Can Politics Be Christian?

November 2024 issue

But as it is, they deserve a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.--HEBREWS 11:16

(1/01/2026) I ran across this back issue of Christian Century this week, thanks to Jerry from our mens' group who is a subscriber. Christian Century was founded in 1884 in Iowa, and reflects the liberal theology and politics associated with mainline Protestant denominations. The theme of the November 2024 issue, published at the time of our last presidential election, was certainly provocative!

What would it mean for politics to be "Christian?" Christianity comes in multitudinous forms, and The Holy Bible contains a wide variety of texts written by various people in various times and circumstances. The phrase could refer to a formal 18th century style establishment, where Christians have certain legal and financial advantages over other people, or even assertive policy actions that reflect preference Christian interests over those of others. President Trump's Christmas Day bombing of Nigeria was framed as protecting Nigerian Christians, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted a social media video (AI generated, of course) of Santa Claus handcuffing an immigrant. (See Anh 2025 and Richardson 2025 for more on the Trump administration, and Goldford 2012, cited below, for why the U.S. has never been an explicitly Christian nation.)

Jesus may not have been born in a manger,
but for sure he never voted

Alternatively, Christian politics could look to Jesus as a model for policy making and advocacy. It's not unconstitutional for people to be motivated by faith to pursue specific policy goals. However, doing what Jesus would have done is less easy than it sounds, as the historical Jesus was extremely marginal in the (autocratic) Roman Empire, and the New Testament has very little to say about how to exercise political power.

The first featured article in that issue of Christian Century, "Wisdom from Augustine in an Election Year," by Calvin College philosopher James K.A. Smith, begins, not with definitions, but by recounting his own experience as an immigrant who came to feel "invested as a member of this flawed but noble project that we call the American experiment, which welcomed me and enabled me to forge a meaningful life" (p. 42). Observing that many Christians are ambivalent about liberal democracy, while many Americans are ambivalent about Christianity, he draws on St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) to describe a sort of tension that requires negotiation. 

Augustine of Hippo
(from athanasiuscm.org)

Augustine called his time the saeculum, in which humans live on Earth, and God's promised kingdom, whatever that may be, has not yet come. We're still in it. "We ought not to want to live ahead of time with only the saints and the righteous," he wrote a Roman official named Boniface in 418 (quoted on p. 44); instead, we in the 21st century, just like those of the 5th, are charged to live in our communities with everyone else. 

How we live in our communities matters, though. In The City of God (c. 426), his most famous work, Augustine argues all earthly communities consist of both the City of Man, whose highest values are self-love and domination, and the City of God, whose highest values are love of God and neighbor. (Those values may do for a working definition of Christian politics.) Thus there is ongoing tension, which must resolved through negotiation among all (permixtum). Smith concludes that "citizens of the city of God are called, as an expression of loving their neighbors, to contribute to the common good by collaborating in the messiness of the permixtum" (p. 45). 

For Smith, Christian politics a la Augustine would not be theocracy: What currently passes for Christian politics is a sub-Christian syncretism that prays to a vaguely moralistic god who plays favorites, a deity of our making whom we trot out to license nationalism and self-interest... little more than Jesufied renditions of the libido dominandi (p. 46). (Does that ever sound familiar!) Instead, he looks to reaffirmed "institutions and practices of liberal democracy," informed by "more robust Christian political witness."

What might such a Christ-haunted, biblically saturated politics look like? Well, it looks like a lot like the civil rights movement: unapologetically biblical, rooted in the practices of the church, and speaking to the public in the cadences of the prophets.... The witnesses and martyrs of that beloved community learned to long for a better country, as the author of Hebrews puts it (Heb. 11:16), but they also imagined that this country could look more like it. That is the posture of an Augustinian politics (p. 46)

A Christian politics that is not about moral judgment and exclusion, but about building a better world for all our neighbors, looks more like what Russell Arben Fox (2025) called "universal leftism" than what the loudest voices in contemporary American Christianity are saying. It also looks a lot like urbanism! (See also Lenz 2023.)

Christian Century's other writers provide more suggestions and examples in the same issue:

• Jeannine Marie Pitas ("Bridging the Ideological Divide") describes places where people of vastly different perspectives can meet, sometimes non-partisan (charity work) but often multipolar discussion groups where people actively listen to each other. 
• Tony Tian-Ren Lin ("Can We Save Democracy in the United States?"), who came to the U.S. from Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan via militarized Argentina, urges immigrants and refugees to use their experiences as well as their "voices and votes" to remind Americans not to give into easy authoritarian answers. 
• Annalise Deal ("Cecil Williams Kept His Ear to the Ground") eulogizes the decades-long ministry of an activist San Francisco pastor (who I'm pretty sure knew my Uncle Clare).

Beloved readers, I too long for an American politics that is all-inclusive, committed both to vigorous meaningful conversations about our common life, and to sustaining even the poorest and meanest among us. Having "nice" conversations that avoid fundamental issues may avoid giving offense, but won't serve to maintain relationships, much less build communities. 

Source: spiritpunktransmissions.substack.com/

After this last year, though, I confess I don't know where to start. As someone whose career has been focused on the U.S. Constitution for decades, and whose future (however long) will have all the vulnerabilities of senior citizenry, America since the publication of the November 2024 Christian Century has been distressing to watch. At the same time, I'm afraid of not being taken seriously. I'm afraid of being played. I don't like tension, and despite my avid reading of Parker J. Palmer, I don't think I'm very good at holding it. I'm afraid of too quickly becoming impatient with what sound like pat answers.

Maybe a good resolution for urbanists and other community builders for the New Year would be at least to be attentive and open to opportunities to have those conversations.

PRINT SOURCE: Dennis J. Goldford, The Constitution of Religious Freedom: God, Politics and the First Amendment (Baylor University Press, 2012)