Faith And Activism, or, The Bible is Not a Blueprint For Society

The Independence of Faith and Politics

Nothing is easier, it seems, than to draw political implications from scripture. The Right has integrated opposition to abortion and gay marriage into its gospel, and on the Left it has become trendy to invoke Jesus’ compassion for the poor in support of the welfare state.

As different as these two might seem to be, however, their error is exactly the same: they apply a collectivist, political hermeneutic to scripture. They read it as if it were a blueprint for society.

But the scriptures care not a whit for any political, economic, or cultural structures. Any inferences in that direction are just that: inferences. Where politics and institutions are mentioned, they are treated as external facts, within which the Christian life is to be lived.¹ Indeed, for the Roman citizen of the time, the Republic long since become an empire, policy was very much an external fact.

Of course, the ascendancy of popular rule has created new duties for the Christian in his role as voter which the Bible does not directly address. It is this vacuum that leads a politicized mind to fill in the political blanks with the individual commands of scripture.² Hence, charity implies a welfare state, and sin requires prohibition.

But the care of scripture is for the soul – the fundamentally individual soul – whose salvation cannot be impeded by external circumstances. If the gates of Hell cannot prevail against the Church of God, how much more impotent are the gates of Rome, or Soviet Russia, or North Korea against it? Nor, conversely, can salvation be aided by external circumstances. Just as persecution cannot destroy the Church, so no laws exalting the Church or protecting the sanctity of marriage can add anything to anyone’s virtue or salvation.³ Thus the inference from individual to institutional is a chimera.

So does faith have any role in politics? Can any institutional inferences be drawn from the individual commands of scripture? Can one’s faith inform his political stand against slavery, as with John Newton, for example, or must he merely not participate himself in the institution?

Individual and Society

Scripture has nothing at all to say about how the government of the United States of America should be run. However, in its care for the individual soul, it does preclude the Christian from advocating certain policies, which affects him in his role as a voter. It does not say that slavery (or Communism or Capitalism or…) is an immoral institution; institutions cannot be moral or immoral. Societies do not merit favor or disfavor from God. The cruelty of the institution does, however, suggest that it would be sinful for an individual in his capacity as a voter to support it as it existed in England and America.

The distinction may seem unnecessarily subtle. After all, isn’t the result abolitionism whether scripture constrains the individual or society? And isn’t society made up of individuals anyway? But there are several important practical differences. First, because the scriptures are speaking to you and not to society at large, it is always inappropriate to justify policy based on scripture. One may convince other Christians that they must support or oppose one policy or another using scripture, but when talking policy with a nonbeliever, scripture has nothing to say to him. In the first place, he will not be convinced of the importance of scripture to policy if he is not convinced of its importance to him for salvation. Justifying policy by appeals to scripture puts the former before the latter, which is useless to him and counter to the aims of scripture.

This means that policies like opposition to gay marriage, whose defenses apart from (faulty inferences from) scripture are flimsy at best, are unjustifiable for the Christian. The Bible does not absolutely preclude support for such a policy, but an individual moral proscription does not translate into an institutional policy prescription, and absent compelling nonscriptural reasons for it (which I have yet to see), the Christian has no business supporting it.

Likewise on the Left with the welfare state. Scripture does not absolutely preclude support for it, but it lends none itself. The Bible does not care so much about the material status of the poor so much as the soul of the giver. This is the reason that even the poor are commended for giving (Mark 12:44, 2 Cor. 8:2), which would be counterproductive if the goal was to maximize wealth in their pockets. As with institutions, scripture treats economic factors as external data. “The poor you will always have with you” suggests no Biblical mandate to eradicate poverty as such, and certainly not to force others to contribute, even apart from evidence and theory that such schemes hurt more than they help.

To be sure, individual compassion is a fruit of sanctification and a mandate from scripture for the Christian. But societies are not sanctified. Governments and institutions are not sanctified. Individuals are sanctified. Welfare policies do not make our society more moral – either separately from the morality of the individuals making it up, or as an average of the morality of the individuals making it up. The very concept of a “moral society” is nonsensical. It simply bureaucratizes what was once a truly moral imperative. The social worker does not have to be compassionate to give someone else’s money to the less fortunate,and neither does the voter. To cast the welfare state in terms of “compassion” is always a canard, and a perversion of scripture when scripture is invoked.

The Role of Faith in Politics

Finally, to cap off this list of policies to which scripture gives no imperative, a policy which scripture does speak to for the individual is immigration, whose moral imperative I have written on before.

Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,” says the LORD of hosts.

-Malachi 3:5

As much as it might seem, even this is not a political verse. It does not speak to the justice of a society. However it does preclude certain political stances for the Christian, and requires, so far as he exercises a voice in policy, that he champion the cause of justice for immigrants (yes, even the illegal ones). The Christian who votes to oppress the alien is not obviously less morally culpable than the officer to whom he gives the authority to do so. This verse may be used to exhort Christians to disavow injustice in their own lives and votes, but to the wider world, appeals must be made to a shared conception of justice, or to trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk.

It may also be objected that such an interpretation would require Christians to support a ban on sorcery as well, which leads us right back to Biblical support for a ban on gay marriage. However – and this is something many social conservatives miss – there is a logical distinction between allowing and perpetrating. Voting to perpetrate injustice makes you party to that injustice. Voting to allow a sin does not. Does permitting sorcery and adultery make you guilty of those sins? Of course not. There is no moral duty incumbent on the Christian to forbid others from practicing them, and there are few compelling practical reasons to do so given the costs. The same is true for oppressing the wage earner and turning aside the alien. A moral duty to prevent these things would be an infeasible individual imperative, despite compelling reasons for a government to disallow it. The salient point is that when one votes to turn aside the alien as a matter of policy; when one votes to oppress the wage earner in his wages, one is not merely allowing these things, but perpetrating them, and becomes culpable for them. The analog to sorcery and adultery is not merely allowing them, but voting to support them with government money – actively perpetrating them.⁴ Scripture does preclude the Christian from supporting this.

In sum, as Pope Leo XIII notes, Christian doctrine does not demand a certain institutional structure of government.⁵ More than that, it does not demand anything of “society” at large, much less a specific set of policies. Its call is salvation for the individual. And just as sanctification cannot proceed without prior justification, so the scriptural constraints on the Christian’s political support are useless to the unbeliever. Let the Christian not adulterate the Gospel with a political program, nor attend to the speck in the eye of society before the plank obscuring his own reading of scripture.

1. See the passages on slavery in Ephesians 6. Even an institution so obviously wrong from today’s vantage point was not condemned as such by the scriptures. Many have faulted Paul on this point, and others have defended him saying that the survival of the early Church required deference to the institutions of the empire. The essential point is, however, that to condemn the institution as such is entirely beside the point. The example of slavery will be discussed further below.
2. On the Right there is also much misunderstanding stemming from confusion regarding the distinction between the political covenant between God and Israel, and the spiritual covenant between God and his Church (e.g. the conceit that 2 Chron. 7:14 is a promise applicable to America). But that discussion exceeds the scope of this chapter.
3. I have written much on this topic before, so I will only summarize here. See Christian and “Family Friendly”, “Natural Marriage”, and The Toaster Marriage Canard.
4. Even the Christian who does not see a Biblical mandate to overturn Roe vs. Wade should therefore nevertheless stridently oppose government funding for abortions.
5. Immortale Dei, 36.

   “[N]o one of the several forms of government is in itself condemned, inasmuch as none of them contains anything contrary to Catholic doctrine, and all of them are capable, if wisely and justly managed, to insure the welfare of the State. Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share greater or less, in the government.”