3.2 (Jesus would vote) For the Greater Good

 Chapter 3 continues in the series, "What Would Jesus Vote?" Here is the series so far:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen
2.2 We're citizens in two kingdoms
3.1 (He would vote) for love of neighbor and enemy

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4. Rather, Paul says in Galatians 6:10, "Therefore, as we have occasion then, let us do good towards all -- and especially toward those in the household of faith." Paul believed that Christians were oriented to do good to all people. He may have put the household of faith first on the list, but all people were on the list, including all the non-believers of the world.

We sometimes encounter any number of excuses to avoid doing good to others on anything like a systematic or macro-scale. For example, some would say that the state shouldn't be involved in helping others -- that it's the job of the church to help others and the government just messes things up. As I write this book, Hurricane Helena has devastated eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina (September 2024). It has been amazing to see some in my denomination spring to action to help, using our church network as hubs to distribute water and other needed supplies. This effort seems absolutely biblical and wonderful in God's eyes. 

However, I might also add that the church would not have been enough for this moment. For all the good the church can do, it is no match for FEMA, the National Guard, the power companies (which are usually monopolies in certain areas), and other aid agencies created for disasters like these. In this case, they have also sprung into action and are doing their part. Aid was approved even before the disaster struck and, from what I can tell, all is playing out as best it can.  

By contrast, others would say that the church shouldn't get distracted with helping others because that's a social gospel, which they think is wrong. Or someone might say it's a distraction from trying to save souls, which is the church's number one business. I once heard an evangelism professor say that since the church has limited resources and the salvation of the world is such an important, urgent task, it simply doesn't have the time or extra resources to give toward anything but saving souls.

We will address all these distractions from doing good in the world soon enough. Suffice it to say, Jesus spent a good deal of time helping people as his first order of business. And it is a myth that the Bible only sees the government as an instrument of justice that isn't supposed to help people. Romans 13:4 says that the state is God's servant for your good. Once again, there is a whole lot of good to be done in the world. More to come.

Utilitarianism and Capitalism
5. Now, we get to the question at hand. What would it look like to apply the love principle to a country or a government? (There is another crucial question that we'll get to in the next chapter, namely, "To what extent should Christians try to make the laws of the land mirror Christian values?" But we'll hold off on that one for now.)

Assuming that the goal was to create a country that maximally played out the love of neighbor in its overall structure, what would that look like? It seems to me that there would be at least three dimensions in play:

1. It would try to set up a structure that brought the greatest good for the greatest number.
2. It would empower and protect the individual so that s/he was not overrun or oppressed by the majority.
3. It would restrain those actors who threaten or endanger the above.

The next few chapters will play out these goals for a thriving (a.k.a. loving) society. In the rest of this chapter, we will talk about the greater good. 

6. In the 1700s, a shift was taking place in British society. It was changing from a society that was largely directed and controlled by a king to one in which its people had more and more say in its direction. It was in this crucible that the United States was formed. As Lincoln put it in his Gettsburg Address, "a government of the people, by the people, for the people."

A man named Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) tried to come up with a way to orient England so that everyone counted, not just royalty and the aristocracy. The idea he came up with was what he called the "greatest happiness principle." The structure and decisions of society should be oriented in such a way that it results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It was a rough idea, perfected by thinkers like John Stuart Mill (1806-73) after him. 

This philosophy is called "utilitarianism." In theory, it is the bedrock of political decision-making. It is the language of the game of politics. Politicians always talk about bringing about good. Of course, it often is not the greater good they are really working toward. Rather, they may be out for the "good" of themselves or the good of special interest groups that are funding them or the good of their party or the good of some small segment of society. But politics typically plays the game of acting like it is advocating for the greater good. 

To some, it may seem strange to invoke these secular thinkers. But it seems to me that the concept of pursuing "the greatest good for the greatest number" is a pretty good starting point for thinking about what it might look like to shape a society that embodies the love of neighbor. Why? Because it aims to create a society where as many people are thriving as possible (without hurting the rest).

Of course, what is good? Questions like this are why politics is so complicated and why genuine Christians often disagree on who and what to support. At the same time, these complications also can open a door for us to make excuses and hide our true motives -- sometimes even from ourselves.

As we move forward, I'm going to very broadly say that to bring about good is to benefit someone. So the greatest good for the greatest number is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number without hurting the rest. That last condition, "without hurting the rest," will be very important in subsequent chapters. 

Again, part of our problem in society is unintended consequences. Sometimes we try to bring about a good but in the process create more problems than we expected. You might fix one problem and cause two more. Or you might plug a leak that later causes a major catastrophe. 

In the next chapter, we will also talk about protections for individuals. One key to American society and other representational democracies is the concept of a "bill of rights" that protects individuals from actions that are positive to a lot of people but to the detriment of others. It might be really "good" for one group for another to disappear. But that isn't allowed.

7. At about the same time that utilitarianism was bubbling up from the British Enlightenment, capitalism was also being born, first set out by Adam Smith in this same period (1723-90). Issues of money are some of the most hotly contested in politics, and few of us are experts in economics. Here is another area where Christians can sincerely disagree -- as well as an area where it is easy to rationalize bad motives and hide them even from ourselves.

