Sept. 15, 2026
Politics Is Bigger Than Voting | Faith & Politics #1
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RSS Feed The first episode in a series on faith and politics running through the midterms. James Spencer and Ashish Varma set the terms before the guests arrive.
Ashish starts with the word itself: polis, the city — the shared life of a community, of which party politics is only a narrow slice. That opens the question the series will keep returning to. Paul had no power to abolish slavery, but he could tell Philemon that Onesimus was returning as a brother, and in doing so redraw a line the empire had drawn elsewhere. That is political work, done without any political agency in the sense we usually mean.
James argues that voting is a voluntary right rather than a sacred duty, and explains why he doesn't always exercise it. Ashish tells the story of asking a pastor why the people who filled the building for ESL classes on Tuesday were absent on Sunday. Both land on 1 Corinthians 7: you don't have to change your situation to serve God where you are.
Guests across the series include Kevin Flatt, Veronica Ogle, William Cavanaugh, Vincent Bacote, and others.
Chapters:
00:00 Why this series, and what it won't do
03:06 What students expect from a political theology class
04:37 Polis: the city, and what "political" actually covers
06:00 Is the gospel political?
08:26 Paul's constraints, and ours
09:51 Political agency without political power
11:35 "The poor you will always have with you"
13:25 Nested authority: everything under God's
16:13 Philemon, Onesimus, and redrawing the line
17:43 Reimagining: children, packaging, and a can of Coke
21:06 Voting as a right, not a sacred duty
25:24 Pro-life advocacy and the children who age out
28:16 A church on the boundary lines of Chicago
32:02 1 Corinthians 7: serve where you're called
36:22 New eyes, new ears
37:39 Who's coming on the series
Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Ashish Varma.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: And today we're going to be kicking off a series on the intersections of politics and faith. Now, I've written an awful lot about this.
00:00:15
Speaker 1: We've had podcast episodes on this in the past.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: But I would say most of my work has really been on Christian nationalism and my problems that I see there, as well as dabbling into some of the American civil religion sort of discourses. And again, some of the theological issues that I have with that. But as we're running up on midterms this, I guess, November, we wanted to do a series on Christians in politics that would hopefully give people a little bit of a framework for how to discern what voting is, what it means, and maybe even who to vote for. Obviously, we're not going to go down the ballot and give recommendations. but we want to help Christians sort of think through their political choices in a more robust and theological manner. And so today what we're going to do is address some of the issues that we think really need to be a part of that, that we, that, Ashish and I just believe as we think about politics, as we think about our own political participation, some of the things that we think about. And then as we go, we're going to have a variety of guests on who obviously have their own ideas and who are going to bring different expertise to the table than Ashish or I have.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: And we're going to be interacting with them too.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: So encourage you to not only listen to this episode, but subscribe to Thinking Christian so you can catch the whole political series we're going to do. So Ashish, welcome. Thanks for having this conversation. I already kind of tipped my hat. I think I got into politics and political discourse. I think the first article I ever wrote was on politics was related to giving to Caesar what is Caesar's and this idea that there needs to be a distinction. And I think this has been a theme that sort of carried forward in most of my work on politics is that there needs to be a distinction between church and state. though not an isolation of church from state. And that's sort of been my, I would say my governing framework, because I've looked at different things like American civil religion, which I think tends toward more of a merger of Christianity and politics, or even Christian nationalism, which has that real strong draw of, hey, Christians should take over government kind of aspect. So that's definitely one of the things that I think is you have to almost start and you have to understand who you are as a Christian, as a member of the body of Christ, what that body of Christ is in the world, how it's supposed to function before we really even get to politics. So that'd be the first issue I'd throw out there. And we don't have to talk about that in depth, but just to say, when I approach politics, one of the things that I'm always thinking of in my mind is how is my political participation going to reflect either positively or negatively, on the church's witness.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: So I'm glad we're having this conversation. Similarly to you, there's a longstanding interest in this conversation for me. I taught a few times a class called Political Theology. That class actually taught me that there's an important disclaimer before you enter into it, because a lot of people came to the class saying, for one of two reasons that were interesting. One of them was, and this one doesn't help in the current moment, it was just simply, I want to take a class with that guy.
00:03:41
Speaker 1: You were popular. That's good.
00:03:43
Speaker 3: I was popular in some sectors, not in others. Or popular for different reasons, right?
00:03:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:03:51
Speaker 3: And that, I want to take a class with that guy, doesn't apply. But then there were others who came to the class thinking, That what they were getting into was a very granular look at why.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: One should be a Republican or a Democrat.
00:04:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: And what they learned pretty quickly was that's not at all what the class was about. And I say that by way of segue to say that's not precisely what political theology is about. I think that actually demonstrates the truncated nature within which we tend to use the language political.
00:04:26
Speaker 1: Agreed.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: And even if you zoom out to other countries than the United States where the word political doesn't connote just two parties, even that would be still too truncated.
00:04:39
Speaker 4: Because the idea at play here is the root word.
00:04:43
Speaker 3: The root word of political is polis, which is an ancient Greek term that just meant the city. And specifically the political were those things referring to the affairs of the city. And so anything that revolves around that shared life together in a communal structure with formal boundaries on what it meant to be within that had to do with the political. And a political theology was very much geared towards what does it mean then to live as people who are followers of Christ within that shared environment of the polis. including but not limited to those or with those who maybe have no interest in the person of Jesus or the kingdom come and the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven, right? And so it raises all sorts of questions that certainly lend to the conversations we think of as political, right? Some of the issues that separate Democrats and Republicans or in other countries, various other parties, but are certainly not limited to that. And certainly, can't be reduced to an advocacy for either party.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: I think that, you know, in theological circles these days, it is not uncommon to hear that the gospel is a political gospel.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: And I think.
00:06:14
Speaker 2: In the best case scenarios, what people mean by that is that the coming of the kingdom of God and the proclamation of the lordship of Christ, King Jesus, you'll often hear it said, is over against the rulers and authorities of this world. Now, I think there needs probably a lot of qualification around that, but I think it's a point that's well made more generally, is to say that this notion that we can separate cleanly between politics and religion and that, for instance, Christianity is a religion and politics is politics or the American government represents the political realm.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: It's not really strictly that.
00:06:58
Speaker 2: As we look at the authority structures that we find in scripture, we do see that God is sovereign overall. And then there's a question of whether or not governing authorities recognize that sovereignty, whether the church recognizes that sovereignty to a degree, how the church recognizes that sovereignty through things like lack of compromise and of the faith as suffering comes, right? Are we really willing to be obedient when there are negative consequences to that obedience, that kind of non-compromise is what I have in mind. So I think that the point you're making is well taken, that there is a political, there is a sense in which the gospel is political because God's kingdom has a king and that king is above all other kings. And to the extent that everybody is beholden to live under the authority of Christ, right? We're all, everyone is obligated to do that. Then there becomes this question of, well, how do Christians do that under rulers who have a delegated authority from the sovereign? How do we relate to those delegated authorities? What is the scope of those delegated authorities? All of these kinds of questions, in addition to the ones you're raising, all come up. And That even looks different as we think about the way that Paul would have had to navigate this. And we've talked about this in other podcasts. But when Paul is giving his instructions to, for instance, bond servants and masters, there's probably a good reason that he's not thinking, you know, we should really change this part of society. We should free the bond servants. Because he had no particular outlet to do so. It's a completely different form of government. It's a completely different social setting. He has different limitations on the rights that he has as a Roman citizen than we do in the United States of America. And so all of these things, I think, point to the idea that when we're talking about the intersection of faith and politics, what we're really talking about is both something that is particular to a particular country, but also particular to a specific time within that country. And so this can look different the way we, the dorky way to say it is diachronically or through time, right?
