65. Have Faith and Politics Always Been This Messy? - Better Questions

Have Faith and Politics Always Been This Messy? - Better Questions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome to another episode of Better Questions. We wrestle with hard questions and seek to ask better ones. Today's question comes in, and I want to read the whole thing. Usually I try to shorten it, but I think the context of this question, um, all of its important. So, question comes in, Mark from Ohio. Says there have been a lot there has been a lot of talk over the past few years about how our country has become so divisive, driven by polarizing politics, heavily exacerbated by social media. I fully believe we need to remember there are Christians on both sides of every issue, and fight to love our neighbors as hard as it may be for some of us. My question is, is there anything in Scripture or even a broader historical documentation of Bible Times that reflects a similar struggle between faith and politics? This cannot be the first time in history that this has become such a challenge. Brilliant question. Um before I continue this podcast, I have to shut my window because there's loud vehicles outside. Stay tuned. Okay, I'm back. Um I could edit that out, but you know, it's a podcast. We're chill like that. Man, I love this question. I love it because it starts from a place of like intellectual honesty rather than defensiveness. You know, this person isn't asking who's right, it's more asking whether this tension is new. Um is there a historical precedent for it? And so I think as a starting point, if we go back 2,000 years, first century Judea, like the world Jesus was born into, you have to understand that the political climate Jesus walked into was by no means chill. It wasn't calm. Um, it was not a world of reasonable people who disagreed politely. Uh, it was passionate, sometimes violent political factions tangled up in identity, ethnicity, survival, like all of it. So certainly not polarized in the sense of living in America today, where you have two very um distinct partisan groups. And while there's certainly other political parties, really it's it's a two-party system. Um, that was not the case. So to break it down, Jewish people were living under Roman occupation, right? Rome had conquered their land, imposed their taxes, installed governors, had soldiers on every corner, and the Jewish community was responding to the reality that there are so many that they're basically formed these various different factions, political parties, each one with a distinct ideology and a distinct vision for what faithfulness looked like to God under these conditions. And so there are five major groups. I'm gonna try to break them down briefly here. The first group you've probably heard of are the Pharisees. They were the religious conservatives of their day. It's not a perfect apples to apples comparison, um, but they had enormous influence. Their answer to Roman occupation was strict observance of the law. Keep yourself pure, stay separate from the Gentiles, don't compromise. And if you do so, God will vindicate the faithful. You'll notice Jesus himself technically, in essence, would have come from the line of the Pharisees, right? But he the Pharisees were the the type of people that Jesus was most vehemently frustrated with. And I think because sometimes when you notice when your own camp is um annoying and doing things that are ridiculous, you tend to be a little harsher on your own people. But then the second group was the Sadducees. They were kind of the religious elites, they were wealthy, connected, priestly. Um they were like the progressives. Again, not apples to apples, but they they're there had a really difficult time believing in the supernatural. Um and they decided they were going to cooperate with Rome and everything, make really pragmatic arrangements, keep the temple running, keep the sacrifices going, and not rock the boat. They didn't believe in the resurrection, right? There's a lot of things that that they they they kind of define the Sadducees. You had the third group, which is the Herodians, these were the political collaborators, for lack of a better term. Um, they supported the Herodian dynasty. Rome was appointed kings over the Jewish people. They embraced it, they embraced Greco-Roman culture, um, all of that. Then you had the fourth group, the Essens. Their answer was to walk away from society completely, like the hippies. They moved into the desert, formed communes, kept their own calendar, copied scripture, and then kind of waited for God to act. Um, they just completely withdrew themselves from the corrupt world. And the fifth group was zealots. These were the revolutionaries, the nationalists. Their answer was armed resistance, right? God is our only king, so Rome must be overthrown by force. And within the zealot movement, there was even a subset called the Sicare, which literally means dagger men. And they carry these like concealed blades and assassinated Roman officials in public, which I think is kind of kind of dope. Not okay, I need to edit that out. It just sounds like a really fun video game. All right, moving on. Five groups, five completely different answers to like the same question. How do we live faithfully in an occupying empire? No. Does any of that sound familiar? Here's where it gets really interesting. And this is where I think you get the heartbeat of God. Because when Jesus chooses his twelve disciples, his inner circle, the people he was going to spend most of his time with, three years, to entrust his mission, he picked Matthew, a tax collector. Which in the first century, tax collectors were Jewish men who essentially sold out to the empire, right? They collected taxes from their own people on behalf of the occupying empire, and they overcharged and pocketed the differences. They're considered traitors. Umtice in Matthew, you often hear tax collectors and sinners as in their one. They're like it's like the same category of