Our economic philosophies are so deeply fried into our psyches that it is incredibly difficult to have a sane, objective conversation about them. America's struggle with communism and the Soviet Union for almost a century has made it difficult for us to think rationally about such things, it would seem. A common tactic to dismiss a candidate is to put the label "socialist" on them. No need for further conversation or thinking at that point apparently.

I personally believe that a carefully monitored capitalism is the most likely path to a society where the greatest number of people are most likely to thrive without hurting the rest. Can capitalism hurt people? I believe history shows it can. It's like having a lion as a pet. It can be magnificent, but be careful that it doesn't eat you.

We'll have several opportunities to return to a Christian evaluation of capitalism in the pages that follow. For the moment, let's remember what the founding concept of capitalism was. The original goal of capitalism was to bring about the greatest thriving for the greatest number. The concept was that if you and I are in a back-and-forth over the price of something, we will eventually arrive at a cost that is mutually advantageous. 

You will try to get as much money as you can from me, while I will try to pay as little money as I have to. We will eventually meet in the middle, at a mutually advantageous price. We both win. [2]

Adam Smith's primary goal was to create a thriving society. It was not necessarily to create a wealthy class that would just replace the current aristocracy. In John Stuart Mills' synthesis of capitalism with utilitarianism, capitalism best tries to maximize happiness by setting up a system where, in our back-and-forth with each other, we arrive at the best outcome for the most people... without hurting the rest.

Notice that the operating premise of capitalism is human self-interest. One might even say selfishness. Everyone will try to get as much as they can for themselves. Far from being a sacred system, it is a system that is built on a recognition of human fallenness. That is why I believe it is likely the best core economic system. It has a proper understanding of human nature.

Interestingly, communism might actually work if everyone were a true Christian. Communism assumes that we will all share everything in our reach with everyone else. Acts 2:44-45 looks pretty communal -- they shared their possessions in common and each person redistributed his or her excess to others in need. The problem is that it doesn't work given human fallenness. I believe the twentieth century is rife with illustrations of its failures.

But capitalism also does not accomplish what it aims for without careful monitoring and guidance at times. Here again, we get into areas where even economic experts disagree. Good intentions can bring about unintended consequences that are bad.

For the moment, let us simply say that the goal of capitalism was never to create immense wealth for a few on the backs of the many. That is exactly the opposite of its goals. The initial goals of capitalism fall right in line with the goal of creating a society that loves its neighbor on the level of society.

It seems to me we have forgotten this goal. Milton Freedman famously wrote that the ultimate responsibility of the CEO of a business and its board is to increase its shareholder value and maximize profits. [3] I suppose that statement is in line with the way capitalism works. But the ultimate goal of capitalism must always be to maximize human thriving. Only then does it cohere with fundamental American values and, incidentally, have a chance to play out the love of neighbor on a societal level.

[2] Adam Smith described this natural meeting in the middle as something that would happen "as if by an unseen hand" in The Wealth of Nations.

[3] Milton Freedman, "The Social Responsibility of a Business Is to Increase Its Profits," New York Times, September 13, 1970. As a side note, one could argue that the economic philosophy of Freedman and others played a direct role in the ultimate fall of Russia into oligarchic corruption. Operating on a philosophy of almost no regulation or government intervention in the transition from communism, it is no surprise that Russia has largely become a state run by the incredibly rich with an almost entirely disempowered people. 

Wesleyan philosophy 7a -- What should Christians think about economics?

It's been a few weeks. Next is economic philosophy in our series on a Wesleyan social and political philosophy (see bottom for posts thus far). What should Christians think about money and economics? 

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How might we best exchange goods and services?

1. The problem with cultural influences on our Christianity is that we often cannot see them. Culture is the water in which we swim. We don't even notice it's there. This was the challenge of much missionary work before the late twentieth century. We often partially imposed an American culture that was intermingled with the gospel message without us knowing it. We were not able to tell that it wasn't actually part of the gospel. We had native Americans wearing buns and holiness dresses. We tried to tell European converts to become teetotalers. We told Africans and others how not to dance. 

Much of the American church has also interwoven a cultural version of capitalism into its faith without realizing it. Often, it doesn't fit very well. I consider myself a capitalist, but I believe in capitalism in part because I believe that human nature is fallen and corrupt. That is to say, capitalism functions on the assumption that people are self-oriented and will generally act in a way that they think is in their own individual self-interest. Since Christianity is more other-centered than self-centered, you can see that there is an inherent tension between the two worldviews at the core.

The philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), who emigrated to the United States from the U.S.S.R., provides a good example of this dynamic even in the title of one of her books: The Virtue of Selfishness. In her philosophy, altruism is immoral because it messes up the system. I at least hope it is obvious that this worldview, while not as sinister as it sounds, is thoroughly unbiblical.

To make this clear, not only are Old Testament economics structured to provide for the poor (such as when farmers leave the edges of their field unharvested for the poor -- Lev. 23:22). The New Testament church sold their excess and gave it to those in need (Acts 4:34-35). Paul says not to be selfish but to look to the concerns of others above your own (Phil. 2:3-4). Ayn Rand, of course, was an atheist.