00:09:20
Speaker 1: In the same way that it can look different geographically.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: So that our, what it means to be Christian in the United States is going to entail different activities than maybe it would require to be a Christian in, let's say, China or Russia or any of.
00:09:36
Speaker 1: These countries over on the other side of the ocean.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And so there's a particular, a particularity to politics that, That tends nowadays to be bounded within what we would call a nation state.
00:09:51
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: This makes me think of another disclaimer that has to enter into this, that when we're talking about being political antagonists, we're saying at base that we are creatures that exist within social political structures.
00:10:08
Speaker 1: Right.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: But it does not mean that the entirety of our agency can be subsumed within what we tend to think of popularly as the political entity. So your example of Paul, I think, is a fitting one, right? He had no political agency if what we mean by that is the power to enact social structural changes that would say slavery is therefore no longer okay. He had no power to enact that. But he was every bit the political agent that could say, I can undermine it, right? And you look at the subtleties within which he talked, not least of which was, for instance, the Book of Philemon. Where he sends Onesimus back to Philemon, but in the process of doing so, he lets Philemon know, hey, guess what? This guy who is your slave, he's your brother in Christ. He's set at odds one political way of forming identities with another political way. And that other political way is one that could not be enacted by any agency of Paul as a social structural rule. about the nature of slavery, but it was one in which he could undermine the validity of the absoluteness within which Philemon perhaps was looking at Onesimus.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:11:29
Speaker 3: Another way to think about this or another example of this, I think is, and, and here's my, here's my dread at the moment that I'm going to get the passage a little bit wrong, but you get the idea. Um, I believe it was Martha was anointing the feet of Jesus with oil. And if I'm remembering and not conflating passages, the disciples chastised her for wasting the oil. You could have sold that and you can give that money to the poor. Jesus' response wasn't, don't worry about the poor. Jesus' response was, the poor will always be with us. Now, I think often that's been read as saying the poor should always be with us. No, I don't think that's at all what he's saying. What he's saying is in this particular moment, the work Martha is doing has a particular vision that's superseding yours. She gets what she's doing in a way that you don't. But he's not undermining the instinct to help the poor. He's saying there will be plenty of time to do exactly what you just say, to take that oil and sell it and give it to the poor. Now, whether or not one feels that the government does a good job of helping the poor, doesn't change the political agency that Jesus is advocating there for the church to help the poor.
00:12:41
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: That's the kind of distinction we have at play here, where there is a political agency that's outside of the typical received notion of politics, as we like to interpret it. Yeah. And theology, at its best, it's knowingly attending to that. At its worstâ it fails to recognize that it is already enacting as political agents, right? Because we exist in context. We exist relative to powers and authorities and principalities. We exist relative to leaders, dominions, rulers. And we have to make decisions that don't just simply honor the lines that those political powers and dominions and rulers and authorities set in place.
00:13:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:26
Speaker 2: So would you agree that, Or what would you think of this idea?
00:13:33
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the better way to phrase this.
00:13:35
Speaker 2: So James Gibson wrote this book called, I'm going to blank on the title. It's an ecological theory of visual perception, I think is the title. But basically what he says is that this is really a profound insight. Smaller things are contained within bigger things.
00:13:56
Speaker 1: Right. And so everything is nested within this large area.
00:14:00
Speaker 2: Now, If I'm thinking about that from a Christian perception, what we're really saying here is that everything is nested underneath God's authority. And so what you end up with is God is the sort of all-encompassing biggest environment you can think of. And so as Paul is moving about and like, you know, talking, you know, sending Onesimus back to Philemon, for instance, What he's really doing is he's calling Philemon to have a bigger vision. Don't allow yourself to be fully nested within the Roman Empire and the conventions and practices within that empire. Don't be slave to that because you have, again, to use Gibson term, affordances beyond that. In other words, when Gibson thinks of affordances, these are the tools that you encounter along the way Right. That all of these have some sort of a utility for humankind, for lack of a better term. And all we have to do is recognize that utility and then we can use it as such. It's not quite that utilitarian, but you get the gist. And so for Philemon, what Paul is trying to open up is to say, look, Onesimus is coming back, but he's not a slave.
00:15:18
Speaker 1: He's a brother. Onesimus is coming back.
00:15:21
Speaker 2: Yes, he ran away. You could treat him harshly. I'm asking you not to. I'm asking you to treat him like a Christian who has come back to his family. And now you guys have a completely different relationship, not because what he did was right, necessarily, but because the way you're going to welcome him back is going to be attuned to God's authority and not to Roman conventions. This to me is an interesting way of sort of saying that Paul is, sometimes I phrase it as relocating a particular set of practices back underneath the authority of God, but it might be better to say he's resituating these practices underneath the authority of God.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Since they're never actually located somewhere different.
00:16:08
Speaker 2: So I don't know, does that get at what you're talking about there, Ashish?
00:16:14
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I see Paul redrawing lines right there, right? That even if he can't go and say, hey, Caesar, this practice is horrific.
00:16:21
Speaker 4: This isn't the way it's supposed to be. He can't do that.
00:16:24
Speaker 1: Right.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: And there's no elections.
00:16:26
Speaker 3: It's nothing like that, right? Caesar's in control because Caesar's in control. Ambassador political power that he has, right? The military that he has, the support that he has. And so he goes to the person that he can, the person that he knows he can direct towards a different different sort of authority, a greater authority, right? To the degree that Philemon has a belief in the person and authority of Jesus, he knows that he can appeal to that and he can begin to redraw lines. You may know that you have the political power in terms of this or the social capital in terms of this structure to have this slave, but I'm telling you, Onesimus is more than that. And of course, there is, by the way, I shouldn't say of course, it's not obvious, but there is a Greek play on words there, right? He's sending back the one who is, in name, useless. I'm sending him back to you useful, right? He's recasting, and in recasting, lines are also being redrawn in terms of the demarcation of how we understand this person, that we're beginning to value this person. Even as the social structures are what they are, We've undermined them in various ways. I think another way of saying this is he's reshaping the imagination.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:17:47
Speaker 4: And I think that's a.
00:17:48
Speaker 3: Powerful word that is going to have to have a lot of value within the conversations of political theology, that there's an imagination that we bequeath just because we are people. We all imagine the world in certain kinds of ways.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:18:02
Speaker 3: But what a good political theology does is it pushes you to reimagine the world as a different sort of thing. Yeah. than what our received structures are. I think kids do this beautifully and wonderfully. I'm honestly actually really hesitant to ever buy my kid's very particular toys. So one of my kids loves the Ninja Turtles. His birthday is upcoming. And I want to see the excitement on his face by buying him a Ninja Turtle action figure. But there's another part of me that says, this kid takes anything and everything... And he can somehow imagine it to be a tool of the ninja.
