Will bring this article here as to not hijack Manny's decision thread. :)
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Originally Posted by
angel_luv
Thanks! I'll read it. :)
Lengthy but excellent article. These were my favorite parts:
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life...le.php?id=7616
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Campolo agrees. “My contention is that if anybody asks if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the answer should be, ‘Please name the issue,’” he says. “On certain issues, I’m going to come across as someone who likes what the Republicans say, and on other issues I will come across as saying what the Democrats say.”
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In fact, Campolo became so disenchanted with the politicization of evangelical Christianity that he and a group of Christian authors and thinkers have chosen all themselves Red Letter Christians, a reference to the words of Christ being printed in red in some Bibles. Campolo hopes to break the stereotype that one political party has a monopoly on Christianity.
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For us, the litmus test for whether we’re a Christian nation is, does it look like Jesus?
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Haw adds that the idea of nationalism is often theologically unsound. He says that being “born again” should mean, from a theological standpoint, that Christians have a new and different citizenship. “Theologically, born again didn’t just mean that you have a spiritual attitude to your life. It literally meant that you’re joining into this people of Abraham that are a holy nation, set apart. There seems to be evidence all over the Bible that this is a very concrete people. You’re latching yourself onto this other nation. Now when you use the word we or our, your identity is connected to a different group of people, a diasporic people. That’s not just linguistic gymnastics. It’s biblical realism. Without that, our nationalism is misguided.”
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Claiborne says that this was a concept understood well by the early Church. In a time when allegiance to Rome was not only expected, but required, early Christians maintained a peculiarity and attitude set apart from the empire in which they lived. “The early Christians said a Christian could only be emperor if he decided not to be a Christian,” Claiborne says. “There was a deep collision of identities between your citizenship on earth and your citizenship in heaven.”
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Thus, say Claiborne and Haw, Christians should belong to a citizenship that is transnational. “What does it mean to be born again?” Claiborne asks. “For Christians, there’s got to be a sense that there’s something that runs deeper than what’s born of the flesh—my biology, my ethnicity, my nation-state. Our central identity is in this reborn people of God that’s transnational.”
In this context, patriotism can seem like a vice. However, Claiborne and Haw believe it’s all about keeping an appropriate perspective. “A love for our own people is not a bad thing, but it’s a love that doesn’t stop at the border,” Claiborne says.
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Claiborne believes Christians can celebrate the good in America without falling prey to the idea that the United States, rather than Christ, is the hope of the world. “We want to celebrate the things that America and leaders of this country do well and right,” he says. “There’s plenty of them, but there’s also plenty of things historically and currently that don’t look like Jesus. That’s why it’s so important to differentiate them. Our hope and what we’re called to is to remind the world of Jesus, to be like Jesus, to take the words of Jesus seriously. We will applaud people when they do that, and we will interrupt and prophesy when they don’t.”
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With this in mind, how can we chart a new course? How can we see society transformed when we have to be wary of involvement in the system? Claiborne and Haw believe that the importance lies in keeping our perspective. “There are a lot of models in Scripture,” Claiborne says. “There are prophets who are on the margins. There are prophets in the royal court. There are people who are engaged in a lot of different ways. One of the tricky things is to maintain the peculiarity and the distinctiveness of being a Christian.”
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“For those of us working legislatively, we can’t compromise on things like, ‘We’re going to beat our swords into plowshares,’” he says. “That’s what we’re called to, and to bless the poor and meek. If we don’t hear any of these parties saying something that embodies that, then we don’t put our hand in with it. There are a number of ways you can call that. You can work for the Kingdom of God and align yourself with whatever seems to move us closer to that. It’s possible to say we’re also going to interrupt with grace and humility whatever seems to be standing in the way of the reign of God. One way of looking at voting is that it’s damage control. We’re in a sense voting against whatever is going to do the worst damage.”
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Part of the beauty of it is saying, ‘We’re going to trust that the Spirit is at work in different people’s hearts in different ways.’ Ultimately, [we hope] whatever they do is seeking first the Kingdom of God and embodying their politics with their lives rather than just trusting in a single candidate or a single politician to change the world for them.”
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Haw adds that action on the part of Christians far eclipses their party affiliation. “What is more important than how we vote on Nov. 4 is how we live on Nov. 3 and Nov. 5,” he says.
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So, how should Christians engage the political arena? That is the question. If Claiborne and Haw are any indication, the choice is up to the individual. No matter what that individual decides, though, they must realize that true change will never happen through legislation alone. And, no matter what the individual chooses to do, they must realize that they are already voting through the way they choose to live.
“We vote every day with our lives,” Claiborne says. “We vote every day with our feet, our hands, our lips and our wallets. We vote for the poor. We vote for the peacemakers. We vote for the marginalized, the oppressed, the most vulnerable of our society. Ultimate change does not just happen one day every four years.”