However, I know what Rand was getting at, and it is overall maximum human thriving. It is at least similar to what Adam Smith (1723-1790), the "father" of modern capitalism, was getting at in propounding the idea of a capitalist system. The idea is that if we each act in our own economic self-interest, a system will develop in the middle that is in everyone's maximum self-interest. I will argue subsequently that this makes sense in general but will devolve into oligarchies without careful guardrails.

2. I do believe that, in a democratic context, carefully structured capitalism is the best potential path to human economic thriving. However, I would also contend that Christian faith playing with capitalism is a little like playing with fire. We have to watch that our faith not get burnt in the process, not to mention the marginalized. To be compatible with Christianity, capitalism must be carefully structured to do what it was invented to do, which is not to make a small group of individuals incredibly wealthy but to lift society economically as a whole, bringing everyone along for the ride, so to speak. A "Christian capitalism" is like firemen trying to do a controlled burn that has to be watched very carefully. 

Both capitalism and socialism easily devolve into oppression. To lead to human thriving, both need to take place within a benevolent political context. Given such a context, I believe that a capitalistic-leaning system is far more likely to lead to overall human thriving than a socialist-leaning one. The story of communism in the twentieth century emphasizes the point.

The Bible and Money

3. The enigmatic Parable of the Unjust Manager is a good place to begin our discussion. What a strange story! A manager has been misusing his master's money. He's about to get canned. So what does he do? He does something we would consider corrupt--he cheats his master even more by writing off half the debts owed the master so the manager will have potential patrons when he is fired. What is strange is that Jesus commends him for his shrewdness!

As I have processed this parable over the years, I've concluded that the entire world of the parable is completely foreign to Jesus' world. The whole situation is like Jesus and his audience watching a movie about people completely different from them and the world of the people of God. In the thought world of the parable, the world of money is a foreign world to God's people. Get out the popcorn for this crazy story.

In effect, this is what Jesus' response is in Mark 12 to those who ask him whether Jews should pay taxes to the Romans. He asks whose image is on the coin. Then in effect he says they should give Caesar his coin back (Mark 12:17). The world of coinage has nothing to do with the kingdom of God. It is a foreign world to God's world.

Of course, money is far less avoidable in our world than it was in Jesus' world. We can hardly not engage with money. Jesus' world was still heavily agrarian, and it was possible to trade goods without much recourse to coinage. In Galilee, coinage was more the stuff of taxes than everyday exchange. It was easily tangential to one's life.

Money is not tangential to life in most of our contemporary worlds. We hardly have a choice not to use it and engage it. In that sense, we are forced in our world to play with fire. This fact makes it even more important for us to set down guide rails for a Christian engagement with money. And yes, I do believe that God has given some Christians gifts at multiplying money in ways that are completely ethical and can benefit the church and humanity in general.

The Parable of the Unjust Manager relates to a world that might have been terrifying to Jesus' audience. The Parable of the Talents might have had a similar feel to it (Matt 25:14-30). Playing in that world is like playing with fire. Those Christians who engage it should be careful and shrewd because that world can eat you alive.

The Parable of the Unjust Steward is unique to Luke. Luke is writing for Theophilus, probably an upper-class, possibly wealthy Roman official. The message that Luke may be delivering to Theophilus through Jesus is possibly that the money of the Roman Empire is something he should give away while being shrewd that it doesn't eat him alive in the process. It is a world that requires cunning.

more to come...

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Introduction

• What is philosophy and is it Christian?

Logic

• What is good thinking?

Philosophy of Religion

• What about God?

Philosophical Psychology

• What is a human being?

Ethics

• How should we then live/be as individuals?
• Gender and sexual ethics (part I: general principles)
• Gender and sexual ethics (part II: homosexuality and transgenderism)

Social and Political Philosophy (How should we then live together?)

• How should the church relate to the world?
• What is the best way to govern society?
• What are some fundamental social concerns?

Wesleyan philosophy 6a -- How should we then live together?

The next question in the series. Doing my best to be objective...

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Social, Political, and Economic Philosophy
We have just finished looking at ethics: "How should we then live?" Or better yet, "Who should we then be?"

The seventh question in these Wesleyan thoughts on philosophy broadens ethics out to society: "How should we then live together?" How is society best structured? How should society be governed? How might we best exchange our goods and services? From a Christian standpoint, a crucial question is, "How should the people of God relate to the people of the world?" 

These are the questions of social, political, and economic philosophy. Social and political philosophy is ethics written large.

This subject will take several posts. Here is a tentative map for the next few weeks:

• How should the church relate to the world?
• What is the best way to govern society?
• What are the fundamental social concerns of Christians and Wesleyans?
• How might we best exchange our goods and services?
• Wesleyans and race
  

Christ and Culture
Few of us, Christian or otherwise, get to choose how our society is governed. Occasionally, there are moments when Christians had the opportunity to choose sides. There was the Jewish War from AD66-70, when Christian Jews in Jerusalem had to decide whether to stay and fight the Romans or retreat to Pella. My sense is that most fled (Mark 13:14). In the 1500s, English Christians could either go with the flow of Henry VIII or resist with the Roman Catholics.