00:18:44
Speaker 2: Right.
00:18:45
Speaker 3: And he does it because he has a more, kids have this, they have a more open-ended imagination, right? They can take things and they can make whatever they want out of it. That's why they see, they see the box packaging that's sitting by the door, ready to go in the recycling bin.
00:18:58
Speaker 4: And they get excited. They quite literally get excited. They say, Papa, can I use this? Sure.
00:19:03
Speaker 3: Just on recycling day, it's still going out, but for now you can use this. Yeah. And I watched them to the point where I've actually started putting them in a bag when I get packaging because I know they're going to get excited and be creative and use it. There's an openness to their imagination where it hasn't been so set that they can see things for other purposes. Another parallel here I would say is being the child of an immigrant, you start to see the different ways that being, frankly, closer to the center of global world order. It's very different than being on the periphery of global world order. I remember we opened up, the car wasn't starting and we opened up the hood as kids. And my dad says, look at this. And he shows me the corrosion on the battery terminals. Now, my parents, they weren't particularly keen on letting.
00:19:56
Speaker 4: Me drink pops, sodas, Cokes, whatever you want to call them, depending on the part of the country you're from.
00:20:03
Speaker 3: But we had some. And it was kind of one of those things of why do we have these if we're not allowed to drink them?
00:20:09
Speaker 4: My dad went and.
00:20:09
Speaker 3: Got one of them and he says, watch this. And he pours it on the battery terminal and the corrosion just melts away. And what he wanted to show me was, there could be a secondary lesson. The secondary lesson could be, you want to put that into your mouth?
00:20:24
Speaker 1: You want to put that into your stomach?
00:20:26
Speaker 3: But that wasn't actually his point. He was just showing me what he did. We have tools all around us that can get the things done that we need to get done, even if it's not the prescribed way our imagination has said they ought to be used, right? It's the same sort of thing as kids do. And that's the sort of thing that I think a good political theology could do. It can sort of say, I can work with that. I live within this structure. How can I redraw lines? How can I take and flip the narrative? How can I place myself within one imposition of a way of being and bring freedom, the freedom that is in Christ in the midst of that, if that makes any sense?
00:21:07
Speaker 1: It does.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: Let me try to, I think, illustrate what you're talking about, and then I'll try to tie this into another point that I think is really crucial for us to wrestle with. I got asked to be a panel on Christian nationalism, and so I was talking with people there, and I had mentioned some of the ways that I vote and don't vote and different things like that, and they were sort of appalled. Um, and they said, you know, how can you not, cause I don't, I don't vote in every general election. I'll just say it like that. Like, and so they were wondering, why don't you vote?
00:21:42
Speaker 1: Right.
00:21:43
Speaker 2: And I tried to explain, like, I live in Illinois. And so if you're a Democrat, they don't need you. And if you're a Republican, you don't matter. Like we're a pretty deep blue state. Like, it's not like one vote is going to make that history.
00:21:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:21:56
Speaker 2: At least in recent history, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference, you know? And, uh, And so finally, I said, listen, I said, I don't view voting as a sacred duty. I think understanding it that way is problematic because at some point, whenever we vote, we could have a detrimental impact on the church's witness. And I think we should be able to, as Christians, choose not to have that detrimental impact. And so I don't view it as a sacred duty. I see it as a voluntary right that we can exercise or not, depending on and constrained by how this does or does not advance the gospel. They still didn't like that. So I finally said, and I don't mean this as a virtue signal, but I'm just saying, I said to them, my wife and I recently adopted. How many kids have you adopted? And they said, well, none, which I think was lucky for the illustration of my point. But when they said none, I said, well, why not? Why wouldn't you adopt? Why wouldn't you take care of the widow and the orphan? Now, in some ways, it's a loaded question, right? I'm not suggesting that all Christians go out and adopt children, right?
00:23:13
Speaker 1: But the point is this, that there has.
00:23:15
Speaker 2: To be some level of discernment within our political ideologies, our political theology and understanding to allow the church to be the church in the various and manifold ways that the church can be the church.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: And I think the.
00:23:31
Speaker 2: Core layer to this is that once we get tied into the political machine where Christians just need to get out and rock the vote, Christians need to like the posts that rally against or rail against a particular policy we don't like. I don't really have too much of a problem with some of those things, but I would say that because that's become the primary mechanism in the United States that we use to engage politically, We have lost resources that come along with being the political body of Christ committed to the gospel and unwilling to compromise, even though there are negative consequences that may come along with obedience. In other words, I think that we have to start thinking in terms of, and I almost hate to borrow this language because it's got such a pejorative effect in other places, but we need to be Christian first.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: Like, Who we are, our.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: Identity needs to be rooted in this notion that the church can have and is intended to be for the sake of the world as much as it's intended to be for the glory of God. And what I mean by that is that without the church, the world has no way of seeing the divine self-disclosure. Like we're supposed to embody that to some way, shape or form. And I think that that is an aspect of our political theology that has to come out here. We can't just get stuck with our primary vehicle of let's get the right guy elected. Let's get the right policy enacted. We also have to be boots on the ground, actually doing the work and being the church, regardless of whether a particular leader or set of policies is right. quote-unquote, going our way or not. Does that make sense to you, Ashish, what I just said?
00:25:25
Speaker 4: It absolutely does.
00:25:25
Speaker 3: So I want to draw out the significant strands that I think align here, and that's that let's give a name to it, right? One of the primary voting bloc issues for especially evangelicals and conservative Catholics in this country, if not the primary voting bloc issue, is abortion, right?
00:25:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:25:50
Speaker 3: One of the, but not the only, critiques of the pro-life movement, as it's called, is that Christians advocate strongly against abortion, but do very little to help people that find themselves in a position such that they end up choosing abortion.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:26:14
Speaker 3: One of the ways in which we see this manifested in is The extreme issue that many orphanages have in which they have children that age out, right? There's a fairly small window in which children tend to be adopted. And once they age out of a certain range deemed to be the cute range, they're no longer really the kids that people want. And now they're left in a situation that is often, not necessarily, but often tragic, right? A growth in the sense of being not wanted, a growth in the sense of displacement. And it ends up creating other cycles that are deeply problematic, right?
00:27:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:27:01
Speaker 3: And what you're advocating here is, or what you're at least implying, I should say. I don't know the full way in which you made your speech. But what you seem to have at least been implying is that the ways that we've drawn the lines... fail to take into account that there's other sorts of ways of being in the world that create an environment that if you don't want people to commit abortions, then you create avenues of opportunity that are viable.
00:27:27
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:27:27
Speaker 4: So how many of you have adopted?
00:27:29
Speaker 3: You're redrawing lines, right? It's a signal for a political change of imagination, by which I mean, again, not in the narrow sense, but in the broad sense, rethinking the way that boundaries are. I think another way of looking at this is to think about racial politics. I live in the Chicagoland area, and it's impossible to deny that historically Chicago and the Chicago area has deeply drawn racial divisions. If you look at the aggregate of it, it's quite the diverse place. But if you look at the drawing of the boundaries, both historically and even the way that they're maintained in various ways today, You have clearly demarcated areas where you can point to.
