Column: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story
September entry: “Politics, Faithfulness, and the Long Defeat”
Column Description: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story is a monthly column that illuminates old and new ideas about media ecology from a Christian perspective. Dr. Mitchell will explore what it means to bear God’s image and Christian witness in a mediated world, with a particular focus on the relationships between theology, media, and orthopraxy across different Christian traditions.
By Chase Mitchell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, East Tennessee State University
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Politics, Faithfulness, and the Long Defeat
I rarely comment on politics on social media, and I almost never discuss how my faith and politics relate to one another. There is one recent exception. I wrote an article for Christ & Pop Culture titled “Baggins/Gamgee ’24: What Hobbits Can Teach Us About Politics,” and posted a link to it on my social pages. In the piece, my primary argument is that many American Christians have conflated faith and politics in misguided ways, and that we need to recenter our political life by cultivating the virtues of humility, longsuffering, and mercy.
The reason I was comfortable posting the article is that although it unapologetically proffers a “Christian approach” to politics, it doesn’t prescribe partisan political stances. That is, I don’t attempt to spell out how Christians should respond to specific issues by appealing to Scripture, theology, or Church authority. There’s a place for that kind of argument, but American Christians, in my opinion, far too quickly resort to such an approach (especially on social media). Unfortunately, such “witness” is generally very brittle, even if it is well meaning and sincere. In avoiding this common pitfall, I tried to define what I believe is a better way Christians can politically engage.
Since the article was published, I’ve realized that some readers thought I meant that Christians should be apolitical. Their takeaway was that focusing on virtue ethics—as a means to reclaim faithful political witness—means that the issues are rendered unimportant. Others accused me of naivety: That “the (insert rival political party) are obviously to blame for America’s spiritual corruption,” that “we can’t allow the (insert rival party) to win because America will go to hell-in-a-handbasket.” I’m paraphrasing, but those types of sentiments did surface. If you read the article, you’ll see that such folks have misunderstood my argument, on both counts.
Holding strong positions on contested political issues is not wrong. We should prayerfully vote and engage the politics of our locality, state, and nation with Christian conviction. I have strong opinions about a variety of political issues. My faith informs those views. Some issues, it’s true, are clear cut—given scriptural evidence and the historical witness of the Church—and not up for debate (as it relates to Christian faithfulness, anyway). But I also recognize that some issues are more complex; they’re not easily parsed, even by erudite Christians who sincerely wish to discern truth. I must be humble in considering my own ability to render faithful judgements in such cases, not just because my knowledge is limited, but also because God’s will is, at times, inscrutable. As it applies to politics, there are instances where sincere Christians can and do disagree, and so we can’t make political fidelity the primary test of Christian faithfulness.
Christians can only abide our political disagreements, and retain faithful witness to the watching world, by communicating our convictions in humble, longsuffering, merciful ways. That doesn’t mean we jettison or dilute those convictions. It doesn’t mean we hide or obscure our politics. What it does mean is that we should communicate our convictions with grace, trusting that steadfast witness—to the Christ who informs our beliefs—is, in the end, more important than mere political “victory.”
Put another way: We can’t be too wary of being judged (or offending others) to tell people Who it is that shapes our politics. But we also must be careful not to let our political convictions obfuscate the humble, longsuffering, merciful witness to which He calls us.
One of J.R.R. Tolkien’s insights is helpful, here. In one of his letters, he wrote: “I am a Christian… so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” Tolkien was not a defeatist in the ultimate sense—he knew that Christ redeems all things in the fullness of time. But he did recognize that the arc of history is so rent by sin that we experience this fallen world, and our political life, as a series of seeming defeats. God has secured final victory in Jesus’ death and resurrection, but in this already-not-yet phase of history, we work out our salvation by faith in that victory, even (and especially) when we can’t see it.
As American Christians, whose body politic has long been associated with the (false) doctrine of Manifest Destiny, we’ve become used to measuring our faithfulness in terms of political fidelity. We confuse the City of God with the City of Man, and locate the political arena as the primary site of spiritual struggle. If our politics fail to pass laws that reflect Christian values, that is, then “we’ve lost.” Many Christians have been led astray by this false gospel.
Like Tolkien, we must realize that “defeat” in the Christian life is not just illusory, but ultimately the means by which Christ is victorious. Paradoxically, God conquers the proud, the loud, and the cruel through the humble, longsuffering mercy of Jesus. For Christians, American politics can feel like a long series of defeats. But we can and must endure faithfully, by pointing to Christ Crucified, who forgave His enemies even as they nailed Him to the Cross.