Citizen Quotes

“Politics is not a sacramental vessel that reveals God, nor is the god of America’s civil religion the God of the Bible. The various systems of modern political philosophy have saved no one, but made a lot of people’s lives worse, including women and people who are part of various minority populations. Modern politics is fundamentally intolerant, and reliably produces all kinds of indefensible discriminations and biases. Modern politics demands total acquiescence to the empire’s grand narrative, lived out as ideological lockstep with the micro narrative of one political party or the other.2”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“we propose an engagement that assumes God’s grace as the underpinning and support for the whole of God’s garden social imaginary. All forms of common life (public education, social systems that support first responders—police, fire, and healthcare professionals—our public transportation, creation care, defense, and all the rest of the national infrastructure) are to be elevated by grace. Christian citizens must be grace-filled political players.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Jesus invites the Christian citizen to reject politics as usual. Our deepened understanding of scripture enables us to see the difference between America’s version of God and the God we receive through the narrative of the garden. Acknowledging that our political systems of so-called natural laws and pragmatic philosophies contain no divine revelation and that we have been duped into believing they do through the shuffles and slights of hand of modern theologies like “Christian realism,” gives us the necessary distance to engage the public square afresh.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“It is the church’s responsibility as a whole to engage in biblical interpretation. Despite people believing they have a right to do this and that, individuals do not interpret scripture for themselves. The Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, combined with the powers and principalities’ ability to affect translation and the Western secular frame, and our insistent deferral to the common person’s common sense is challenged by God’s narrative as understood by the church. Following Stanley Hauerwas, I believe in a community that is under authority; such authorities within the ecclesiastical tradition must be listened to, if we are to mine the depths of scripture and invoke God’s social imaginary and engage the powers and principalities of this world.5 It”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Jesus is inviting his followers to define their secular politics by their citizenship in the reign of God. The powers of this world cannot tell us what the Christian story is and we needn’t accept the secularist maxim that we have no story until we choose theirs. Jesus invites us to transcend the narrative of this world with a different narrative. We are to engage the world by rising above passive submission or violence. We are invited to find a third way.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“King James was adamant that no matter how the rest was translated he didn’t want his people to get the idea that there was a godly admonition towards kings or an empowerment of the people to take corrective action when monarchs misbehaved. In James’s eyes, previous versions were fraught with “seditious . . . dangerous, and trayterous” translation. I imagine you were not even allowed to bring up the Geneva Bible in his presence because it was so radical. It included the suggestion that it was okay to overthrow a despotic ruler if they were unjust. King James wanted to make sure that the people knew they were to “resist not” their king and ruler.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“We are called to see the importance of all people and their gifts for the good of the whole. Governments are called to see all citizens as having a role in the society. Everyone is a member of the garden society by virtue of their creation. As the state embodies the garden social imaginary, it can see that (Rom. 12:3–6). The state is to build its government on love and to reject evil. The country is to focus and work towards the good, honoring all people inside and outside of its boundaries.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Hauerwas challenges us, and calls Americans out on their blatant misuse of Romans 12 and 13. He says we read Romans 13 as an unchallenged support of the government while we read Romans 12 as a private rule of life. Americans forget that they are Christians before they are American citizens. Recovering our own place in God’s narrative means that we can no longer sacralize our own American democratic presuppositions about government. Romans 12 does not only apply to the Christian citizen, it is the measure by which we understand the kind of just government we can support. We cannot read Romans 13 without first applying the criteria we find in Romans 12 to the empire.16”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Christian citizens take up their crosses and follow. We do this by declaring peace in a world of violence; members of Christ’s community of peace lose their lives. The community of shalom is a community that is willing to lose. This is most clearly articulated in the three sayings of Jesus about “the way.” Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it” (Mark 8:35); “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35); and, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark10:43). The victory of the Cross is no worldly victory; it is complete loss. The Christian citizen accepts this loss as “our way.” It may look like the powers and authorities have won, but Christians proclaim that “Jesus’s nonviolent power has actually begun to unravel their rule of domination”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Christian citizenship has an agenda and it is not the same as the agenda of the state, even though our dual citizenship requires that we be a part of the wider community. Jesus reminded his disciples that their loyalty should not be to the empire or to the rebels. They were to be loyal to God’s garden social imaginary of compassion and expansive familial faithfulness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Jesus was not interested in a theocracy. All too aware of the abuse of the tenants in God’s garden, he warned his followers to be wary of those who would use them for political gain. Jesus, in one of his last teachings, warned his followers to avoid those who used their ministry as a means to power. He told them to watch out because those seeking political power (rebelling against the state in order to rule themselves) wanted to deceive them. Jesus told his followers that rebels and politicians just wanted power for themselves.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“The Christian citizen rests upon the power of cultivated interdependence for the sake of relieving the suffering of people within the system, by changing the system politically. Yes, we resist withdrawing into our hives by being a good neighbor. The Good Samaritan invites us to resist division when confronted with diversity. It invites us to resist our hives’ desire to support political theories, policies, and practices that demonize the other. It also challenges us to confront the powers and principalities of the world that gain power out of this division. Chapter”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Faced with inadequate health care, a weakening birth rate, the dying off of the boomer generation, the increased need for skilled and unskilled labor, and failing systems of infrastructure and education, we will not be able to adapt if we cannot concede that we are intimately connected to each other, and are a part of each other’s narrative. The narrative of Christian citizenship turns on sacrifice for the other. It is rooted in the idea that we are at our best when we are willing to enter into another person’s loss and suffering and become sacrificially responsible.