In 1600s England, English Christians could either go with the flow of the Puritans or support the king. Perhaps some of my German Baptist ancestors left Germany for the Americas in the early 1700s because they sought religious freedom. In 1776, Christians in the colonies picked sides between the revolutionaries and the crown. There were choices on governance that could be made in the lead-up to the Civil War. Perhaps some of my Quaker ancestors left North Carolina to trade a place of slavery for southern Indiana. 

In 2021, many of those who stormed the US Capitol saw an alignment between their actions and their Christian values. Evangelical Christianity is playing a major role in current civil unrest in the United States, and it remains to be seen where it will lead.

But most of the time, our governance is a given. Most of the time in history, the way we are governed is not something we could effectively change. The more poignant question for Christians is thus how we engage the society in which we find ourselves.

In the end, most of us are not fully aware of the historical forces at work on us. We have likely inherited certain assumptions about how the church should relate to the world. We may not even know we have them. Rather, there is often a prevailing wind in the groups to which we belong. We typically go with the way the wind is blowing. 

We always have arguments, to be sure. We probably think we have thought deeply about the positions we have. But most of us are fairly unaware of the historical forces at work on us. [1] Our arguments come more from our social groups and our historical situation than from reason. We seldom change our minds, just our rationalizations.

In 1951, H. Richard Niebuhr suggested five different approaches of Christians to culture. [2] His categorization has not been without critique. [3] Nevertheless, I still find his categories generative. Here is a simplification of his schema:

• Christ against Culture -- withdraw from society, live in a bubble in a world to which we do not belong
• The Christ of Culture -- accommodate the broader culture, modifying our Christianity
• Christ above Culture -- synthesize Christianity with culture, blur them together
• Christ and Culture in paradox -- live like Christ at church, like the world in the world
• Christ the transformer of culture -- try to influence the culture to become more like Christ

These categories are suggestive, but there is no such thing as a social group that does not have a culture. Culture refers to the norms and practices of a social group. Faced with this typology, almost everyone puts themselves in the last category, as if we stand outside culture in some way.

Every word of the Bible is incarnated in a culture of some kind. There is no such thing as a culture-less Christianity, and the people of God go through cultural shifts within the pages of the Bible.

I wonder if we might categorize Christian engagement with the surrounding culture by way of two "axes," one of which is a spectrum about how activist or separatist we are from society. Then the other axis would relate to whether the church aligns more with the way culture is changing or the ways in which culture is resisting change. We might plot such a grid as follows:

Some Christians assume that the job of the church is to make the laws of America mirror that of their particular Christian group. The law of the land should be the law of their church, a kind of Christian sharia law.

Other Christians see the broader society as something quite separate and removed from the church. Let God take care of the world. Our business is to be the church. "Come out from among them and be ye separate."

Still other Christians think that the world is getting better and better. Society is actually getting more and more like the kingdom of God should be. The church should change for the better as the world changes for the better.

Finally, there are those who think we have to live in the world even though we cannot agree with the world. We inevitably have a split personality. In the church we live and think as the church. Then when we go to work, we live and think like the world.

The last four paragraphs describe different positions Christians--and various Wesleyans--have toward how the church might engage the world. I would argue that Wesleyans have taken most of them at some point or another. Let's look at each of them in turn.

Christ above Culture

1. Niebuhr wrote his classic work in 1951. We had just become the world's greatest superpower coming out of World War II. We had played the key role in the defeat of an incredibly evil force on the earth. The Nazis were outside us. We could be honest about them. Nothing stopped us from seeing Hitler for the pure evil he was. We had no media channel telling us the Holocaust was a hoax. 

As a side note, it is hard for us to realize how many "mild-mannered Germans" did not see through Hitler. [4] Their media broadcast that all Jews were evil, and dissenting voices were squashed. Think of how illegal immigrants are sometimes portrayed on certain media channels today, almost as if they are all murderers and rapists. Many Germans thought it was justice, moral law in action, for Jews to be rounded up and separated. Their removal protected society from their evil influence, they rationalized. Germans were shown pictures of happy Jews playing in the camps. 

See, they are happy in those camps. We've brought justice. We've protected society. They are being treated nicely.

What we call Germany's invasions were, in their view, setting right the injustices of the past. It is the same argument that the Russian church is supporting right now in Russia in relation to Crimea and Ukraine. Those territories belong to Russia, the argument goes. So Germany was recovering the lost German territory of the past. It was liberating Germans from peoples who were oppressing them, and redressing the injustices of World War I. 

Our human capacity to rationalize our social situation and to justify the groups to which we belong is immense.

We like to think that we would have seen Hitler for who he was. I'm not so sure many of us would have, including many Christians. They made the mild-mannered citizens of Dachau walk through the camp after it was liberated so that they could not deny the reality of what had happened there. It seems absurd to us. They must have known. But I doubt that your average German at that time was much different than your average American today, including your average American Christian. 

Coming out of World War II, it was easy for us to think of America as God's nation. We helped restore Israel as a nation in 1948. We put "in God we trust" on our money in 1956. More than ever we saw ourselves as the savior of the world, the hand of God. We were God's favorite nation. As any sociology textbook would predict, we accentuated our virtues and ignored that we had plenty among us with the spirit of Nazis.

