Keeping the wrong kind of religion out of politics -Sep 7, 2003

"When people say the Bible and politics don't mix," says Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "I don't know which Bible they are referring to. It's not the one I've been reading."

Tutu's own application of biblical texts has, of course, been inspirational for global struggles against injustice and oppression. He has taken as his interpretative keys the picture of humanity made and re-made in the image of God, and the example of Jesus siding with the suffering even to the point of death. Read this way the Bible is a story of liberation for all people, if only they will change.

But that is not the whole picture. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures are dripping with political intrigue, wrangling and violence of an altogether baser kind, too. What's more, God is portrayed as an enthusiastic participant in these distinctly murky proceedings, sanctioning everything from a minor brick workers' strike (Moses' earliest tussle with Pharaoh) right through to the ugliest forms of mass slaughter (Judges and Joshua).

Biblical texts continue to be used as a basis for expropriating the landless. Indeed even as Latin American theologians were employing the Exodus story as a paradigm of freedom for the enslaved, their counterparts in the Middle East began to notice that the Canaanites are the hidden victims of this very episode. In many ways they are the equivalent of the modern stateless Palestinian, sadly (and ironically) dispossessed by a small, desperate people fleeing tyranny and seeking security.

Or take the famous story of Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple and killing 3,000 innocent people with the apparent approval of God. When I was young I was told that Samson was a great hero. Now, given the hideous parallels between what he did and 9/11 (twin towers, the number killed), it becomes obvious that he was actually a suicidal terrorist. Mind you, none of the great Christian interpreters (including Aquinas and Augustine) had a word to say against this appalling religious violence. Nor do most preachers today.

It simply will not do, then, to sanction religious involvement in politics without reference to the darkly ambiguous and downright destructive elements of the Christian and Jewish scriptural inheritance. Similar dilemmas also face the other great faiths too. Even apparently peaceful Buddhism has shown its more malevolent face in alliance with nationalism in Sri Lanka, among other places.

All this religious wrongdoing has to be taken firmly into account by people of faith when we hear renewed calls for the exclusion of religious influence and God-language from the public political arena. At the very least, it makes such cries distinctly comprehensible. They are not 'anti-religious propaganda'. They are based on hard experience – in our context, the religious wars from which Europe was delivered by the Enlightenment.

The latest example of trying to ‘keep religion out of politics’ was the attempt by the now former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's press secretary, Alistair Campbell, to stop his master talking about his faith. Campbell, of course, isn’t especially concerned with what beliefs personally motivate the political leader of the British people, provided they’re not too cranky. He is much more interested in the potential for Blair's 'piety' to alienate non-religious (and non-Christian) voters.

In a plural society, faith is a private matter that does not intrude on public life; that is the core argument. And the fact that many commentators have derided the PM's "dangerously messianic zeal" over the war with Iraq only emphasises the delusions which many think await those who mix prayer in with their political judgements. If this is so in Western societies, it is implied, how much greater is the problem in countries with little civil and secular democratic tradition?

Of course, for believers, religion is not and never can be a ‘purely private concern’. It is about the way in which faith in God might completely re-shape our personal and corporate lives. Moreover, as the example of Archbishop Tutu illustrates, this can be an enormous benefit to the sum of human good.

Indeed, from a specifically Christian perspective, the titles given to Jesus in the Gospels are designed precisely to act as a claim against other, domineering attempts to 'lord it' over us. The ‘reign’ of Christ is first of all conducted in the interests of the last, the least and the lost. The politics of Jesus is about absorbing and transforming hatred, not inflicting it.

The problem, however, is that the way of Jesus looks nothing like the religious empires, biblically-sanctioned pogroms, fanatical messianisms, zealous crusades and faith-based power bids which (along with some pretty nasty examples of non-religious horror) have dominated too much of human history.

"My kingdom is not from this world", says Jesus. By which he does not mean that it makes no effective claim against worldly domination systems (it does), but that its authority and ethos come from God. As a Hebrew poet puts it: "Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord."

The main political impact of the Gospel, therefore, is to call into being a company of odd and unlikely people who, wherever possible, refuse to play by the standard political rules (defend, divide, demand) because they owe allegiance to the 'Lamb who was slain' and not to the slayers of lambs.

Nowadays the church is a complex organisation as compromised as any other. But its origins are as ekklesia, a body called out to witness against 'the powers that be'. If Christian institutions have any useful future it is surely as harbingers of values, practices and structures that owe their shape and conviction to Jesus, rather than to other 'lords'?

This implies that the place for Christian politics is primarily in civil society, not ruling over people. It suggests that Christians should be the first to deny religious sanction to policies that fall radically short of the love of God, even when they are inextricably caught up in them. It militates against state religion and 'establishment'. It implies a particular interest in those who are excluded and damaged by the polis. It involves concern for others, not just for our own security.

So while Christians cannot sort out the problems of other religious communities in the public arena, they can certainly deal with their own. By showing how religion might be redeemed from wrongdoing they can also make a vital contribution to the wider political process.

That does not mean quietism, separatism or lack of realism. But it does rule out interventions in existing political systems of the kind that depend primarily on religious power and privilege, which support the manipulativeness of much political culture, which deny the efficacy of God's love to change us, which remain closed to the alternative vision of Jesus, and (perhaps above all) which leave the biblical texts that gave rise to the Gospel counter-story unredeemed by Jesus' categorical refusal of domination.

'Christian politics', if it exists as a particular category, is about Christians opening up a 'space for people to be people' (Jose Miguez Bonino) alongside others. This will be a space for creative resistance, re-valuation and construction: one which refuses to be accountable primarily to the distortions of power. Only a faith that is properly political in this sense can help keep the wrong kind of religion out of politics.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.