More Thoughts on Faith & Politics

Recently I saw a rerun of the Saddleback forum on faith and politics. It got me thinking about my open letter to Rick Warren on this subject, and I decided to add a few more generic thoughts on faith and politics. Last time I focused mainly on the libertarian non-aggression principle and as a result my point was that people of faith should not use their beliefs to justify initiating force against others in order to remake society more in what they see as being God's standards. Now I am going to focus on why I think faith and politics still would not mix even if the non-aggression principle were set aside.

To start out, I believe in God, but unlike many other believers I don't really think God cares about our political system. Politics, whether we like it or not, is mainly focused on temporal, material problems. We want the economy to be good, we want security, I want freedom etc. As much as we want to babble on about how idealistic our plans are or how glorious a society we intend to create or how God has ordained our plan the bottom line is that God doesn't actually care about those sorts of things. I might think the non-aggression principle is a great thing and that the initiation of force is evil and that I ought to fight for it, in fact I recently wrote a piece about it. I do not expect God to join me in the fight, because I expect him to have bigger things on his mind.

The point is that I love politics because I find politics interesting and as much as I believe in the non-aggression principle I probably wouldn't be fighting for it if I weren't interested in politics. As I've watched the elections progress I realize more and more just how futile politics is and I begin to wonder more and more why I actually care. Even if caring about politics produced massive returns it still would not matter in the long run; in the end our lives are but a flash in the pan and our world is but a dot on the map of space. These political issues don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, they only matter in the here and now. This conclusion has not led me to abandon politics altogether, and I hope it doesn't lead others to do the same; what I hope is that those who see faith/religion and politics as inextricably linked will simply reevaluate their position.

When we proclaim that God has a certain political agenda, we are projecting our blasphemies outward onto the universe. When we say God agrees with us and that he wants us to enact a certain political agenda it might make us look devout but in truth it reveals a profound arrogance. No matter how noble an agenda may seem, no matter how much it may match up to seemingly godly morality, when one proclaims that it is the duty of the state to enact this godly agenda one is at the same time proclaiming himself to be the representative of God on Earth. How do we know what God wants? Some people will answer, "The Bible," or "The Koran" or whatever else. Rick Warren probably says that the Bible teaches us what God wants, but how in Heaven's name are we supposed to determine which of the thousands of denominational and individual interpretations of what the Bible actually says is THE correct one? Just do a Google search for the phrases "Jesus is a liberal," "Jesus is a conservative," "Jesus is a libertarian," "Jesus is a socialist," "Jesus is an anarchist," etc. etc. etc. You will find so many different interpretations of what God/Jesus believes; so which one is it? All these groups will take out the Bible and point to scripture, and guess what? All of them are right! The point is that certain verses can be used to point to one ideal while other verses can point to another. Like Founding Fathers quotes, the Bible can be twisted around to fit just about any agenda possible. Ultimately, what ideology God or Jesus holds is almost always the same ideology as the mortal men who proclaim the Supreme Being to hold to the principles of the said ideology in the first place.

For all those who want to put themselves in the position of being God's mouthpiece, I've got another interpretation. God is not any political ideology. The reason God is not any political ideology is that he doesn't really care about politics. God is too big and too eternal to care about our temporal problems. I don't think that it means that anybody is ungodly it just means that by participating you do not become godly per se. The point is that I've seen many a person claim that participating in politics is against his religion and I've also seen many who claim that participating in politics is something of a religious sacrament; I'm telling you that God is indifferent. I'm also telling you that as long as you are not some sort of Nazi or somebody who clearly advocates things that God would condemn then it doesn't really matter to God what ideology you adhere to. If you are a conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian, socialist, anarchist or whatever I think God probably looks at you and says, "Well at least he's trying, but I still don't care." Interestingly, this same conundrum can be used to solve the problem of evil (i.e. how an allegedly loving God can allow so much bad to happen); the answer is that all the world's problems are temporal whereas God is eternal. We only get so long on Earth and even the Earth itself only gets so long in the Universe, its okay if we want to improve our lot but it does not change anything in the grand scheme.

Some religious folks are probably going to read this and profoundly disagree. They will say that we have some sort of obligation to establish a Kingdom of God on Earth, as if God doesn't have sovereignty over the Earth and the whole rest of the Universe already. The best advice I can give to anybody who takes me seriously is to quit praying for political victory because in the end it doesn't matter. Quit claiming God is on your side because he probably doesn't care enough to take sides. Quit claiming that God wants you to enact policy X or policy Y because there are so many others who will say God wants the exact opposite, so what makes you right? More importantly, recognize that you are a temporal being trying to interpret the will of a being insurmountably greater and more powerful than yourself, so for your own self-interest I'd recommend you'd stop. As for those who still disagree with me, I concede that I may be wrong but there is no more evidence to your opinion than to mine. The bottom line is that as far as faith and politics is concerned, if anybody is right it is a mere coincidence of opinion and not because they themselves discovered the infallible truth.