hesitation about deriving public policy ideas from eschatological prophesies and does so as easily as the pro-Israel lobby of Evangelicals draws its policy ideas from other prophetic passages. Does either side do justice, however, to the prophets or to the formation of sound public policy?

Skillen concludes that there’s still a lot of work for Christians to do:

We exhibit little public unity even in our understanding of how the prophetic messages relate to God’s covenant with Israel and to the Messiah of Israel, Jesus Christ. Beyond that, we exhibit little consensus around even the most basic of political philosophies. We should not be surprised, consequently, to find that we have difficulty achieving a consensus on particular public policy issues and on the responsibility government bears for any number of needs and problems people face. There is much in these books that provides food for thought and motivation for taking civic life more seriously. What is needed beyond that, however, are real organizational efforts that can bring Christians together in political service.

Skillen here puts his finger on something that’s been bugging me for a while. The whole debate over “values” that we’ve seen in the wake of last year’s election has all too often remained on the level of superficial platitudes. Take, for instance, the argument about poverty. Wallis’ oft-repeated point that there are more verses about poverty in the Bible than virtually any other “social problem” may be true, but it doesn’t really get us very far since it’s something practically no one denies! Thoughtful conservatives don’t think that society has no responsibilities to the poor – they think that the policies they favor are better for the poor than those offered by liberals.

That, it seems to me, is where there is need for fruitful debate. The question is not whether God wants the poor to be helped (everyone concedes that!); the question is what is the best way to do so. The values debate often seems to center around intentions and sincerity (who really cares) rather than results. Impugning your opponents’ compassion may be more personally satisfying, but it’s pretty hard to see how it will actually help those most in need. Granted, there may be people who really don’t care, but since there’s really no way of knowing that, isn’t it better to focus on the public effects of the policies they advocate?

To endlessly debate who really has “values” is as unhelpful as it is tiresome. Values need to be placed in the context of a political philosophy and an understanding of the complex causes of things like poverty, not simply used as clubs to beat one’s opponents with.