Piety and Politics – A Baptist Perspective
By Foy Valentine
This article was prepared at the request of Dr. Ronald Sider for a special issue of the publication Transformation, entitled "Towards an Evangelical Political Philosophy and Agenda." Specifically, it was one part of a section on "Different Political Philosophies: Several Major Traditions," including Catholic, Reformed Thought, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Baptist.
My perspective regarding a Baptist political philosophy and agenda is significantly affected, if not actually shaped, by my particular time and by my particular place. I grew up, and I have lived practically all of my life, in the American South where Baptists are either the majority faith group or think and act as if we were. About half of all the Baptists in the world live here. Thus affected, my view of the subject at hand is not exactly the same view as that of Baptists in Great Britain or Brazil; and it is even less likely to be the same as that of Baptists in Russia or Canada or Burma or Indonesia or Nigeria. There are majority mind-sets and minority mind-sets. A marginalized minority, like the early Christians in Jerusalem and later in the Roman Empire, relates to the principalities and powers in ways significantly different from those who, like myself with a majoritarian heritage, tend to develop in their relationship to the state more confidence, more of a willingness to use power, more of a sense of responsibility if not actual ownership, and, in short, more of an established church outlook and approach.
Still, there are enough shared Baptist convictions, common Baptist commitments, and underlying Baptist insights for it to be said that Baptists everywhere share essentially the same ideas about politics and political action, about government and our relationship to it and its various entities. We profess one Lord, one faith, and one baptism; and we generally subscribe unambiguously to an overarching belief that the people of God ought to be in the world, including the world of politics, as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and leaven for the lump.
Out of the last six presidents elected to the presidency of the Untied States of America, three have been Baptists. The present Vice President is a Baptist as are both the current Speaker of the House of Representatives and the immediate past Speaker, generally said to be the third most powerful person on the national political scene. The list could go on. Obviously these Baptists have found in their Baptist heritage strong support for their involvement in the political arena.
Why?
Baptists are not Anabaptists. We honor our Anabaptist kin. We respect their special convictions and commitments. Our respect is given to those who lead contemplative lives or expend their energies in fine-tuning formal worship of Almighty God or reject the use of power in the social setting or withdraw from the world in order to devote themselves singlemindedly to what they understand to be the things of God.
All of this, however, is simply not the Baptist way. It strikes us as less right for us than a principled involvement in government so as to effect change for the glory of God and for the good of humanity.
We respect all who stop and render aid to those who have fallen among thieves on today`s Jericho roads, and we ourselves are committed to such one-on-one personal ministries. But we also believe that it is the Christian thing to do to band together with others of like mind and heart to make the Jericho roads of this world safe for travel. Such banding together to effect social change and extend justice, as the former president of the American Baptist Churches, Dr. Culbert G. Rutenber, has powerfully put it in his book, The Reconciling Gospel, is also a way for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Justice, we believe, is love at a distance. We understand it to be our Christian duty to involve ourselves in government so as to "work out" our "salvation with fear and trembling" as an appropriate response after we have prayed, "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."
For these reasons, and many others, Baptists accept our dual citizenship, in heaven and on earth. We are like Dwight L. Moody who was rebuked by a pious woman for having taken what she considered to be a much too active stand in a political issue of the day. "After all Mr. Moody," she asked, "Aren`t you a citizen of heaven?" "Indeed, lady," he replied, "I am a citizen of heaven; but right now I am voting in Cook County, Illinois."
So, Baptists pray for those in authority, pay taxes, obey the law, vote on election day, and stand for office. We work at shaping legislation that helps children, strengthens families, defends the poor, feeds the hungry, and supports public education. And we actively oppose such socially destructive things as racism, institutionalized gender bias, gambling, smoking, pollution, and environmental abuse. As changed people, we seek to change the world.
Politics is the science of government, the art of the possible, the serious business of deciding who gets what, when and where. In and of itself, it is neither good nor bad. It has power as its chief ingredient, compromise as its primary method of getting things done, and the public good as its main purpose. Baptists believe that politics, the conduct of public affairs, is neither bad enough for Christians to try to wash their hands of it nor good enough for Christians to feel no obligation to seek to permeate it with the moral salt and light and leaven by which we ourselves have been graced by the goodness of God in Christ.
We are not willing to leave the welfare of society, the running of government, up to the wisdom of unbelievers. We think that the people of God ought to do all within our power to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty "to ourselves and our posterity," as the American Constitution`s Preamble puts it.
When we are true to our best insights, Baptists neither denigrate nor deify the state. Instead, we pursue a policy of engagement. Withdrawal and involvement, conservatism and radicalism, worship and work, reflection and action, practicing and preaching, believing and behaving, the personal and the social, piety and politics, Baptists believe, all must be everlastingly linked together in the life and work of the church, lest the church itself go off into crippling escapism or grievous heresy.