2. I would argue that the grassroots of the Wesleyan Church has thoroughly participated in these winds of culture. Niebuhr's "Christ above Culture" refers to a blurring, a synthesis of our traditional cultural values and our faith. Robert Bellah coined the phrase "civil religion" in 1967. [5] He referred to the way in which our patriotism can take on a quasi-religious form. 

Predictably, since our national fervor and our religious fervor have a similar character, they get mixed together. Our patriotism becomes sanctified and mixes imperceptibly with our faith. We have US flags on our platforms. July 4 becomes a religious holiday. Veterans and soldiers become saints. Our political party becomes the only party a Christian could belong to.

I have participated as a minister in a few funerals and burials where the deceased had served in the military. As a minister, I know that the spiritual dimension of a burial far supersedes any memorial of earthly military service. Yet I did not experience those funerals in that way. It seemed to me that the greater religious fervor often attached to the memory of military service. The truly Christian part seemed more a formality to get out of the way. "Are you done yet, preacher?"

This is civil religion, where we cannot tell where our devotion to America ends and our devotion to God begins. It is all intermingled almost imperceptibly. Our political associations are synthesized with our religious ones. It is, frankly, idolatry.

Let me suggest that "Christ above Culture" has been the dominant way grassroots Wesleyans have related the church to the world perhaps since World War II. We have had a hard time distinguishing our faith from certain cultural traditions, including our political affiliations. 

3. If you look back to the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, it is no surprise that most of those Wesleyans were Republicans. After all, it was the party of Lincoln that had, in the end, been the side that abolished slavery. It is no merit since I had no choice in it, but I am grateful that my ancestors were Quakers who left the world of slavery for Indiana. My great-grandfather happened to fight for the Union. That is not to say that his cousins who fought for the South had much choice in the matter.

So being Republican in 1865 was very understandable for a northern Wesleyan Methodist. This association was passed on to the next generation. Inevitably, other Republican positions became associated with our Christianity. If the Republican party tended to be the party of (northern) industry, then capitalism and faith become blurred. Capitalism and faith would eventually become synthesized. [6] 

I'm not sure that many northern Wesleyans paid much attention to the injustices of the South toward former slaves in the late 1800s and into the twentieth century. These would have been reasons for northern Wesleyans to continue to lean Republican in the early 1900s. However, I suspect that our Republicanism was more baked into our religion by that time. It had become part of our culture, the blurring of our faith with our tradition.

My family was afraid the four-term Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, might usher in the tribulation. There were similar fears about the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Might not a Pope turn out to be the Antichrist? Nixon was revered. He was firmly believed until he publicly confessed. Even then his own confession was almost not believed. He was mistreated by those liberal Democrats (who, after all, were probably communists).

The reasoning changed. The blurring of faith with our culture was the deeper, constant reality.

In many circles similar to ours, there is a kind of sanctification that takes place once a person is chosen as the Republican candidate for president. No matter what we might have felt about the candidate in the primaries, he almost becomes a saint once the election cycle has begun. One of the most fascinating tidbits of Wesleyan history is that the 1972 Democratic opponent to Richard Nixon, George McGovern, was raised as a Wesleyan Methodist. Yet I doubt very seriously that many Wesleyans or Pilgrims in Indiana voted for him. The political synthesis prevailed over any religious commonality.

Before we knew his name or any details about President Trump, before we knew any charges against him, (I have joked, before the foundation of the world) we could have predicted strong Wesleyan support for him. We could have predicted that opposition to him would be cast in religious terms as the work of the Devil, with Democratic opposition on the side of evil. 

This is Christ above culture, the blurring and synthesis of faith with cultural tradition.

The rationalization of why the Democratic party is the party of evil and the Devil has changed over the years, but the position has stayed the same. It is significant to reflect on the fact that this was true long before Roe v. Wade gave the argument to end all arguments. Most historians would argue that the Democratic and Republican parties have almost switched sides on some issues, [7] yet the synthesis of Republicanism has persisted.

4. Even the religious-political synthesis on the issue of abortion is not as straightforward as it may seem to us. I have already argued for the Wesleyan position in a previous post. This is a post on social forces and the fusion of traditional culture with our Christianity. There are social forces at work here of which we may not be fully aware.

Politically, Republican opposition to abortion has a background in southern opposition to desegregation. Southern states had argued that the federal government did not have the right to make them have black children in white schools. It was the same argument for "states' rights" that they had made prior to the Civil War. 

(Note on which side of that issue the Wesleyan Methodist church was. Some southern history books have tried to gloss over the reasons for southern secession, but the majority of historians would agree that "state's rights" was really a proxy for the issue of slavery. The South could see the writing on the wall and wanted out before the broader country would limit or abolish slavery. State's rights was the rationalization for a more basic underlying reason. We could resurrect most any 1800s Wesleyan Methodist, and they would fully agree with this interpretation.)

In the late 1970s, Jerry Falwell shifted the state's rights argument from desegregation to abortion. Did the Southern Baptists really care that much about abortion? They would come to. But in 1973, most Southern Baptists supported Roe v. Wade. In that year, a former president of the SBC made a statement that only considered a child a person after it is born. [8] He would change his mind in the decade that followed. Then, under Ronald Reagan, the abortion issue became synthesized not only with states' rights but also with Republicanism.