00:28:13
Speaker 4: This is where such and such people live.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Right down to the very community I live in that has a very heavily Islamic community that draws upon people ranging from northern India through the UAE, right? Immigrants from these different areas. But you can, again, look at the community and you know where people live.
00:28:40
Speaker 1: Right.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: Now, I was involved in a church for a long time in which I was trying to have conversations with a pastor. And I'll leave names of church and pastor out of this. But I was trying to advocate that this church is hard for me to attend. I have my reasons for why I was attending the church, but I said it's hard for me to motivate myself still on a weekly basis to come and to be involved in. And I was involved at the time at that church because.
00:29:10
Speaker 3: There seems to be very little effort made to recognize that there are barriers within this church, social imaginary barriers to people who don't look like the pastor or sound like the average person in this church, that I have to overcome those barriers every time I come here. And he seemed like he was listening. He seemed really attentive. But then he said, you know what, Ashish, I hear you, but we also have to reckon with basic facts of this community just as white. That was a really disappointing answer to me, not least because I could immediately point to the pockets that.
00:29:50
Speaker 4: Were very not white. Mm-hmm.
00:29:54
Speaker 3: And I could point to the fact that, you know what, if I walk into this church on a Tuesday, you know what I'll see? I'll see those people coming in here for language classes.
00:30:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:02
Speaker 4: English as a second language class.
00:30:04
Speaker 3: But if I walk in here on a Wednesday or on a Sunday, nope. Why is it that they don't feel welcomed or invited to come in on a Wednesday and a Sunday in a way that they'll walk in for a completely non-religious experience of learning English as a second language? And to his credit, he said, that's a good point. I never thought about that. And my larger point was because we've organized the ways that we think as a church and the things that we prioritize and the ways in which we organize our life of worship and the ways in which we signal out social being and political being. That's very exclusionary, meaning those same lines we see in the Chicagoland area that demarcate what spaces are safe for whom, are the same lines within which this church operates. What if, just what if, the church challenged that imaginary and said, we're building, whether physically or metaphorically, on borders rather than within those boundaries, right? Now, I'll leave off the story of that church and speak more optimistically and just simply say, I think that's the sort of thing that you were getting at, it sounds to me, with your comments about adoption. It's the sort of thing that I'm definitely trying to get at by signaling that there's great opportunity in imagination and expanding that imagination. Because often the sorts of boundaries that we take for granted, often implicitly, are things formed in us, but we're not even aware of, right? And it's the same reason that kids who haven't yet been rigidified, if I can make up a word, in those sorts of ways- can pick up one thing and imagine it to be something else and be entertained for hours with it, right? So what if the church could think in those sorts of ways, right? That's the challenge and the hope.
00:32:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love, I mean, one of the passages I reflected on a pretty good bit here lately is 1 Corinthians 7, and I think it has deep application to a political theology. And part of the reason I think that is because Paul is urging Christians people to remain as.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: They are called.
00:32:24
Speaker 2: Now, what's he doing there? He speaks to married people, single people, and then ultimately bond servants. I don't think what he's saying is, if you're single, just never get married. Or if you're a bond servant, never seek your freedom. In fact, in the passage, he says, but if you can gain your freedom, do it. So he's not arguing that you should never change your social status. This is not Paul saying that we all have our destiny and we all have our lot to live. And so just stay where God put you and don't have any ambition. That's not the point of the text. What I think the point of the text is, is this. We don't have to change our social situation in order to serve God. And I think that's a really crucial lesson for the church in the United States today and probably in other countries. I'm just most familiar with the United States is to say this, that. We've tended to lean into the politics pretty, to the political realm, I'll say, the government pretty hard.
00:33:25
Speaker 1: We've engaged a strategy.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: Or a big portion of the evangelical community, at least, has engaged a strategy that says, if we can get the right judges on the Supreme Court, if we can get the right people in office, if we can get the right policies in place, if we can get the right laws changed, we're going to be better off. I don't disagree with that being the case at all, right? Like, Some of those things are fine. Like, go ye therefore and do. My problem is that there's a capture within that political realm that says, if we don't change it, we can't really serve the Lord. And so people begin to default to changing the world, as opposed to serving the Lord where they are, doing what they can. And there's just something in me, maybe it's the old personal trainer, man, like, you know, you develop strength one rep at a time.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: It's just all it is.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: It's always about the next rep. You either get it or you don't. But it's small steps, right? And we can construct them as bigger workouts or year-long programs or whatever. But at the end of the day, it comes down to, you're still doing one rep at a time. And to me, I think that if we lose this notion that the church has the ability to do one rep at a time, that we can do small things that are going to add up to big service to the Lord, whether that changes the country's political landscape or not, is not really my concern, right? But my concern is that when we live into faithfulness, we're living into the responsibility we've been given. And I would just argue that we are not, Christians aren't responsible for changing the world. We're responsible for living in the world faithfully as we wait for God to transform it. That may very well entail certain changes in the world. It may very well mean that we, to your point, the poor will always be with us. It may very well mean that we keep running into the poor, right? And helping the poor until the end of the world, right? And nothing changes about that. The poor will always be with us, right? That problem never gets fixed until the end. I think our job is not to fix it. It's to live faithfully within it. And this is, that's where I think that first Corinthians seven passage really resonates with me as we think about sort of the political theology aspect, because in it, Paul is saying, you don't have to change your situation in order to serve the Lord, serve where you're found.
00:36:07
Speaker 1: Don't miss opportunities to change things. That's fine. but serve the Lord where you're found, serve the Lord where you're called.
00:36:15
Speaker 2: Um, so yeah, I, you know, any last comments on that and then we'll, we'll kind of close off the episode.
00:36:22
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:36:23
Speaker 3: I want to look at your comment from a slightly different angle, but to say the same thing where you said you don't have to change your, your situation in order to bring about the sorts of public changes or public efforts.
00:36:39
Speaker 4: Um, Right.
00:36:41
Speaker 3: We can continue to be where we are, but that requires us to begin to see with new eyes, to hear with new ears, to maybe hear from those we haven't previously been willing to hear from, to be willing to give an ear to those who we might incline to be thinking, well, they're coming from some position that I know I'm going to disagree with, and listen charitably, right? It'd be the willingness of the pastor to look and say, you know what, this community maybe isn't quite as homogenous as I thought it was. I'm just drawing lines in the wrong way. And so there's a willingness to challenge the givenness and to allow the opening up of an imagination to see things more broadly or from a different angle or in terms of different sorts of goals than what's given to us from the pulpit of the political stands or podiums.
00:37:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%.
00:37:42
Speaker 2: I think this is going to be an interesting series because I think what we're going to start to open up and recognize is that the church has a really unique political role to play. And it's a, to borrow a William Kavanaugh term, a theo-political role to play.
00:37:57
Speaker 1: In the world.
00:37:58
Speaker 2: We've obviously already mentioned imaginaries, which is Charles Taylor's language. We're going to be able to dive into a lot of these ideas in greater depth across this series. And so We're just barely scratching the surface on it here. So I'd encourage everybody to come back and continue on with this series. We've got some really great guests lined up and so excited to have some folks on the show and hopefully continue lining up some additional people. We've got one guy who Ashish and I worked with for a long time that we're excited about, but many.
