I’ve previously posted some of my correspondence with it Tim Sherratt, CPJ trustee and a professor in political studies at Gordon College — here — but one of the questions he raised in our subsequent correspondence has me thinking so much that I am posting a more extended extract of our correspondence here, for your consideration. I asked three questions (which appear in bold below), to which Tim responded thoughtfully and at some length. Tim’s question that raised my eyebrows is this: “How, in communicating the work of CPJ, should the Center stress the trans-political?”
1. What do American evangelicals need most, today, to help us discern our political responsibilities?
a. Oddly enough, I sense that evangelicals need many of the things that mainstream liberals need. Both (and of course there is overlap) need re-connections to everything outside the self. As I understand contemporary liberalism (whether post-modern like the social culture or Enlightenment like the Constitution and hence the political culture), the liberal emphasis on rights and autonomy has typically been adversarial towards threats to those rights and that autonomy. Ironically, the baby of rich and dignified human living gets thrown out with the bathwater of actual, historical oppression in this scenario, because liberals don’t have a discerning language capable of overcoming their instinct for ferreting out oppression in this custom or that law. Today’s agreement sows the seeds for tomorrow’s oppression because today’s reasoned agreement will be tomorrow’s arbitrary imposition, to which I did not consent.
b. Evangelicals are more individualistic than they realize with debts to the above greater than they appreciate. The “given-ness” of human life is all around them and they respect it in their worship, but they are more likely to use a “thin” form of discourse to try to describe it.
c. But I have no ready prescriptions to cure this tendency. It would seem that the basic ingredients for a prescription include the biblical basics (Repent of sin, acknowledge Christ as Lord); and then the implications of that repentance. A rough summary might include: acknowledge finiteness (Man is but dust, etc.); acknowledge sociability; acknowledge need of the earth, etc., that God has made and on which I partly depend. Re-think career—at least accept that following Christ, however one does that, is the heart of one’s vocation.
d. And we have still not arrived at political responsibilities, but these pre- or accompanying conditions appear necessary to fleshing out civic responsibility. Because they equip us to see the cultural mandate in three dimensions (whether or not that term is used) as practical, stewardly, and spiritual. And if this is grasped, then the stewardly task of government goes with it.
e. An evangelical weakness I’ve noticed is found in some who do think there are civic responsibilities for Christians, but who have not recognized the non-negotiability of governments caring, defending, acting justly, being stewardly. Typically (I think) evangelicalism does not prepare one well for seeing these objective responsibilities of government. A lot of evangelicals have failed to give any thought to what government must do because it is government (ordained by God, part of the normative architecture of creation, etc.).
2. What exactly is the something unique that CPJ is bringing to policy discussions, and how can we continue to nurture that uniqueness?
a. As I have implied above, CPJ is an effective antidote to what ails evangelicals re civic responsibility because the Kuyper tradition, in confronting an early and confident liberalism took on many of the issues noted above—the individualism, the tendency to treat government as tabula rasa to be written on by the legitimating forces of majority rule and individual rights, etc. And of course, in presenting Christian public responsibility, the tradition and thus CPJ employs the kinds of terms and relationships I describe above. So far, so good.
b. But CPJ is hardly hip to 20-somethings. Nurturing the uniqueness will have a lot to do with communicating in the media of a younger generation, conveying the radical nature of what Kuyper proposed in the 19th for application in the 21st century, and, I suspect, making more of a community of believers out of CPJ. I find discernment here quite difficult but I am regularly surprised to find my own way of life—marriage, family, and our relationships therein—described as rare, and in some way valuable as if about to be lost. Anecdotal evidence from friends, acquaintances and students, accompanied by other evidence out there, prompts me to wonder whether the church will have to take on a rather tougher witness in the coming decades than has been the case, be it in relation to personal relationships and living well, or stewardship and care, or to challenging a mendacious culture that uses the law to punish words and connections that the culture doesn’t like (what does and doesn’t get into conversations about homosexuality, for example), irrespective of their objectivity. That’s long-winded, but the punch line is that CPJ has furnished for me much of the means to enlarge and defend a biblical perspective and way of living it out. But do the evangelical 20-somethings know (a) that they need something like this, and (b) that it’s available?
c. Hmm. How political, or not, is this? At what cost will the breadth and depth of the worldview animating CPJ’s political perspective and work be communicated? I mean that a Christian political perspective is only faithful if trans-political, because it recognizes (in the way that sphere sovereignty points to the same thing) the stewardly task of government and of citizens. Sphere sovereignty registered in a new way for me when I read Kuyper’s purpose (in “The Anti-Revolutionary Program,” in Skillen and McCarthy, Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society) as making every human task—government, business, parenting—effective not for its own sake, and as it were, separated from other tasks, but effective as a form of obedience to God. How, in communicating the work of CPJ, should the Center stress the trans-political? Will it help the political task of the Center to lay out for new members or potential members a strong emphasis on sphere sovereignty that will nurture relationships, marriage and family and how to think about those, for example? Should CPJ’s materials and staff time be spread to a broader cultural menu of concerns than has been our wont? I can see that this could be a powerful draw for younger Christians but it could also result in a dilution of the Center’s mission. So, that’s a key issue and question for #3 below, too.
3. What questions should I (Gideon) be asking as I seek to learn how to be part of the work of the Center?
a. High on the list, but up there in your skillset, I believe, is cross-generational communication. The older CPJ helped develop and act on the Reformed worldview that is reflected in the Center’s work and materials. But those were developed with certain assumptions in place, which over time may have been called into question. CPJ emerged in the period between the Great Society and the Republican Revolution, critical of both but appropriately feeding off the differences between its Christian democratic vision and these policy offspring of the liberal tradition. Policy was at a different place, etc. Thus the older generation wanted certain points made, stands taken. Yet sphere sovereignty is remarkably flexible in its application to a host of different circumstances. We mustn’t communicate a merely conservative (in the sense of simply repeating old positions taken for reasons that have now no traction in contemporary politics).
b. Ask CPJ members (old and young) how adversary CPJ needs to be. Distinguishing a Christian-democratic perspective can be done as if there were no common ground and the aim was instead to contest every inch of intellectual/political territory. I think CPJ has taken on the culture in this fashion now and then, or taken on other believers that way. What does/may faithful strategy for Christian pluralists look like?
c. Ask what services members or potential members would like CPJ to provide. Do they want us to come to their churches (Speakers’ Bureau, e.g.) or provide materials via the website or respond to questions or point them to resources, or something else? You can never ask too many of that sort of question.