The Political Importance of Wednesday

This was published in etcetera on Oct. 28, 2008.

The Political Importance of Wednesday

How can we distinguish between true and false modes of Christian political action? This is the same question that began my article from Sept. 30, and I want to begin again with it today. In that article I was hoping to challenge our assumption that voting is the best or only way to bear faithful witness to Christ during the elections in the United States in 2008. I came to the conclusion that it is neither, and offered the action of non-voting as a better alternative. Today, however, I don’t want to talk about voting - which Ben Amundgaard calls “one of the only opportunities a citizen has to directly alter the position of the government under which he or she must live” – rather, I want to talk about the public and political nature of the church.

We don’t normally talk about the church as being ‘public’ or ‘political’. The reason for this is because those words have been co-opted by the state in order to put the church in its proper place. Unfortunately, that place is no place. “Political action” is voting, running for office, and starting political action committees. The closest the church can get to being “public” is by talking about being “visible”, which usually ends up being nothing more than a discussion about church building funds. “Public” is specifically used in contrast to “private”, which is the only thing the church can be: a place for the private affairs of a dwindling number of nostalgic, self-deluded believers.

I want to reject these distinctions and the implications they lead to. I want to argue that it is the church – the ekklesia – that is the most political entity in God’s creation and, consequently, the most public. However, these words (political and public) must be used on the church’s terms rather than those dictated to us by the state. In his book Political Worship, Bernd Wannenwetsch states: “It should be borne in mind that the church has its own ‘politics’ (and economics), its specific way of dealing with the differences in social life... This means that it enters into a struggle which is certainly not directly ‘political’ (since it does not follow the prevailing political rules) but is primarily a struggle about politics, a struggle for the true form of political existence.” Wannenwetsch goes on, “…the Church has to bring its own form of political praxis into the game, by playing along, but with other rules.”

What are those rules? How many of us have ever considered that most of the rules we live by are actually given to us by the state, not the Gospel of Jesus Christ? The freedom of the gospel allows us to think outside the rules of empire. Why was the term ekklesia used by the early church for self-identification when other concepts were available? Ekklesia, as argued by William Cavanaugh and others, is a particularly political term. To be political was to be involved in the affairs of the polis – the state. They could have self-identified as a guild or an association (koinon or collegium) but opted for a word that denotes a specific stance towards the public life. The choice of ekklesia was a conscience choice to self-identify as the people of the public God who is the Lord of all of life – even the empire. We must recapture this understanding of ekklesia if we will ever be able to engage the state with true political and public worship.

What does it mean to be political? How can we distinguish between true and false modes of Christian political action? I have few answers to these questions but I refuse to begin with the answers of empire. As long as the illusion is perpetuated that says we can divvy up our life into public, private, sacred and secular, it is crucial that the church resists the disintegrating force of the modern political machine driven by propaganda and technique. We must disengage from the dominance of the state – to use the words of Walter Brueggemann – only then to re-engage as Christians to unmask the principalities and powers. The action of disengagement begins with gathering as the ekklesia. After prayer, gathering around the crucified and resurrected Lord is the most significant form of political (public) action we have available to us. And if we don’t engage in these two things with patience, hope, and imagination, we will not be faithful to our call to be the church that resists the world by living the Word. If we can’t understand how praying and gathering are both political and public, then perhaps we should start with that question before simply accepting the imperatives of the state.

Christians in The United States will have the opportunity to engage in some “political” action by voting next Tuesday, but what will we do on Wednesday? If the church is not political on Wednesday then it is not political at all – and there are no elections on Wednesday.

KC Flynn, Oct. 28, 2008