00:38:30
Speaker 1: People might not know, Michael McDuffie.
00:38:33
Speaker 2: We've got Kevin Flatt, who wrote a book on secularization, social order, and world history.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: Who's got some really interesting stuff. And we're bringing back some old favorites like David Kiosis and a few others that have been on the show before. Veronica Ogle is going to be on, who wrote on the City of God and Augustine. We've just got a really.
00:38:54
Speaker 2: Great lineup of people who are going to bring a lot of diverse perspectives and thought process to this. And so just encourage you all to come back and subscribe to Thinking Christian so you don't miss any episodes. But Thanks, Ashish, for being here today. Thanks for the conversation. And thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Ashish Varma.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: And today we're going to be kicking off a series on the intersections of politics and faith. Now, I've written an awful lot about this.
00:00:15
Speaker 1: We've had podcast episodes on this in the past.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: But I would say most of my work has really been on Christian nationalism and my problems that I see there, as well as dabbling into some of the American civil religion sort of discourses. And again, some of the theological issues that I have with that. But as we're running up on midterms this, I guess, November, we wanted to do a series on Christians in politics that would hopefully give people a little bit of a framework for how to discern what voting is, what it means, and maybe even who to vote for. Obviously, we're not going to go down the ballot and give recommendations. but we want to help Christians sort of think through their political choices in a more robust and theological manner. And so today what we're going to do is address some of the issues that we think really need to be a part of that, that we, that, Ashish and I just believe as we think about politics, as we think about our own political participation, some of the things that we think about. And then as we go, we're going to have a variety of guests on who obviously have their own ideas and who are going to bring different expertise to the table than Ashish or I have.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: And we're going to be interacting with them too.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: So encourage you to not only listen to this episode, but subscribe to Thinking Christian so you can catch the whole political series we're going to do. So Ashish, welcome. Thanks for having this conversation. I already kind of tipped my hat. I think I got into politics and political discourse. I think the first article I ever wrote was on politics was related to giving to Caesar what is Caesar's and this idea that there needs to be a distinction. And I think this has been a theme that sort of carried forward in most of my work on politics is that there needs to be a distinction between church and state. though not an isolation of church from state. And that's sort of been my, I would say my governing framework, because I've looked at different things like American civil religion, which I think tends toward more of a merger of Christianity and politics, or even Christian nationalism, which has that real strong draw of, hey, Christians should take over government kind of aspect. So that's definitely one of the things that I think is you have to almost start and you have to understand who you are as a Christian, as a member of the body of Christ, what that body of Christ is in the world, how it's supposed to function before we really even get to politics. So that'd be the first issue I'd throw out there. And we don't have to talk about that in depth, but just to say, when I approach politics, one of the things that I'm always thinking of in my mind is how is my political participation going to reflect either positively or negatively, on the church's witness.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: So I'm glad we're having this conversation. Similarly to you, there's a longstanding interest in this conversation for me. I taught a few times a class called Political Theology. That class actually taught me that there's an important disclaimer before you enter into it, because a lot of people came to the class saying, for one of two reasons that were interesting. One of them was, and this one doesn't help in the current moment, it was just simply, I want to take a class with that guy.
00:03:41
Speaker 1: You were popular. That's good.
00:03:43
Speaker 3: I was popular in some sectors, not in others. Or popular for different reasons, right?
00:03:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:03:51
Speaker 3: And that, I want to take a class with that guy, doesn't apply. But then there were others who came to the class thinking, That what they were getting into was a very granular look at why.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: One should be a Republican or a Democrat.
00:04:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: And what they learned pretty quickly was that's not at all what the class was about. And I say that by way of segue to say that's not precisely what political theology is about. I think that actually demonstrates the truncated nature within which we tend to use the language political.
00:04:26
Speaker 1: Agreed.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: And even if you zoom out to other countries than the United States where the word political doesn't connote just two parties, even that would be still too truncated.
00:04:39
Speaker 4: Because the idea at play here is the root word.
00:04:43
Speaker 3: The root word of political is polis, which is an ancient Greek term that just meant the city. And specifically the political were those things referring to the affairs of the city. And so anything that revolves around that shared life together in a communal structure with formal boundaries on what it meant to be within that had to do with the political. And a political theology was very much geared towards what does it mean then to live as people who are followers of Christ within that shared environment of the polis. including but not limited to those or with those who maybe have no interest in the person of Jesus or the kingdom come and the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven, right? And so it raises all sorts of questions that certainly lend to the conversations we think of as political, right? Some of the issues that separate Democrats and Republicans or in other countries, various other parties, but are certainly not limited to that. And certainly, can't be reduced to an advocacy for either party.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: I think that, you know, in theological circles these days, it is not uncommon to hear that the gospel is a political gospel.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: And I think.
00:06:14
Speaker 2: In the best case scenarios, what people mean by that is that the coming of the kingdom of God and the proclamation of the lordship of Christ, King Jesus, you'll often hear it said, is over against the rulers and authorities of this world. Now, I think there needs probably a lot of qualification around that, but I think it's a point that's well made more generally, is to say that this notion that we can separate cleanly between politics and religion and that, for instance, Christianity is a religion and politics is politics or the American government represents the political realm.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: It's not really strictly that.
00:06:58
Speaker 2: As we look at the authority structures that we find in scripture, we do see that God is sovereign overall. And then there's a question of whether or not governing authorities recognize that sovereignty, whether the church recognizes that sovereignty to a degree, how the church recognizes that sovereignty through things like lack of compromise and of the faith as suffering comes, right? Are we really willing to be obedient when there are negative consequences to that obedience, that kind of non-compromise is what I have in mind. So I think that the point you're making is well taken, that there is a political, there is a sense in which the gospel is political because God's kingdom has a king and that king is above all other kings. And to the extent that everybody is beholden to live under the authority of Christ, right? We're all, everyone is obligated to do that. Then there becomes this question of, well, how do Christians do that under rulers who have a delegated authority from the sovereign? How do we relate to those delegated authorities? What is the scope of those delegated authorities? All of these kinds of questions, in addition to the ones you're raising, all come up. And That even looks different as we think about the way that Paul would have had to navigate this. And we've talked about this in other podcasts. But when Paul is giving his instructions to, for instance, bond servants and masters, there's probably a good reason that he's not thinking, you know, we should really change this part of society. We should free the bond servants. Because he had no particular outlet to do so. It's a completely different form of government. It's a completely different social setting. He has different limitations on the rights that he has as a Roman citizen than we do in the United States of America. And so all of these things, I think, point to the idea that when we're talking about the intersection of faith and politics, what we're really talking about is both something that is particular to a particular country, but also particular to a specific time within that country. And so this can look different the way we, the dorky way to say it is diachronically or through time, right?
00:09:20
Speaker 1: In the same way that it can look different geographically.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: So that our, what it means to be Christian in the United States is going to entail different activities than maybe it would require to be a Christian in, let's say, China or Russia or any of.