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Manichaean politics have now taken root internally as part of our civil religion in the midst of our own internal political debate. We are in a political season of extreme hivishness, where political powers and principalities use Manichaean philosophy to cast the world in threatening terms of good and evil. One political party is good, the other evil. Both parties and everyone in between now operate out of a hivish Manichaean political framework.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“A Manichaean view of our parable would take the side of the political and religious leaders who have nothing to do with the half-dead man and leave the Christ figure to die by the side of the road. Manichaeism rejected interdependence. Their worldview was dualistic; there were good and evil forces and you don’t mix the two. A number of years ago Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and author, coined the term “Manichean politics,” which, he said, pervades our political discourse.23 Greenwald argued that this dualism took root some time ago in American politics as it made the case for the defeat of foreign powers: they are evil; we are good.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“It was not individuals who withstood tyranny at America’s founding, but a new community who worked together and saw that their futures were intertwined. They each had to give a little to work together. In the end, their shared responsibility for each other—their cultivated interdependence—gave life to a new and unique republic.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“God has also created us free. Our freedom is how mimetic desire and sibling rivalry enter our relationships. Desire and rivalry perpetuate scapegoating and violence, thereby fraying the fabric of our interconnectedness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“In God’s social imaginary, we have described community in terms of relationship and responsibility. The stories of Jesus point us towards the virtue of interconnectedness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“However, “individualism” is not a strong enough shared value to help this country manage the challenges that face us in our next age. In fact, it may undermine our future if it remains the sole arbiter of truth.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“The Gerasene demoniac, Legion, was the first evangelist in the Gospel account of Mark who was freed and went on to tell a different story of political engagement. But we have merely became evangelists for our opposing political parties. In our context we have not freed people from their zombified and colonized experience. We have demanded greater occupation of religious space by political parties with the hope that people would join our side. Instead of restoring people to each other to live together in harmonious relationship, as Jesus did, we shackled ourselves and each other, and condemned ourselves to dwell among a politics of tombs and gravestones. Christian citizens must rise above political narratives of estrangement. Those stories are legion and they want only one thing: power. They serve only one master: the demonic powers and principalities that use us. We are challenged to honor Jesus’s exorcizing work, to take our place in the political world without doing violence to our relationships and our communities. This kind of exorcism demands the virtues of compassion and familial faithfulness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“All societies are free to turn their backs on the needy, but such societies can never be worthy of the name of God. All societies are free to ignore the prophets’ invitations, but such societies bear no resemblance to the realm that Christians call their first home. God holds nations responsible for those who must rely upon the grace, mercy, justice, and hospitality of others. God judges nations based on how well they treat the most vulnerable within their borders, and how they treat the nations who are their neighbors.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“The whole society from individual to the government is responsible for the poor.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“God had a social imaginary that ensured that all people were cared for even if they could not care for themselves. They were all kin. This was not social welfare; it was an expectation that the prosperity of society in general benefited every-one specifically. From the king to the pauper, from the land owner to the widow and the orphan, from the tribal member who inhabited the land to the stranger making their way in a foreign land, the Sinai tradition ensured people were cared and provided for at every level of the social structure. Moreover, when they were not, the prophets reminded those who govern to be mindful of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the migrant.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“to embrace the scripture as a list of individual moral imperatives—biblical laws that function for the person like natural laws function for Newtonian physics.10 Treating the commandments like this is a clever way of honoring them while evading their meaning. Our response to the commandments is not merely individual. As Christians, we read the biblical story in the context of a network of faithful people that stretches forwards and backwards across all of time. From this perspective, scripture becomes “revealed reality” instead of “revealed morality.”11 The next step is arriving at a series of virtues that are faithful to the commandments. We live the commandments through a virtuous common life.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“These commandments are not an ethical prescription to be filled by a loyal disciple; instead they evoke a community living into the blessings and grace of God.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Political pundits have long been in the habit of declaring that citizens are not patriotic if they do not believe that America was chosen by God to be a great country. This propaganda is often rooted in the Exodus story. The suggestion is that America is the new Israel. However, nothing could be further from the truth when one reviews our founding fathers’ debate and language. The God that is present in our American origin documents is not a god who shows favor to one nation and curses another. Thomas Jefferson simply wanted the founding Declaration to “assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“It isn’t that people support governments that won’t do them any good; it is that governments are not interested in doing the citizen any good unless it profits the power structure and people in charge. This is the lesson learned in Egypt.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Rabbi Sacks reminds us that our invitation to journey with God means confessing and rejecting the notion that “For there to be an ‘us’ there must be a ‘them,’ the people not like us. Humanity is divided into friends and strangers, brothers and others. The people not like us become the screen onto which we project our fears. They are seen as threatening, hostile, demonic. Identity involves exclusion which leads to violence.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Laws that dehumanize and lift up some at the expense of others are out of step with the scripture.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“The American civil religion and Christianity are not the same. Meacham writes, The Republic is not a church, but it is a Republic filled with churches. Let the religious speak but encourage them not to shout; let them argue, but encourage them not to brawl. The system the Founders built allows for religious considerations to play a role in politics in the same measure—no greater, no smaller—as any other consideration, whether geographical, economic, or cultural.14”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World