The Myth of the Apolitical Church

Photo by Mikhail Nilov: www.pexels.com

The tradition I was formed in had a very specific Jesus. He was personal, and spiritual, and focused almost entirely on where you go when you die and what you believe in your heart while you’re still alive. That Jesus was mostly unconcerned with saving souls.

It wasn’t until I read Marcus Borg’s The Last Week that a whole new world cracked open for me.

I don’t remember exactly when I read it. It was somewhere in the long stretch of years when I was pastoring and questioning and slowly becoming a different kind of Christian than I started out as, but I remember the feeling of reading the pages and thinking that I had been looking at something my whole life without actually seeing it.

The book is brilliant and illustrates an image I can’t shake.

On Palm Sunday morning, two processions entered Jerusalem from opposite sides of the city. From the west, Pontius Pilate rode in with the Roman cavalry with horses, armor, standards, the full machinery of imperial power on display, and a yearly reminder of who was actually in charge. From the east, Jesus rode in on a borrowed donkey with a crowd of Galilean peasants waving palm branches and shouting words from the Psalms. Borg and his co-author John Dominic Crossan argue that this was not coincidence. It was a counter procession. A piece of deliberate political theater, staged in direct response to Rome’s show of force and it was enacting a completely different vision of what power looks like and where it comes from.

I had read that passage probably a hundred times. I had preached it maybe a dozen, but I had never once seen it as political.

What We Were Trained Not to See

There’s a particular way of reading the gospels that became dominant in American evangelical Christianity, and it works by quietly evacuating Jesus of his historical context. You pull him out of first-century Roman-occupied Judea, you set aside the fact that his people were living under a brutal colonial regime, you treat the religious leaders he kept clashing with as stand-ins for generic human sinfulness rather than as a specific class of people navigating a specific political arrangement with their occupiers, and what you end up with is a Jesus who is spiritually urgent but historically weightless. He’s not really anywhere. He’s not really addressing anything in particular. He’s just saving you.

The problem with that reading is that it’s drastically incomplete. And the parts it leaves out happen to be the parts that most directly challenge the comfortable arrangement between Christianity and power that a lot of American churches have spent decades constructing.

The Sermon on the Mount Wasn’t a Self-Help Talk

When Jesus sat down on that hillside and started speaking, he was announcing a kingdom. And the people listening to him knew, in their bones, what kingdom they were already living under. They felt it in the taxes they paid to Caesar, in the soldiers they had to accommodate, in the religious economy that was deeply entangled with Roman occupation. When Jesus said blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, those words landed in a specific world where meekness was weakness, where there was no peace, and where justice was something the powerful decided on your behalf.

Sermon on the Mount by Cosimo Rosselli, 1481-82.

The Sermon on the Mount is political because it describes a completely different ordering of human life than the one his audience was living under. It says the people Rome has decided don’t matter are the ones the kingdom is actually being built around. And whether we like it or not, that is a political claim. The fact that we domesticated it into a list of personal virtues is one of the stranger things Christianity ever did to itself.

Political But Not Partisan

Now, here’s the thing I want to be careful about, because I think it matters a lot.

Recovering the political Jesus doesn’t mean recruiting him for your preferred political party.

The Jesus of the gospels resists that pretty aggressively. He frustrated everyone who tried to make him a straightforward political actor. The Zealots wanted a military revolutionary. The Pharisees wanted a Torah purist. The crowds wanted a king. But he kept being something none of them could fully domesticate.

What he offered was a vision. A picture of human community organized around the dignity of the poor, the welcome of the outsider, the rejection of redemptive violence, the subversion of systems that grind people down. That vision has political implications without being reducible to political positions, which is actually harder to sit with than a simple party alignment. It means you have to keep thinking. It means you can’t just vote your values and check out. It means the church is always going to be in some tension with whatever power structure it finds itself inside.

Why This Matters Right Now

If you have been around for a while you know that I write about politics sometimes in this newsletter and I get occasional pushback about it. “The church should stay in its lane.” “Faith is personal.” “Keep Jesus out of it.” I understand that instinct, especially from people who watched evangelicalism turn itself into a political action committee over the last few decades. The desire to have a faith that isn’t weaponized for someone’s agenda is completely legitimate.

But I’ve come to think that the answer to a politicized church isn’t an apolitical church. It’s a church that is honest about the fact that Jesus was not apolitical, that the kingdom he announced has always been in tension with empire, and that following him faithfully in public life is going to look like something. Not a party. Not necessarily a candidate, but something. A set of commitments about who matters and how power should be used and what we owe each other that will always be, in some sense, political.

I’m still working out what that looks like. I think most of us are. But I’m not going back to a Jesus who has nothing to say about the world we’re actually living in. That Jesus, it turns out, was never in the text to begin with.

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