00:09:36
Speaker 1: These countries over on the other side of the ocean.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And so there's a particular, a particularity to politics that, That tends nowadays to be bounded within what we would call a nation state.
00:09:51
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: This makes me think of another disclaimer that has to enter into this, that when we're talking about being political antagonists, we're saying at base that we are creatures that exist within social political structures.
00:10:08
Speaker 1: Right.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: But it does not mean that the entirety of our agency can be subsumed within what we tend to think of popularly as the political entity. So your example of Paul, I think, is a fitting one, right? He had no political agency if what we mean by that is the power to enact social structural changes that would say slavery is therefore no longer okay. He had no power to enact that. But he was every bit the political agent that could say, I can undermine it, right? And you look at the subtleties within which he talked, not least of which was, for instance, the Book of Philemon. Where he sends Onesimus back to Philemon, but in the process of doing so, he lets Philemon know, hey, guess what? This guy who is your slave, he's your brother in Christ. He's set at odds one political way of forming identities with another political way. And that other political way is one that could not be enacted by any agency of Paul as a social structural rule. about the nature of slavery, but it was one in which he could undermine the validity of the absoluteness within which Philemon perhaps was looking at Onesimus.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:11:29
Speaker 3: Another way to think about this or another example of this, I think is, and, and here's my, here's my dread at the moment that I'm going to get the passage a little bit wrong, but you get the idea. Um, I believe it was Martha was anointing the feet of Jesus with oil. And if I'm remembering and not conflating passages, the disciples chastised her for wasting the oil. You could have sold that and you can give that money to the poor. Jesus' response wasn't, don't worry about the poor. Jesus' response was, the poor will always be with us. Now, I think often that's been read as saying the poor should always be with us. No, I don't think that's at all what he's saying. What he's saying is in this particular moment, the work Martha is doing has a particular vision that's superseding yours. She gets what she's doing in a way that you don't. But he's not undermining the instinct to help the poor. He's saying there will be plenty of time to do exactly what you just say, to take that oil and sell it and give it to the poor. Now, whether or not one feels that the government does a good job of helping the poor, doesn't change the political agency that Jesus is advocating there for the church to help the poor.
00:12:41
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: That's the kind of distinction we have at play here, where there is a political agency that's outside of the typical received notion of politics, as we like to interpret it. Yeah. And theology, at its best, it's knowingly attending to that. At its worstâ it fails to recognize that it is already enacting as political agents, right? Because we exist in context. We exist relative to powers and authorities and principalities. We exist relative to leaders, dominions, rulers. And we have to make decisions that don't just simply honor the lines that those political powers and dominions and rulers and authorities set in place.
00:13:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:26
Speaker 2: So would you agree that, Or what would you think of this idea?
00:13:33
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the better way to phrase this.
00:13:35
Speaker 2: So James Gibson wrote this book called, I'm going to blank on the title. It's an ecological theory of visual perception, I think is the title. But basically what he says is that this is really a profound insight. Smaller things are contained within bigger things.
00:13:56
Speaker 1: Right. And so everything is nested within this large area.
00:14:00
Speaker 2: Now, If I'm thinking about that from a Christian perception, what we're really saying here is that everything is nested underneath God's authority. And so what you end up with is God is the sort of all-encompassing biggest environment you can think of. And so as Paul is moving about and like, you know, talking, you know, sending Onesimus back to Philemon, for instance, What he's really doing is he's calling Philemon to have a bigger vision. Don't allow yourself to be fully nested within the Roman Empire and the conventions and practices within that empire. Don't be slave to that because you have, again, to use Gibson term, affordances beyond that. In other words, when Gibson thinks of affordances, these are the tools that you encounter along the way Right. That all of these have some sort of a utility for humankind, for lack of a better term. And all we have to do is recognize that utility and then we can use it as such. It's not quite that utilitarian, but you get the gist. And so for Philemon, what Paul is trying to open up is to say, look, Onesimus is coming back, but he's not a slave.
00:15:18
Speaker 1: He's a brother. Onesimus is coming back.
00:15:21
Speaker 2: Yes, he ran away. You could treat him harshly. I'm asking you not to. I'm asking you to treat him like a Christian who has come back to his family. And now you guys have a completely different relationship, not because what he did was right, necessarily, but because the way you're going to welcome him back is going to be attuned to God's authority and not to Roman conventions. This to me is an interesting way of sort of saying that Paul is, sometimes I phrase it as relocating a particular set of practices back underneath the authority of God, but it might be better to say he's resituating these practices underneath the authority of God.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Since they're never actually located somewhere different.
00:16:08
Speaker 2: So I don't know, does that get at what you're talking about there, Ashish?
00:16:14
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I see Paul redrawing lines right there, right? That even if he can't go and say, hey, Caesar, this practice is horrific.
00:16:21
Speaker 4: This isn't the way it's supposed to be. He can't do that.
00:16:24
Speaker 1: Right.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: And there's no elections.
00:16:26
Speaker 3: It's nothing like that, right? Caesar's in control because Caesar's in control. Ambassador political power that he has, right? The military that he has, the support that he has. And so he goes to the person that he can, the person that he knows he can direct towards a different different sort of authority, a greater authority, right? To the degree that Philemon has a belief in the person and authority of Jesus, he knows that he can appeal to that and he can begin to redraw lines. You may know that you have the political power in terms of this or the social capital in terms of this structure to have this slave, but I'm telling you, Onesimus is more than that. And of course, there is, by the way, I shouldn't say of course, it's not obvious, but there is a Greek play on words there, right? He's sending back the one who is, in name, useless. I'm sending him back to you useful, right? He's recasting, and in recasting, lines are also being redrawn in terms of the demarcation of how we understand this person, that we're beginning to value this person. Even as the social structures are what they are, We've undermined them in various ways. I think another way of saying this is he's reshaping the imagination.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:17:47
Speaker 4: And I think that's a.
00:17:48
Speaker 3: Powerful word that is going to have to have a lot of value within the conversations of political theology, that there's an imagination that we bequeath just because we are people. We all imagine the world in certain kinds of ways.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:18:02
Speaker 3: But what a good political theology does is it pushes you to reimagine the world as a different sort of thing. Yeah. than what our received structures are. I think kids do this beautifully and wonderfully. I'm honestly actually really hesitant to ever buy my kid's very particular toys. So one of my kids loves the Ninja Turtles. His birthday is upcoming. And I want to see the excitement on his face by buying him a Ninja Turtle action figure. But there's another part of me that says, this kid takes anything and everything... And he can somehow imagine it to be a tool of the ninja.
00:18:44
Speaker 2: Right.
00:18:45
Speaker 3: And he does it because he has a more, kids have this, they have a more open-ended imagination, right? They can take things and they can make whatever they want out of it. That's why they see, they see the box packaging that's sitting by the door, ready to go in the recycling bin.
00:18:58
Speaker 4: And they get excited. They quite literally get excited. They say, Papa, can I use this? Sure.