a person. So Matthew, politically speaking, was a Roman collaborator. And then you had uh Simon, who was called the Zealot, right? Um, not Simon who used to be a zealot, right? Not Simon who had these like zealot tendencies, Simon the Zealot. That was his identity, even after he started following Jesus, right? So a Jewish nationalist, a man from a movement that believed like people like Matthew deserved a dagger in the back. And Jesus put these two men in the same room. He called them both, he gave them both the same mission, and he sent them out, right, two by two to preach the kingdom. Um some scholars even believe that maybe those two paired together. So you can imagine that first conversation would have looked like Matthew, the tax collector, and Simon the Zealot sitting across from each other, you know, casting their lines, fishing. One who had spent his entire career serving the Empire, and the other who was devoted to killing those in the Empire. So now this is not a modern compare. I mean, this isn't Democrat and Republican, progressive, conservative, you know, nationalist, globalist, however you want to frame out these dualities. Um, but in a in a in a way that's a similar comparison because they would have thought so differently. And Jesus said, You're both on my team, figure it out. And I want to be careful because I don't want to oversimplify what what Jesus is doing here. Um, he didn't ignore politics, he wasn't naive to power, he was born under a political decree, right, that forced his family to move to Bethlehem, uh force his family originally to Bethlehem because of the census. Um and then he was executed by a very political process, right? Pilate's court, you had Herod's interrogation, the Roman cross, all of it. Politics was everywhere in his life. And yet Jesus consistently refused to be what's the right word? Tribal, right? He refused to identify with a single political faction, and that in and of itself was kind of a radical statement. The Pharisees and the Herodians, like they were bitter rivals, and actually teamed up to try to trap him with a question about taxes. Do we pay to Caesar or not? And it was the perfect trap. Either answer would alienate a faction. And Jesus looks at the coin and says, Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. And this is okay, this is the like magician. That's the wrong word. This is the um this what makes Jesus the goat. I don't know. I'm trying to try to use hipper language for the younger audience. Um He's not dodging the question, he's reframing the question. He's saying you're asking the wrong question. Let me ask a better one. You're so obsessed with Caesar that you've forgotten who actually owns everything. And so, really, if Jesus had a quest a podcast called Better Questions, it would be way better than mine. Because that's what he does. Um, think about the zealots. You know, they wanted a military messiah who would lead this revolution against Rome. Right? Jesus fed 5,000 people and the crowd tried to make him king by force. John, what is it, John 6? Uh, he withdrew, he refused, not because he didn't care about justice or being freed or liberated, but because the kingdom he was building just operated on a totally different playing field. It wasn't the it wasn't the kingdoms of this world. And so Jesus did not identify with one of these factions. Every faction tried to claim him, and every faction inevitably was wrong. Because what his kingdom represented couldn't be contained by any of these categories. Okay, let me let me take this in another direction, too. Like the early church also inherited some of these tensions. You know, Paul writes to these churches that are navigating enormous uh political complexity. The Roman Empire is not friendly uh to this movement. Christians are being watched and marginalized, and some places even like persecuted. And yet, Paul writes in Romans, I want to say 15 or 14 or 13. I'm I'm sorry, I should have my Bible in front of me. But he writes that governing authorities are instituted by God and should be respected, which would have been a very provocative thing to say to Jewish Christians who had watched Rome destroy their temple and scatter their people. And then Paul turns around in Philippians and said, Your citizenship is in heaven, which to a Roman citizen living in Philippi, a Roman colony, would have been equally provocative. You're saying our first allegiance isn't to Rome. Right? I can't even begin to explain how that would have sounded. And so the early church had these tensions, but they didn't have a way to resolve them neatly. They lived into the into the tension, into the middle of them, trying to be faithful to a kingdom, as citizens of heaven. It didn't map out onto any earthly political party. And so what this means for us in 2025, whoa, 26. Wow. My brain just exploded. I forgot what year it was. 2026. We're still polarized. Our social media feeds will sort of morph into what we want to hear about whatever political tendencies we have. I've heard stories of like family members not going to Thanksgiving because of politics. I've heard so many times, like, yeah, we'll we can be together, but politics is off the table. It's like people can't even talk anymore. And I think it means I think there's a few things here. First is that you are not the first to experience this tension between your faith and your politics, loving your neighbor and disagreeing what they stand for. It's not a sign that something has gone uniquely wrong with your generation or or your country. Right? I think God's people have always lived in this tension. And I think the question is not whether it will be there, but how do we navigate this as a follower of Jesus? And it's true. You know, Jesus is bigger than your political party. And this is the thing I want to say as directly and as gently as possible, if if I can even do that. If your political party and your Christian identity have become so fused that you can't tell them apart, I think that's worth examining.

