When most of us hear the word “politics” we think of either fights between political parties, fractious policy debates, or manipulative forms of negotiation. But underneath the polarization, rage tweets and back-room deals is the reality that politics is the only means we have for living well with strangers and enemies. It is also the only means of answering the existential question confronting Christians not just this election season, but in all seasons: How can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with those who have a different vision of life than I do (strangers) or who actively oppose mine (enemies)?
Politics is the stark alternative to other ways of answering this question. When I meet someone I disagree with, dislike, find strange or threatening, I can do one of four things. I can kill them. I can create a structure of domination so I can control them. I can make life so difficult that they run away. Or I can do politics. That is to say, I can form, norm and sustain some kind of common life without killing, coercing or causing them to flee. These really are the only options. Human history and the contemporary context are awash with examples of the first three approaches. Faithful Christians should be invested in the fourth one for both Scriptural and practical reasons.
What Politics Is Not
But before giving the Scriptural answer to the above question a few clarifications are needed.
The first clarification is that forming a common life with strangers and enemies through politics does not depend on sharing the same ideology. Politics does not begin once everyone I disagree with has left the room. Rather, it begins from the assumption that we are all complex bundles of competing, often contradictory loyalties and loves whose personhood cannot and should not be reduced to a singular set of commitments or beliefs.
An implication of this assumption is that a political position is not a placeholder for character. People with views I abhor have shown me love and kindness beyond what I deserve, while others with whom I agree on most things have stabbed me in the back in the blink of an eye. To do politics and thereby forge some kind of common life, it matters far more how someone actually treats those around them than whether they share the same beliefs or worldview.
In the same vein, the second important clarification is that the moral basis of a common life is politics and not family, faith or flag. There are of course many who envision a common life based on sharing the same blood, history, culture or religion. But anchoring a common life in anything other than politics quickly leads to killing, dominating or persecuting those who are not considered like “us.”
Understanding our common life as constituted through politics means that it is only ever as good as the quality and character of its political relationships. And that takes virtues like hospitality, courage, patience, kindness and mercy. In short, it takes neighbor love. And this brings us to the Scriptural answer to the question with which we began.
Politics as Neighbor Love
The constructive way in which the Bible frames relations with strangers and enemies is in terms of loving one’s neighbor. In the call to love strangers and enemies as neighbors, the New Testament addresses the central moral problem of politics. In the Greco-Roman world, those judged to be outsiders, whether residents within the boundaries of the polity or living elsewhere, were not just strangers, they were enemies. Their way of life threatened the very existence of the political community. And since the physical, moral and spiritual flourishing of the individual citizen was interwoven with the flourishing of the city, outsiders not identified with or contributing to the life of the political community were necessarily either potentially seditious (if they were resident aliens) or a threat (if they were foreigners).
For the safety and well-being of the political community, it was necessary to guard against alien forms of life. If they disturbed the peace, they were either repressed (if inside the walls) or repelled (if outside). Violent reactions against St. Paul’s preaching and miracles in cities like Philippi and Ephesus exemplify these responses (Acts 16:12–40; 19). Internal and external “others” were also a means by which the common life of “our” polity came to be defined and understood. “We the people” were not like “them,” and all that strangers and enemies were imagined to be (effeminate, uncivilized, treacherous, cruel, etc.) was all that “we” were not (virile, loyal, brave, honest, rational, etc.). See, for example, numerous ancient Greek depictions of the Persians.
Different civilizations have imagined themselves over against different internal and external others, and friend-enemy relations deeply shape fallen political life east of Eden. This is no less true of Christendom than of city-states like Athens, or the Roman, Ottoman or Ming empires, or atheistic states like the former Soviet Union. European, confessionally Christian civilization historically imagined itself over against the internal other of Jews and the external other of Muslims. This self-understanding thereby justified the repression or subjugation of Jews and Muslims and formed the thought world that subsequently justified the subjugation of various “pagan” and non-white peoples.
The New Testament commands that friend-enemy relations be converted into neighborly ones. God’s love revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ dismantles any attempt to make others different from us into permanent enemies who can be killed, coerced or persecuted — a lesson Christians down the ages have repeatedly failed to learn. Love of neighbor embodies the redemptive possibilities of politics. It disrupts how we imagine and construct friend-enemy relations by extending our sense of who to include in our common life.
Love of enemies, however, tends to fall into one of three traps. Either we make everyone an enemy (the sectarian temptation to denounce anyone who is not like “us”). Or we make no one an enemy, denying any substantive conflicts and pretending that if we just read our Bible and pray, things like racism and economic injustice will get better by means of some invisible process (the temptation of sentimentalism). Or we fail to see how enemies claim in problematic ways to be our friend (the temptation of naïveté that ignores questions of power).
In relation to this last trap, we must recognize that the powerful and unjust mostly refuse to recognize they are enemies to the oppressed and claim they are friends with everyone.
Politics as a Dance of Conflict and Conciliation
A loving act in relation to those in power who refuse to acknowledge their oppressive action is to force those who claim to be friends to everyone (and are thereby friends to no one) to recognize that their actions perpetuate domination and need repenting. This involves struggle culminating in an ongoing dance of conflict and conciliation. With too much conflict, we cannot hear each other. Politics thereby dissolves into sloganeering, polarized denunciation, and eventually violent strife. With too much conciliation, we paper over real points of disagreement, foreshortening the debate, and concealing the truth of what is going on.
Like any good dance, politics as a form of neighbor love requires cultivating a sense of motion in balance through learning certain moves, fostering specific dispositions like patience and courage, and developing the ability to live with tension. But for a dance of conflict and conciliation to be formational of holiness we must learn to see enemies as neighbors capable of change and recognize that we ourselves must move and change.
Building any form of loving and just common life through a dance of conflict and conciliation entails reckoning with a hard truth: Everyone must change, and in the process, we must all lose something to someone at some point. Change is part of what it means to live as frail, finite and fallen creatures who are nevertheless open to new, God-given ways of being alive. If some kind of shared flourishing is to emerge, loss — and therefore negotiation and compromise — are inevitable. The temptation for those with concentrations of privilege and power is to fix the system so that they lose nothing and others always lose, no matter how hard they work. The fight is to ensure that the loss is not borne disproportionately by the poor and marginalized.
The fight also includes holding accountable those who train “their tongues to speak falsely” (Jeremiah 9:3–4), who humiliate and demean others, and who intend evil to secure themselves. Such a fight is a critical part of what it means to love our neighbor in a way that is faithful to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To use Martin Luther King, Jr.’s formulation, such agitation and protest is “love correcting that which revolts against love.” Political struggles for a more loving and just common life are thereby a defining feature of neighbor love.
Salt and Light
Christians are to work with others through politics to remake the world as it should be and bear witness to how it will be in Christ. In other words, Christians are to be salt and light. Being salt means identifying and conserving what is good in our society that we receive from those who came before us, tending and cultivating it so that it can be handed on to the next generation.
Christians are also to be light that exposes the deeds of darkness and brings understanding. Being light means identifying what needs changing if we are to move from the world as it is to a more generous and just one. But being light also means nurturing and forming new practices and institutional arrangements that point to and exemplify the kingdom of God as revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Luke Bretherton is the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Research Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining the Duke faculty in 2012, he was reader in Theology & Politics and convener of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King’s College London. He is the author of several books, including: “Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy” and “Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life.” He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and Gonville & Caius College.
View Articles