00:19:03
Speaker 3: Just on recycling day, it's still going out, but for now you can use this. Yeah. And I watched them to the point where I've actually started putting them in a bag when I get packaging because I know they're going to get excited and be creative and use it. There's an openness to their imagination where it hasn't been so set that they can see things for other purposes. Another parallel here I would say is being the child of an immigrant, you start to see the different ways that being, frankly, closer to the center of global world order. It's very different than being on the periphery of global world order. I remember we opened up, the car wasn't starting and we opened up the hood as kids. And my dad says, look at this. And he shows me the corrosion on the battery terminals. Now, my parents, they weren't particularly keen on letting.
00:19:56
Speaker 4: Me drink pops, sodas, Cokes, whatever you want to call them, depending on the part of the country you're from.
00:20:03
Speaker 3: But we had some. And it was kind of one of those things of why do we have these if we're not allowed to drink them?
00:20:09
Speaker 4: My dad went and.
00:20:09
Speaker 3: Got one of them and he says, watch this. And he pours it on the battery terminal and the corrosion just melts away. And what he wanted to show me was, there could be a secondary lesson. The secondary lesson could be, you want to put that into your mouth?
00:20:24
Speaker 1: You want to put that into your stomach?
00:20:26
Speaker 3: But that wasn't actually his point. He was just showing me what he did. We have tools all around us that can get the things done that we need to get done, even if it's not the prescribed way our imagination has said they ought to be used, right? It's the same sort of thing as kids do. And that's the sort of thing that I think a good political theology could do. It can sort of say, I can work with that. I live within this structure. How can I redraw lines? How can I take and flip the narrative? How can I place myself within one imposition of a way of being and bring freedom, the freedom that is in Christ in the midst of that, if that makes any sense?
00:21:07
Speaker 1: It does.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: Let me try to, I think, illustrate what you're talking about, and then I'll try to tie this into another point that I think is really crucial for us to wrestle with. I got asked to be a panel on Christian nationalism, and so I was talking with people there, and I had mentioned some of the ways that I vote and don't vote and different things like that, and they were sort of appalled. Um, and they said, you know, how can you not, cause I don't, I don't vote in every general election. I'll just say it like that. Like, and so they were wondering, why don't you vote?
00:21:42
Speaker 1: Right.
00:21:43
Speaker 2: And I tried to explain, like, I live in Illinois. And so if you're a Democrat, they don't need you. And if you're a Republican, you don't matter. Like we're a pretty deep blue state. Like, it's not like one vote is going to make that history.
00:21:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:21:56
Speaker 2: At least in recent history, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference, you know? And, uh, And so finally, I said, listen, I said, I don't view voting as a sacred duty. I think understanding it that way is problematic because at some point, whenever we vote, we could have a detrimental impact on the church's witness. And I think we should be able to, as Christians, choose not to have that detrimental impact. And so I don't view it as a sacred duty. I see it as a voluntary right that we can exercise or not, depending on and constrained by how this does or does not advance the gospel. They still didn't like that. So I finally said, and I don't mean this as a virtue signal, but I'm just saying, I said to them, my wife and I recently adopted. How many kids have you adopted? And they said, well, none, which I think was lucky for the illustration of my point. But when they said none, I said, well, why not? Why wouldn't you adopt? Why wouldn't you take care of the widow and the orphan? Now, in some ways, it's a loaded question, right? I'm not suggesting that all Christians go out and adopt children, right?
00:23:13
Speaker 1: But the point is this, that there has.
00:23:15
Speaker 2: To be some level of discernment within our political ideologies, our political theology and understanding to allow the church to be the church in the various and manifold ways that the church can be the church.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: And I think the.
00:23:31
Speaker 2: Core layer to this is that once we get tied into the political machine where Christians just need to get out and rock the vote, Christians need to like the posts that rally against or rail against a particular policy we don't like. I don't really have too much of a problem with some of those things, but I would say that because that's become the primary mechanism in the United States that we use to engage politically, We have lost resources that come along with being the political body of Christ committed to the gospel and unwilling to compromise, even though there are negative consequences that may come along with obedience. In other words, I think that we have to start thinking in terms of, and I almost hate to borrow this language because it's got such a pejorative effect in other places, but we need to be Christian first.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: Like, Who we are, our.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: Identity needs to be rooted in this notion that the church can have and is intended to be for the sake of the world as much as it's intended to be for the glory of God. And what I mean by that is that without the church, the world has no way of seeing the divine self-disclosure. Like we're supposed to embody that to some way, shape or form. And I think that that is an aspect of our political theology that has to come out here. We can't just get stuck with our primary vehicle of let's get the right guy elected. Let's get the right policy enacted. We also have to be boots on the ground, actually doing the work and being the church, regardless of whether a particular leader or set of policies is right. quote-unquote, going our way or not. Does that make sense to you, Ashish, what I just said?
00:25:25
Speaker 4: It absolutely does.
00:25:25
Speaker 3: So I want to draw out the significant strands that I think align here, and that's that let's give a name to it, right? One of the primary voting bloc issues for especially evangelicals and conservative Catholics in this country, if not the primary voting bloc issue, is abortion, right?
00:25:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:25:50
Speaker 3: One of the, but not the only, critiques of the pro-life movement, as it's called, is that Christians advocate strongly against abortion, but do very little to help people that find themselves in a position such that they end up choosing abortion.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:26:14
Speaker 3: One of the ways in which we see this manifested in is The extreme issue that many orphanages have in which they have children that age out, right? There's a fairly small window in which children tend to be adopted. And once they age out of a certain range deemed to be the cute range, they're no longer really the kids that people want. And now they're left in a situation that is often, not necessarily, but often tragic, right? A growth in the sense of being not wanted, a growth in the sense of displacement. And it ends up creating other cycles that are deeply problematic, right?
00:27:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:27:01
Speaker 3: And what you're advocating here is, or what you're at least implying, I should say. I don't know the full way in which you made your speech. But what you seem to have at least been implying is that the ways that we've drawn the lines... fail to take into account that there's other sorts of ways of being in the world that create an environment that if you don't want people to commit abortions, then you create avenues of opportunity that are viable.
00:27:27
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:27:27
Speaker 4: So how many of you have adopted?
00:27:29
Speaker 3: You're redrawing lines, right? It's a signal for a political change of imagination, by which I mean, again, not in the narrow sense, but in the broad sense, rethinking the way that boundaries are. I think another way of looking at this is to think about racial politics. I live in the Chicagoland area, and it's impossible to deny that historically Chicago and the Chicago area has deeply drawn racial divisions. If you look at the aggregate of it, it's quite the diverse place. But if you look at the drawing of the boundaries, both historically and even the way that they're maintained in various ways today, You have clearly demarcated areas where you can point to.
00:28:13
Speaker 4: This is where such and such people live.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Right down to the very community I live in that has a very heavily Islamic community that draws upon people ranging from northern India through the UAE, right? Immigrants from these different areas. But you can, again, look at the community and you know where people live.
00:28:40
Speaker 1: Right.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: Now, I was involved in a church for a long time in which I was trying to have conversations with a pastor. And I'll leave names of church and pastor out of this. But I was trying to advocate that this church is hard for me to attend. I have my reasons for why I was attending the church, but I said it's hard for me to motivate myself still on a weekly basis to come and to be involved in. And I was involved at the time at that church because.