unknown 14:10

Right?

SPEAKER_00 14:10

That's just Jesus recruited a zealot and a tax collector at the same table. He didn't ask either of them to pretend their differences didn't exist, but he asked them to submit those differences to something larger. Right? This is the whole idea when Paul's writing to a fractured church in Philip Philippi. He's telling them, look, look at how Christ himself, right, emptied himself completely, like in the Kenosis, emptied himself, made himself nothing, right? Preaching to eventually what he's going to call a citizen, citizens of heaven. Man, that is there's something you're giving up. I think I think Wayne Brown, if uh one of the pastors at at Bay Press, those of you who are listening, uh the church where I serve, he preached the a few weeks ago just on this very issue on taking up your cross. And by doing so, you are giving up a sense of your identity on this earth. Um last thing. I I think the witness of the church depends on this, right? He prays in John 17 that his followers would be one, that he and the father are one, and then he explicitly connects that unity to the world, excuse me, to the world believing, right? That our unity is not just like a I don't know, an internal church management issue, right? It is evangelism. And when we watch a world that sees people who should hate each other sharing a table, sharing bread, sharing a mission, that is a proclamation that the movement is bigger than our differences. And I think I think that's that's a power power in that. Like, I think there's power when we can have healthy debate, when we can disagree well, when we can go into a conversation with someone who has a different political identity and be able to steel man their argument, meaning articulate what they believe in a way that is that is not dishonest. Because what do we usually do? Right? We we we sort of argue from a place of what I'll call intellectual dishonesty, right? We we present the worst version of what they believe and we don't ask the question that gets underneath the question. Like there's a book I read a while back by Adam Grant called Think Again. And interestingly, one of the one of his main ideas is that in order to change someone's mind on an issue, it's not actually about presenting new information. Like you can present new information, but oftentimes most people's minds are made up. He said the way in which you can actually change someone's mind is by actually being curious about how they believe what they believe in the first place. And by chasing that curiosity and really asking questions. So, why do you believe this? How did you get there? And understanding them more deeply, all of a sudden you have earned a certain amount of respect and relational capital to which perhaps that person may be willing to change their mind. Now, I say all this to say that I just think the the the age of polemics and aggressive apologetics as a way to be winsome is just it's just not the sound culture we live in anymore. And sorry, there's a lawnmower outside my office, so if you can't hear this, I'll try and fix it in post, but it is what it is. Let me land the plane. I've been I've been talking a long time. I think I want to push on something that the question raised because I think it deserves a direct answer. Right, the listener said, I truly believe we need to remember there are Christians on both sides of every issue. I want to affirm that spirit, the spirit of that, but also complicate it slightly. Because I don't think it means every political position is equally faithful. The church has always had to make moral judgments, right? Wilberforce fought to abolish slavery against Christians who defended it. Right? They defended it from the scriptures. Bonhoeffer resisted Hitler while other German Christians collaborated. Like there are moments when faithfulness requires taking aside. And so that's my only pushback. I think sometimes we can we can pretend like there's this really clean middle way where it's like, well, I'm not them, and I'm not them. But the truth is, I think the distinction here matters. Um, at the same time, I think you can say there's a difference between a conviction, right? Something your faith compels that you stand for in a partisan identity, a team you belong to that determines your position, whatever, your tribalism. The difference here is one flows from scripture outward, the other flows from whatever party you believe inward. And I think that's what's tearing people apart right now is not Christians disagreeing about the convictions. It's Christians who have been absorbed into some kind of complete partisan package, right? The talking points, the outrage, the suspicion, the conspiracy theories, and then brought this whole thing to church with them. And this is not what Matthew and Simon were doing at the table with Jesus. They were both being asked to lay something down, not their convictions, but their tribal loyalties. And anyway, this this lawnmower is and edger outside is super loud. I apologize. So let me let me land this plane. Which side is right? Maybe that's not the best question. When you look at the political landscape right now, are you more like the factions trying to trap Jesus? Or are you more like Matthew and Simon figuring out how to share a table with someone you should hate? I think that's the better question. Are you trying to trap Jesus, or are you more like Matthew and Simon figuring how to share a table with someone you should hate? Because here's what I believe. The same Jesus who looked at a tax collector and a revolutionary and said, Follow me, is still doing that today. He is building a community that should not exist by any human logic. Still calling people to a table that crosses every line that the world draws. And if the church can be that, if we can be genuinely, visibly, confusingly unified across political minds. Right? Even the people on the other side of the aisle. I think that's one of the most powerful things we can offer a watching world that has forgotten what that looks like. And here's the deal: that does not mean you have to compromise on anything. It just simply means you learn how to love your neighbor who's different than you. Amazing question. I feel like I rambled. I may have to redo this whole thing. But thank you for tuning in. We hope you will continue to send in your questions. Send in text in your question. You can do that right from the podcast episode. Um, or you can email me at askbetterquestions at gmail.com. Thanks for tuning in. Have an amazing week, grace, and peace.