Again, I have argued for the Wesleyan position on abortion in a previous post in this series and elsewhere. Similarly, I do not belong to the Democratic party. My purpose in this post is self-awareness, not to oppose the Republican party or favor the Democratic party. 

5. This post is about our assumptions on how the church should engage the world. My argument is 

1. that we are often unaware of the historical forces on us in such matters, 
2. that we give arguments that are often not the deeper, underlying forces behind our positions, which often involve a lot of sociology, and 
3. that having a position does not automatically entail how we should engage the world in relation to it.

As Christians, as Wesleyans, we need to be able to distinguish our kingdom identity from our political identities. Paul recognized this need when he told the Philippians that their citizenship was in heaven (3:20). As a Roman colony, citizens of Philippi were citizens of Rome, a real treasure in that world. Paul says it is not who they are.

Hebrews similarly distances its audience from its Jewish political identity. "Here we have no lasting city" (13:14), almost certainly a reference to the earthly Jerusalem. I would argue that there are equally godly Wesleyan individuals in all the principal political parties. 

I believe there are times when the appropriate Christian action is to call the world back to past strengths in our culture. There are times to affirm positive elements of our culture that are in danger of passing away. American culture is increasingly nihilistic, meaning that it is plagued with an increasing sense of purposeless, which often leads to violence. A celebration of truly positive virtues in America's past isn't a bad thing. However, it would be beneficial for us to be more self-aware of instances when we might confuse our faith with elements of our tradition that aren't actually Christian at all.  

Christ against Culture

1. I was not alive in the first half of the twentieth century. For those who were, we should also keep in mind that human memory tends to color our earlier memories each time we reflect on them, "infecting" them, as it were, with our current experiences. That's why primary sources are so important, so we can see how people really thought in another time. [9] We may think we always thought a certain way when in fact our perspective or emphasis has actually changed over the years. [10] 

My hypothesis is that World War II marked a shift in the paradigm of many Wesleyans from "Christ against Culture" to "Christ above culture." Christ against Culture is a perspective that withdraws and separates from society rather than trying to make society conform to our Christian values. My hypothesis is that our positions may have stayed much the same but our stance of engagement with culture changed after World War II. After the war, we became increasingly zealous to convert the world to our synthesis of traditional culture with Christianity. 

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, I'm suggesting, Wesleyans were more separatists.

I would describe the paradigm of the holiness movement as "Come out from among them and be ye separate" (2 Cor. 6:17). We recognized that we were a "peculiar people" (Deut. 14:2). The world was lost. It was doomed. It could not be saved. In the late 1800s, D. L. Moody preached that all we could do was try to get as many people as we could into the "lifeboat" of the true church. The Pilgrim Holiness stream of the Wesleyan Church was a firmly dispensationalist church. They were pre-millennials like Moody. It was all headed for the Tribulation. 

No use trying to save the world other than a few souls.

Although the Pilgrim side of our heritage did favor urban centers, the Wesleyan Methodists generally located their colleges in the middle of nowhere. The founder of Houghton College explicitly spoke of Houghton as a place removed from the world. Central was located smack between Atlanta and Charlotte--as far away as you could get from both.  

2. Christ against culture is largely the paradigm of the New Testament as well. Before we say that this paradigm must then be ours, we should remember that the social situation of the Roman Empire was quite different from ours. To impact the culture with a "Christ above culture" synthesis in the first century would have been impossible without revolution. (Some Jews of course tried it.)

When the powers of government are overwhelmingly disproportionate to the church, living as a somewhat isolated community of faith is probably the only option for the true church. There is no real option to synthesize the culture of the church with the world. The options are either to accommodate and disappear (Christ of culture) or be separate and weather the occasional persecution.

Jesus shows this attitude toward Roman money when he says in effect, "Give Caesar his money back. It has nothing to do with God" (Mark 12:17). Paul shows this attitude toward policing sexual activity in the world: "What is it to me to judge those outside? Is it not those inside you to judge? God will judge those outside" (1 Cor. 5:12-13). Paul would never even think about trying to get the Romans to pass certain laws about marriage or sexuality. It wasn't even a possibility.

I have heard an anecdote about a Pilgrim District Superintendent in the 60s who on election day would muse to his children, "I wonder who they'll elect as their president." It's not that he didn't vote. He voted. That wasn't the point. The point is the paradigm. The world was something different, something separate. This was a quite different paradigm than the strident engagement of the evangelical church today in politics.

Christians can also separate from the world on some issues and not on others. For example, evangelicals might say on issues of racial inequality, "God will take care of things. We just need to pray. It's a soul matter." Or on guns a Christian might say, "This is a heart issue. You can't change people's hearts by legislation." On social issues in general, someone might say, "The job of the church is to see souls saved, not to change the world. The world will get worse and worse until Jesus returns." But on abortion or gay marriage, the same person might be quite activist. "We need to vote for politicians who will make decisions from a Christian worldview."

3. My sense is that John Wesley was not a "stay separate from the world" kind of person. He was not a "the church is just in the business of saving people's souls, not their bodies or relationships or bank account or society." He was a social activist. He favored the empowerment of the poor. He empowered women in his movement. He favored the abolition of slavery. I will return to him below.