00:29:10
Speaker 3: There seems to be very little effort made to recognize that there are barriers within this church, social imaginary barriers to people who don't look like the pastor or sound like the average person in this church, that I have to overcome those barriers every time I come here. And he seemed like he was listening. He seemed really attentive. But then he said, you know what, Ashish, I hear you, but we also have to reckon with basic facts of this community just as white. That was a really disappointing answer to me, not least because I could immediately point to the pockets that.
00:29:50
Speaker 4: Were very not white. Mm-hmm.
00:29:54
Speaker 3: And I could point to the fact that, you know what, if I walk into this church on a Tuesday, you know what I'll see? I'll see those people coming in here for language classes.
00:30:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:02
Speaker 4: English as a second language class.
00:30:04
Speaker 3: But if I walk in here on a Wednesday or on a Sunday, nope. Why is it that they don't feel welcomed or invited to come in on a Wednesday and a Sunday in a way that they'll walk in for a completely non-religious experience of learning English as a second language? And to his credit, he said, that's a good point. I never thought about that. And my larger point was because we've organized the ways that we think as a church and the things that we prioritize and the ways in which we organize our life of worship and the ways in which we signal out social being and political being. That's very exclusionary, meaning those same lines we see in the Chicagoland area that demarcate what spaces are safe for whom, are the same lines within which this church operates. What if, just what if, the church challenged that imaginary and said, we're building, whether physically or metaphorically, on borders rather than within those boundaries, right? Now, I'll leave off the story of that church and speak more optimistically and just simply say, I think that's the sort of thing that you were getting at, it sounds to me, with your comments about adoption. It's the sort of thing that I'm definitely trying to get at by signaling that there's great opportunity in imagination and expanding that imagination. Because often the sorts of boundaries that we take for granted, often implicitly, are things formed in us, but we're not even aware of, right? And it's the same reason that kids who haven't yet been rigidified, if I can make up a word, in those sorts of ways- can pick up one thing and imagine it to be something else and be entertained for hours with it, right? So what if the church could think in those sorts of ways, right? That's the challenge and the hope.
00:32:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love, I mean, one of the passages I reflected on a pretty good bit here lately is 1 Corinthians 7, and I think it has deep application to a political theology. And part of the reason I think that is because Paul is urging Christians people to remain as.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: They are called.
00:32:24
Speaker 2: Now, what's he doing there? He speaks to married people, single people, and then ultimately bond servants. I don't think what he's saying is, if you're single, just never get married. Or if you're a bond servant, never seek your freedom. In fact, in the passage, he says, but if you can gain your freedom, do it. So he's not arguing that you should never change your social status. This is not Paul saying that we all have our destiny and we all have our lot to live. And so just stay where God put you and don't have any ambition. That's not the point of the text. What I think the point of the text is, is this. We don't have to change our social situation in order to serve God. And I think that's a really crucial lesson for the church in the United States today and probably in other countries. I'm just most familiar with the United States is to say this, that. We've tended to lean into the politics pretty, to the political realm, I'll say, the government pretty hard.
00:33:25
Speaker 1: We've engaged a strategy.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: Or a big portion of the evangelical community, at least, has engaged a strategy that says, if we can get the right judges on the Supreme Court, if we can get the right people in office, if we can get the right policies in place, if we can get the right laws changed, we're going to be better off. I don't disagree with that being the case at all, right? Like, Some of those things are fine. Like, go ye therefore and do. My problem is that there's a capture within that political realm that says, if we don't change it, we can't really serve the Lord. And so people begin to default to changing the world, as opposed to serving the Lord where they are, doing what they can. And there's just something in me, maybe it's the old personal trainer, man, like, you know, you develop strength one rep at a time.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: It's just all it is.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: It's always about the next rep. You either get it or you don't. But it's small steps, right? And we can construct them as bigger workouts or year-long programs or whatever. But at the end of the day, it comes down to, you're still doing one rep at a time. And to me, I think that if we lose this notion that the church has the ability to do one rep at a time, that we can do small things that are going to add up to big service to the Lord, whether that changes the country's political landscape or not, is not really my concern, right? But my concern is that when we live into faithfulness, we're living into the responsibility we've been given. And I would just argue that we are not, Christians aren't responsible for changing the world. We're responsible for living in the world faithfully as we wait for God to transform it. That may very well entail certain changes in the world. It may very well mean that we, to your point, the poor will always be with us. It may very well mean that we keep running into the poor, right? And helping the poor until the end of the world, right? And nothing changes about that. The poor will always be with us, right? That problem never gets fixed until the end. I think our job is not to fix it. It's to live faithfully within it. And this is, that's where I think that first Corinthians seven passage really resonates with me as we think about sort of the political theology aspect, because in it, Paul is saying, you don't have to change your situation in order to serve the Lord, serve where you're found.
00:36:07
Speaker 1: Don't miss opportunities to change things. That's fine. but serve the Lord where you're found, serve the Lord where you're called.
00:36:15
Speaker 2: Um, so yeah, I, you know, any last comments on that and then we'll, we'll kind of close off the episode.
00:36:22
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:36:23
Speaker 3: I want to look at your comment from a slightly different angle, but to say the same thing where you said you don't have to change your, your situation in order to bring about the sorts of public changes or public efforts.
00:36:39
Speaker 4: Um, Right.
00:36:41
Speaker 3: We can continue to be where we are, but that requires us to begin to see with new eyes, to hear with new ears, to maybe hear from those we haven't previously been willing to hear from, to be willing to give an ear to those who we might incline to be thinking, well, they're coming from some position that I know I'm going to disagree with, and listen charitably, right? It'd be the willingness of the pastor to look and say, you know what, this community maybe isn't quite as homogenous as I thought it was. I'm just drawing lines in the wrong way. And so there's a willingness to challenge the givenness and to allow the opening up of an imagination to see things more broadly or from a different angle or in terms of different sorts of goals than what's given to us from the pulpit of the political stands or podiums.
00:37:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%.
00:37:42
Speaker 2: I think this is going to be an interesting series because I think what we're going to start to open up and recognize is that the church has a really unique political role to play. And it's a, to borrow a William Kavanaugh term, a theo-political role to play.
00:37:57
Speaker 1: In the world.
00:37:58
Speaker 2: We've obviously already mentioned imaginaries, which is Charles Taylor's language. We're going to be able to dive into a lot of these ideas in greater depth across this series. And so We're just barely scratching the surface on it here. So I'd encourage everybody to come back and continue on with this series. We've got some really great guests lined up and so excited to have some folks on the show and hopefully continue lining up some additional people. We've got one guy who Ashish and I worked with for a long time that we're excited about, but many.
00:38:30
Speaker 1: People might not know, Michael McDuffie.
00:38:33
Speaker 2: We've got Kevin Flatt, who wrote a book on secularization, social order, and world history.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: Who's got some really interesting stuff. And we're bringing back some old favorites like David Kiosis and a few others that have been on the show before. Veronica Ogle is going to be on, who wrote on the City of God and Augustine. We've just got a really.
00:38:54
Speaker 2: Great lineup of people who are going to bring a lot of diverse perspectives and thought process to this. And so just encourage you all to come back and subscribe to Thinking Christian so you don't miss any episodes. But Thanks, Ashish, for being here today. Thanks for the conversation. And thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.