What has Washington D.C. to do with Jerusalem?: Can Christians be political when politics means violence?
We know from both biblical revelation and from experience that the state is violence. Experientially, we know that the primary distinction between the state and other institutions which organize our society is that the state can take our money and create rules which are enforced by the threat of violence and incarceration–something no business (apart from organized crime enterprises) can do. As Tolstoy wrote in his book The Slavery of Our Times:
“Laws are rules, made by people who govern by means of organised violence for non-compliance with which the non-complier is subjected to blows, to loss of liberty, or even to being murdered.”
Similarly, the Bible tells us that rulers carry a sword to carry out wrath against wrongdoers (Romans 13) and that Christians should pray for government leaders so that we may live unmolested by the violence which states visit upon those who gain their attention (1 Timothy 2:2). This further supports the notion that the state is violence.
But here’s the rub. Unlike the state, followers of Christ are, almost by definition, nonviolent.
Many Christians throughout church history have argued that if the state sometimes serves a divine role by punishing evildoers, as Paul seems to claim in Romans 13:4, it should be not only acceptable but desirable for Christians to participate in state violence. But in the same place where we read that the state can be a tool of the vengeance and wrath of God, we read that Christians are never to avenge themselves, never be a medium for God’s wrath, but must always overcome evil with good (Romans 12:19-21). More famously, in Jesus’ sermon on the mount, Christians are told to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), love their enemies (5:44), and live as peacemakers (5:9).
If the state is violence, though, how can Christians support its existence, even tacitly? A popular argument for allowing the state to continue, and thus for state violence, is that when a government is absent an order will arise anyway and that this order will likely be more violent and aggressive than a state intentionally organized to maximize justice and order. In other words, a little aggression stops a lot of aggression. This was precisely the argument which America’s founding fathers invoked for the creation of their constitutional republic. As the Declaration of Independence tells us:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”
According to this philosophy, a limited government is a necessary minor evil which is initiated by men to allow for more human freedom and flourishing than could be possible if the state were abolished.
The notion that some state violence is necessary, which is to say only as much as is needed to preserve the greatest exercise of human rights, is called minarchism. A Christian who is a minarchist in theory, because she believes that God intends the state to maintain peace and punish evil until the kingdom of God comes in its fullness, would still practice separation from government violence due to Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom of God is not of this world (John 18:36). She would also prefer a state with limited power so that Christians like herself “may lead a peaceful and quiet life” (1 Timothy 2:2).
On the other hand, the Christian who takes Jesus’ condemnation of violence to be a universal maxim and not just a command for Christians will engage in positive action on behalf of the peaceful (which is to say persuasive instead of coercive) destruction of all state aggression. This is not the soft libertarianism of minarchist separation but the radical libertarianism of anarchist activism.
But whether Christian non-violence leads to separation or revolution, the one thing a follower of Christ should not do is to actively support the violence of the state and agree to be used as its tool to destroy lives that Christ came to save.
Our methods for defeating the spiritual-political complex which the apostle Paul called the powers and principalities must thus not only be nonviolent, but Christ-centered. As the 19th century Christian minister David Lipscomb wrote:
“It is the duty of the Christian to submit to the human government in its office and work and to seek its destruction only by spreading the religion of Christ and so converting men from service to the earthly government to service to the heavenly one, and so, too, by removing the necessity for its existence and work. No violence, no sword, no bitterness or wrath can he use. The spread of the peaceful principles of the Savior, will draw men out of the kingdoms of earth into the kingdom of God.”
