Christianity’s chief contribution to America’s civic life resides less in the ideas and positions Christians promote than in the way they go about promoting them.Debate about our shared life as citizens has always been a vigorous affair in American history. Yet recent years have seen a hardening of positions and a refusal to cross boundaries to cooperate or even understand those with whom we disagree. Not only in the rough and tumble world of political campaigns, but even in the historically more bipartisan world of governance, the American public square has become a fundamentally divided place.One reason for this situation, says Ellen Marshall, is an absolutizing of the ethical positions that underlie political commitments. Both the religious right and the secular left have couched their ideas in terms of unbending moral principles, certain in their possession of the truth. But Christian ethics teaches us that, while God's truth is indeed absolute, our grasp of it never is. Recognizing this truth, Christians can more faithfully engage in the political sphere by:• Insisting on a rigorous and sustained exercise of the virtue of humility. • Charting a narrative understanding of Christian ethics, in which a rich description of the context of moral decisions is necessary to understand how right and how wrong they are. • Taking account of the moral ambiguity that resides in almost all human actions.Read the Introduction

Christians in the Public Square

Faith that Transforms PoliticsBy Ellen Ott Marshall

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2008 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-64698-2

Chapter One

Love

With this chapter, we begin to turn our attention from the substance of the debates to their form. Chapters 1 through 3 make three recommendations regarding the form of progressive Christian political engagement: (1) that it should take the shape of love in the public square, (2) that it should attend honestly and deliberately to moral ambiguity, and (3) that it should practice theological humility. This chapter draws on guidance from the history of nonviolent action to argue that love must accompany Christian political engagement, and to describe this love in action.

Love, as a subject in Christian ethics, has a long history as one would imagine, given its primacy as one of the three theological virtues. It has, moreover, received particularly intense scholarly scrutiny since Anders Nygren published Agape and Eros in the 1930s. Around the same time, Reinhold Niebuhr began to articulate the distinction he sees between love and justice, a distinction that appears in various forms throughout his life's work. Gene Outka, ethics professor at Yale University, has also shaped this discussion with his systematic treatment, Agape: An Ethical Analysis. With the rise of liberation movements, the self-sacrificial aspect of agape came under critical scrutiny. In the 1970s, Roman Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley joined other feminists to emphasize love as mutuality and equality rather than self-sacrifice.

It is important to know that there is a history of scholarship on the ethics of love. However, the resources informing this chapter primarily come from the history of nonviolent resistance, where we find descriptions and examples of love persisting in the crucible of conflict. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, and Dorothy Day provide us with helpful language for and practices of love in the context of struggles for social change. The following pages provide a brief description of five related concepts, one from each figure: ahimsa, agape, interbeing, ubuntu, and personalism. It is helpful to think in terms of a Venn diagram, a series of overlapping circles.

Each concept has its own context, meaning, history, and religious tradition, but there is also a common area that provides additional texture to the concept of love in the context of political engagement.

Unconditional Love as a Starting Point

I believe that Christians should engage politics with a love that risks not being reciprocated, an unconditional love for all, a love that makes no distinction between friend and enemy. This is not a universal argument for unconditional love as the highest form of love in every context. It is an argument for the necessity of agape in situations of heated political conflict where we must learn to confront one another without hatred. As I will argue more fully later in this chapter, I recommend this form of love in politics because I believe we are fundamentally related in such ways that your benefit is not wholly distinct from mine, and because I believe that this form of love has the potential to transform our politics and our societies in positive ways. I find myself nodding to the truthfulness and importance of agape as described by Gene Outka:

Agape then includes unilateral efforts to establish and enhance personal relations marked by closeness and social relations marked by concord. It does not await, anticipate, or demand a response in kind, though it desires and hopes for such a response, and takes actual attainment as the fruition it seeks. It will, moreover, strive for reconciliation that forsakes negative equivalence: 'When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate' (1 Corinthians 4:12b-13 [RSV]). The refusal to make reciprocity a condition for care about another's well-being points likewise toward universal love.

I do not think that a love that refuses "to make reciprocity a condition for care" is the only form of Christian love. But I do think it is an essential posture for Christians in the public square.

In her reflections on the suspension of human rights and civil liberties for those suspected of terrorism, philosopher Judith Butler writes, "Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity." I feel the same way about the commitment to unconditional love in the context of heated political debate. My ability to care for the well-being of the very person whose views threaten the people and values I hold dear is a test of my humanity and my discipleship. We are not called to discipleship only in private places or only when it is politically effective. Discipleship requires that we reflect the light of a gracious and loving God. We cannot do this when we place that light under the bushel of political division and public antagonism.

To take it a step further, I am convinced that means and ends are related, to the point that we cannot realize a beloved community with less than loving means. Deep in my own faith and family tradition is the pietist conviction that connects action with character formation: I become what I do. The study of nonviolence convinced me that this sense of individual character formation also holds true on larger, social scales. We, as communities, become what we do.

Gandhi put it this way: "They say 'means are after all [just] means.' I would say 'means are after all everything.' As the means, so the end." As Gandhian scholar Rex Ambler explains, the connection between means and ends "exemplified the fundamental strategy of Gandhian peacemaking, which was to embody the goals to be struggled for in the conduct of the struggle itself." Like Gandhi, King preached the connection between means and ends, adding that hateful acts contribute to hate in the universe. In his account of the Montgomery bus boycott, King writes:

In my weekly remarks as president [of the Montgomery Improvement Association], I stressed that the use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force.

This connection between means and ends is so important because we create the future through our present actions. If we want a less violent future, we must act less violently in the present. Repeating behavior does not make transformation possible. Transformation requires that we disrupt the pattern. If I respond to hate in kind, then I foreclose the possibility of a new opportunity in the future. But if I respond to hate with love, then I have introduced a new possibility; I have created a space for love to grow.

I want to stress that unconditional love is not the only form of love suited to the public square, in my view. But in these situations of intense conflict, we must begin with agape because it functions as a negative limit: No matter what, we refuse to hate and to...