There are times when the appropriate stance is to separate like the New Testament church. But if we can do good in the world, why wouldn't we?

The danger is when we have mixed foreign DNA into what we are trying to transfer the world into. We probably cannot help this dynamic because we can never fully see ourselves. Christ above culture does this by mixing non-Christian elements from our past and from our human traditions. Christ of culture, our next stance, can do this by mixing non-Christian elements of the present and future. We thus need to be careful always to remember that our kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). We are ultimately aliens and strangers in the world (Heb. 11:13). 

In that sense, Christ against culture is the most fundamental of the stances from a New Testament standpoint, even if we should try to transcend it when we can.

Christ of Culture

As Niebuhr described the "Christ of Culture" perspective, it was the church selling out to the pagan world around it. Some non-Wesleyans would say that we have accommodated culture by letting women preach. The newly formed Global Methodist church would say that the United Methodist Church is accommodating culture with regard to the ordination of practicing homosexual ministers.

As Niebuhr laid out this position, I find it to be his least helpful characterization because it makes it easy to say "those who believe like me are the true, faithful Christians and other groups that disagree are compromising to culture."

Take the issue of women in ministry. Wesleyans believe in leadership and ministry. We would point to examples in Scripture where women are:

• the highest political and military leader (Deborath)
• a higher spiritual authority than the high priest (Huldah)
• an apostle (Junia)
• evangelists and teachers of men (Priscilla)
• a deacon (Phoebe)
• etc.

Many Wesleyans have historically been egalitarian. Luther Lee, a founder of the Wesleyan Methodist church, preached the ordination service of the first woman ordained in the US. Again, we find the core truth here in Scripture, in Galatians 3:28 and Acts 2:17.

However, many other voices in the church today would consider the Wesleyan support of women in ministry as an infection of the church by culture. Even within the Wesleyan Church, there is an increasingly louder group claiming that egalitarianism is an infection of the church by culture. They would argue that complementarianism is the more Christian view. This view tries to affirm women as equal in value while believing they simply serve different roles in the church.

Clearly, the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist church were progressives in their day, even revolutionaries in their social context. Donald Dayton has done a good job of laying out these dynamics in Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage: A Tradition and Trajectory of Integrating Piety and Justices, a must-read for all Wesleyan ministers wanting to understand our heritage. The Princeton Calvinists of the mid-1800s were the traditionalists of their day. They were the ones who used Scripture to push that slavery was biblical. They were the ones using Scripture to push that women should be in submission to their husbands. The first Wesleyans were radicals.

In revising Niebuhr, I find it more helpful to identify this position as one that sides with social change over social tradition. Some of my readers may wonder where his "Christ the transformer of culture" goes in my chart. The answer is that it depends on the moment. There are times when Christians should be activists and times when they should separate. There are times when they should pull culture back to tradition and times when they should be on the side of change.

The mistake Niebuhr and so many of us make is in thinking we can actually remove ourselves from the culture around us. Christianity is always incarnated in culture. It can never fully separate. Even if we go to live in the middle of nowhere, we take it with us. The Amish are half-frozen in the culture of the 1800s but still affected by the contemporary world around them.

There can be elements of secular culture that are actually more in keeping with Christian principles than parts of the church. Where did secular culture get the idea that women are just as valuable as men? Is it not the fumes of Judeo-Christian values? Could it therefore be that what part of the church sees as an accommodation to culture is actually an example of the world being more Christian than that part of the church? 

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul tries to dance between the newness of the gospel and tradition. The gospel opens the door for women to pray and prophesy in worship. But that causes significant social conflict as the dynamics between men and women at Corinth are in conflict with the culture. Paul's solution is for the women to veil. That way they are respecting their husbands. They are not creating a sexual obstacle to the other men. They are not causing jealousy from other wives. But they are vessels of the Spirit. I have a hunch that 1 Timothy 2 reflects the effects of trying to work through similar tensions.

So there will be times when "Christ the transformer of culture" sides with change in the culture from tradition. And there will be times when "Christ the transformer of culture" sides with tradition over change in the culture. And there will be times when the church lays low and doesn't make waves with the culture (e.g., 1 Peter 2:12).

Christ and Culture in Paradox

At its worst, "Christ and Culture in Paradox" reflects the divided mind of James 1:6-8. The person is one way in church and another way in the world. The person is loyal to God on Sunday, and loyal to the world the rest of the week.

There are individuals who live with this sort of inner tension. There have always been individuals who work in the field of science and have never fully reconciled the operating assumptions of their work with the assumptions of their church. For example, some graduate students in biology go into their study convinced that evolution is irreconcilable with their faith. If they then become convinced of evolution, they lose their faith. 

Others reconcile their faith with evolution. But still others continue on with a kind of inner contradiction. Their mind says that evolution makes sense, but they can't square it with the belief they also have that the Bible is true. That is a conversation for another place. My point is simply that there are individuals who live with a kind of contradiction of worldviews inside.

Similarly, there are those who personally live by one set of rules as a Christian but operate by a different set of rules in their public life. In the past, President Biden has suggested that while he is personally opposed to abortion, he does not believe that position should be enacted in US law. I know military chaplains who have struggled with the religious neutrality the military expects of them and the expectation that they treat all religions neutrally and perhaps even perform gay marriages.

