I felt sheepish showing up to work on Tues., April 26 this year. I wasn\u2019t wearing an oval American flag sticker boasting \u201cI Voted\u201d on my lapel\u2014the one that has become the ultimate symbol of responsible citizenship. I had not voted and I wasn\u2019t going to.<\/p>\n
The fact is, I wasn\u2019t allowed. Pennsylvania holds closed primaries, so as a registered Independent I\u2019m not able to vote in them unless I join a political party, which I don\u2019t plan to do.<\/p>\n
Many years ago I heard the South African bishop and Methodist pastor Peter Storey, chaplain to Nelson Mandela while he was in prison and ardent opponent of Apartheid, warn pastors not to join political parties. The church, he said, needs leaders who are truly free, not beholden to a party platform or partisan agenda.<\/p>\n
In other words: we need to be free from partisanship<\/em> in order to be faithfully political<\/em>.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a myth that the church shouldn\u2019t meddle in politics. But if politics is the way a community orders its life across time for the common good, then the church should meddle away, working to make sure the marginalized, ignored, and forgotten have a share in the common good.<\/p>\n What the church shouldn\u2019t be is partisan<\/em>. Partisans confuse their identities with the agenda of a party. Christian partisans mistakenly believe that the mercy, peace, and justice\u2014the shalom\u2014of God\u2019s Kingdom can be captured by the narrow agenda of a political party. And when this happens, as it often has, the results can be disastrous, especially for the church as it loses the integrity of its prophetic witness.<\/p>\n When my friends in North Carolina\u2014former colleagues, professors, and church members\u2014head to the capital building in Raleigh each \u201cMoral Monday\u201d to witness against what they take to be the damage the state\u2019s ruling Republicans have done to the poorest and the most marginalized in the areas of voting rights, education, and discrimination, they are doing this not because they are partisan Democrats (many of them), but because they see that such policies don\u2019t live up to God\u2019s vision for a flourishing society. They are being political, not necessarily partisan.<\/p>\n As soon as the church becomes a spokesperson for a political party, it has lost its freedom to be faithfully political in a society that needs Christians guided by a Kingdom vision of human flourishing for all, rather than the narrow agenda of a party.<\/p>\n I remember in 2003 protesting at the beginning of the Iraq war. I joined friends from seminary in downtown Durham, N.C., a town where it wasn\u2019t hard to find people willing to protest anything George W. Bush thought was a good idea.<\/p>\n I had a Mennonite friend other protesters tried to avoid; I wasn\u2019t even sure how close I wanted to stand to him. He didn\u2019t fit in. People stared at his sign in confusion. It read:<\/p>\n A Consistent Christian Ethic of Peace: No War, Racism, Abortion, Euthanasia.<\/p>\n A sign as unwelcome in North Carolina as it would have been in Oregon\u2014how often does that happen?<\/p>\n My friend didn\u2019t belong to any party\u2019s camp. In a way, he was protesting with the protesters, but protesting against them as well as he stood up\u00a0for what he believed to be a culture of life in the midst of a culture of death.<\/p>\n However you feel about his positions, one thing is clear: his political engagement was anything but partisan.<\/p>\n And in an election year, we need to remember that voting is not the only form of political engagement.<\/p>\n As the theologian Holly Taylor Coolman has recently written, \u201cWe need a fully-orbed account of political engagement. Political engagement involves elections and governance and law. It also involves service and solidarity and principled protest<\/em>. It happens at the national level, the state level, and the local level. It is a conversation with the next-door neighbor.\u201d<\/p>\n True conversation with the next-door neighbor is hard. It\u2019s even harder when the conversation happens from partisan trenches. But such conversation, along with other forms of political engagement, are necessary for Christians who seek to foster the common good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Rev. Dr. L. Roger Owens is associate professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and teaches courses in the MDiv, Doctor of Ministry, and Continuing Education programs. Before coming to PTS he served urban and rural churches for eight years in North Carolina as co-pastor with his wife Ginger. He has written multiple books including <\/em>The Shape of Participation: A Theology of Church Practices which was called \u201cthis decades best work in ecclesiology\u201d by <\/em>The Christian Century.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I felt sheepish showing up to work on Tues., April 26 this year. I wasn\u2019t wearing an oval American flag sticker boasting \u201cI Voted\u201d on my lapel\u2014the one that has become the ultimate symbol of responsible citizenship. I had not voted and I wasn\u2019t going to. The fact is, I wasn\u2019t allowed. Pennsylvania holds closed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[257,258],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theological-reflection","tag-church-and-politics","tag-faith-and-politics"],"yoast_head":"\r\nThe Church in Politics<\/h2>\n
What can we do?<\/h2>\n