Christian Involvement in Politics Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
When Christianity was granted the status of an approved religion by the Roman Emperor Constantine 313 A.D., and especially when it became the official state religion in 380, believers found themselves responding in one of two ways. Some basked in their new found power and luxury, holding it over the now oppressed class of pagans. We’ll call them the Constantinians. Others, the monastics, sought to check out of this new institutionally supported Christianity which they saw as sensual and double-minded. It seemingly didn’t occur to anyone to simply participate in society as one group among many and allow evangelization to happen through freely established relationships instead of coercion.
This false dilemma remained in force through the Protestant Reformation, during which time the Roman Catholics and Magisterial Protestants sought to crush religious dissent via the power of the state while the Anabaptists went into hiding and designated Christian participation within the larger society, and particularly in politics, as sinful.
Fast forward to the summer of 2015 in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that same sex marriage is a civil right. Before this ruling, the majority of confessing evangelicals and Roman Catholics had demanded that their government maintain a Christian value judgment enshrined into the law and they were not willing to replace it with a more pluralistic non-religious entitlement such as civil unions. After the ruling, with one new view of marriage backed by the force of the state, Christians are increasingly anxious that this new entitlement will lead to government discrimination against Christians.
For these Constantinian Christians, politics is a zero-sum game. If a non-Christian group gains something, this means Christians have lost something. The debate over gay marriage was set up intentionally to be this kind of arrangement, but this risk was considered acceptable in order that their side might prevail.
That the debate over gay marriage was nothing more than a power play can be demonstrated by comparing how conservative Christians compare this ruling with other, more egregious ones. The Dred Scott Decision which came down from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, declaring that slaves did not have the same rights as free persons and thus undermining the Christian belief in human equality before God, is not generally considered to be a loss for Christianity, because Christians as a group lost no political power. The same can be said for many other deplorable events in America’s history. But as power has now been wrested from the hands of Constantinian Christianity, American Christians are saying, as one evangelical writer did, “I am horribly grieved that a lifestyle that is so contrary to Christian morality is being celebrated in a country that once honored Christian values.”
It is, of course, not Christian values which America has honored, but Christian hegemony. As such, American Christians generally believe that there are two options open to them in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision–fight for the return of their political power or remove themselves from society.
May I humbly suggest that we have a third option?