Here we get into the question of church and state. The first amendment to the Constitution indicates that Congress shall not establish any law respecting the establishment of religion. Thomas Jefferson coined the expression, the "separation of church and state." We live in a time when the interpretation of this concept is a matter of significant debate. 

The background of this clause was the tension within the colonies over the establishment of state churches. New England was Puritan and Calvinist. Maryland was Catholic. Rhode Island was a place where you did not have to be one church or another. This was the position that won out in the Constitution.

In effect, then, we theoretically live in a land that tries to be religiously neutral. It does not aim to favor or squash any particular religious perspective. This context creates immediate conflict with the Christ above culture perspective, whose implicit aim is to fuse Christianity and culture. Can gay marriage or early first-term abortion be legally prohibited on any grounds that are not specifically religious in nature?  

When you look at the Thirty Years War in Europe or the back and forth blood shed in Reformation England, much of that conflict had a Christian overlay. Should Germans be Lutheran or Catholic? Should the French allow Protestant Huguenots to practice Christianity their way? Should Zwingli allow the Anabaptists to rebaptize? Should the English burn Catholics or Protestants at the stake?

The Puritans fled England for religious freedom only to impose their own approach to faith on everyone else in the New World (Christ above culture). The Quakers just wanted to be left alone to practice Christianity in their own way (Christ against culture). In my opinion, the Founding Fathers were wise to go for religious neutrality, even though some of them were people of faith. Others were Deists, who believed God created the world but was no longer directly involved.

There is an anecdote that probably is not historical but still provides insight. In the story, Charles Spurgeon is asked why the Baptists never burned anyone at the stake in English history. His answer was reportedly, "Because we were never in charge."

I would argue that a system of government that is religiously neutral fits very well with Arminian theology. It fits with Calvinist theology to force (predestine) the rest of a country to abide by its own religious understanding. The US ended up with a more Arminian theological paradigm. God wants the world to choose him, but he does not force the world to choose him.

It is thus fitting for the US to be a country with basic moral laws that keep us from killing each other, stealing from each other, etc. These are all concrete instances of harm that are moral but not specifically religious. Then the Constitution keeps us from imposing specific religious views on each other. This protects us from our own Christian infighting. After all, which Christian understanding would we make the law of the land?

Christ the Transformer of Culture

It is not historically Wesleyan to think of the church's role in society as purely one of spiritual influence. Wesley tried to change England societally for the better. I believe it is possible to synthesize the above conversation into a coherent approach to Christ and culture in the US context. 

First, there are universal moral principles that cohere well with a representational democracy. The US was founded on the theory that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Mind you, that language already involves some "Christ of culture." The biblical perspective is arguably one of graces not rights.

We might think of this principle as nothing other than "love your neighbor as yourself." A societal structure in which all persons are valued equally, protected equally, and equally given rights thus provides an intersection between Christian values and American values. It provides a framework in which we can work for good in the culture without trying to impose specifically Christian convictions. It does roughly correspond to the second half of the Ten Commandments.

We can work to abolish slavery on this understanding. We can work to protect the life of the unborn to the extent we can convince the world that the unborn are children. We can work to undo discrimination against individuals on the basis of their race or gender. If we can make the world a better place, why wouldn't we? This is intrinsic to Wesleyan roots.

However, as Arminians, we do not try to legislate morality beyond doing fundamental harm to others. We leave room for the world to choose God. We are content with the separation of church and state in specifically religious matters. We try to woo the world to Christ rather than synthesize a Christian Frankenstein of culture.

Christ the transformer of culture may adopt each one of the four basic stances at appropriate times and places. There are times when we should call culture back to its previous values and a time to push it toward change. There will be times when we are activist and times when we separate and hunker down. The Holy Spirit provides the wisdom to know when to do which.

[1] An excellent window into the fact that our reasons for our politics are often not the real reasons comes from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012).

[2] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951). 

[3] I have heard several in recent days express a strong preference for Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Task (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008). However, his position is that we cannot change the world.

[4] Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the "banality of evil," how completely unordinary those who carried out the Holocaust and the Nazi agenda were. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963).

[5] Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1967): 1-21.  

[6] In the early 2000s, I used to joke to my philosophy classes that some in my family were somewhat sympathetic to the NRA because they were against abortion. Evangelicals are against abortion, so they tend to be Republican. Republicans tend to be in favor of the NRA. So evangelical Christians are in favor of the NRA because they are against abortion.

[7] This is the insidiousness of Dinesh D'Sousa's argument. He equates the southern Democratic party of the early 1900s with the Democratic party of today when some very important transitions in that party took place in the 1950s and 60s. It was the Democratic party of the 60s that passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, for example. Over a thirty-year period, that element of the southern Democratic party largely transitioned to the Republican party.

[8] William Criswell. See here and elsewhere.

[9] This is a reason why journaling is so personally valuable too, to put us in touch with our real self from the past.

[10] I have found myself having to adjust my language over the years as certain terms explode. A word or phrase that caused no controversy one year might be something to strongly avoid the next, as phrases become highly politicized. This is true for both the right and the left. "You can't have used that word and not have meant something big by it."