Episode 55: Define Politics
Using one word for five different concepts is confusing at the best of times, but when that one word is controversial and emotionally charged, it makes acting with patience and wisdom even more difficult.
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Shownotes
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Transcript
Introduction
In just a couple weeks, we’ll be launching Christian Civics Foundations, our new 101-level online course. If you’re considering signing up for that course, I can’t encourage you to do it strongly enough. The last few years have been frustrating and exhausting for almost everyone who cares about government and civic life. This course can help refresh the way you think about faith and politics. It can help you find ways to get involved, to help make things better and healthier, without giving in to anger, frustration, or hatred or cynicism. You’ll leave this course feeling more hopeful than you went in. You’ll leave it understanding other people better. And you’ll leave it feeling like you have more options. I’m really excited to kick this new course off, and I’m especially excited for the new 201-level events it’s gonna let us host in the future.
On the podcast this week, though, I want to just take a few minutes to define a pretty important term. If you’re attending Christian Civics Foundations, then this is going to help you better navigate and understand the course. If you’re NOT attending this round of Christian Civics Foundations, then this week’s episode of the podcast will help you be more critical about the kinds of messages we get from candidates, elected officials, party influencers, and other political types.
Why Define Politics?
The term I want to define is, “politics.” But first, give me a minute to use a metaphor:
In Christian circles, it’s common for people to talk about how in English, we use one word for five completely different Greek ideas that the New Testament writers talk about. Philadelphia and eros and agape and philoxenia and storge were totally distinct concepts to Greek speakers, so the authors of the New Testament would probably be pretty confused about why English speakers call all five of those concepts the same thing: We call them, “love.”
And we all KNOW that the way we use “love” in English is kinda messy. A lot of sitcoms get a lot of mileage out of how ambiguous the word is: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has a whole musical number called, “I Love My Daughter (But Not In A Creepy Way),” where the joke is that the singer is very clearly trying to articulate agape love, but is also very clearly annoyed that there’s no way to do that without using the same term he’d use for eros love.
Now, sure, that ambiguity about the word love isn’t ALL bad. It lets us save face sometimes: We’ve all been teenagers. We know what it’s like to have these big emotions, and these big insecurities, and so we try to hold them in, but eventually we can’t, and we tell someone, “I love you,” and then they act surprised, or maybe scared, and we try to backtrack, and convince them we meant “philadelphia,” and say, “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Can you imagine? Oh wow.” And they look relieved, and maybe they believe us, but now I have to say, “I love you” to them ALL THE TIME, and to a lot of my other friends, too, or else they’ll catch on, or else they’ll realize that I actually meant I was IN LOVE with them, and if they figure that out and I can’t convince my parents to send me to a different school IMMEDIATELY then I don’t really know what’s gonna happen but I know for a fact that it’s gonna be bad and I’ll never, ever recover, and people will make fun of me for it my whole life.
But that’s a REALLY specific exception to the rule. Other than giving us an easy way to save face when we take a really big romantic risk that we REALLY shouldn’t have, using one word for so many different, so many CHARGED ideas, makes figuring out what those ideas actually mean to us really difficult.
And the word, “politics,” believe it or not, kinda works the same way. The way we use that word in the US is kind of blurry and not very specific. Our guest last week, Dr. Trick, I think would have used the word, “slippery” to describe the way the word “politics” works in American English.
So, before we kick off our class, let’s try to make the word a little less slippery. Let’s take a few minutes to break apart some of the different definitions that we usually keep all bundled together into the word “politics.” Christian Civics Foundations consists of six sessions, and we’re gonna deal with all five meanings of the word as those sessions go on, but we’ll usually only be dealing with one or two of those meanings at a time, so going over them now can help us avoid confusion in the future. It can help us think a little more clearly, and have better conversations, whether it’s in our breakout groups, or our small groups, or with our friends and family.
So, what does politics mean?
Definition One: Life of the Many
When we’re talking about “the life of the many,” we’re talking about what we might usually call, “the public square.” The systems, and institutions, and traditions, and rules, and norms that make up a society. The things that all give shape and order to our relationships to more people than we could ever actually meet. The life of the many is the things we share with people we might not ever actually know or ever actually meet.
When we’re talking about “the life of the many” in the US, we sometimes say, “civic life,” or we use the metaphor “the public square,” which was a space where people gathered and handled public business in olden times.
And, again, when we are using the word politics to mean the public square, we’re usually including formal institutions like government, businesses, the media, the internet, but also cultural norms, shared physical spaces. Systems, institutions, traditions, rules and norms that shape or mediate our relationship to people we might never meet.
Definition Two: Government
Government is a specific set of institutions within the public square that have authority to make and enforce rules and regulations. Government is one of the institutions that is specifically ordained by God in scripture for humans to create, use and maintain for the sake of the common good and human flourishing. And the Bible does tell us that government is an institution that will continue to exist when the kingdom comes. Jesus will bear the government on his shoulders, according to Isaiah. But, crucially, the Bible doesn’t necessarily endorse a specific style of government between the fall and the resurrection.
During the first week of the class, we’ll look in a lot of depth at what government meant to people in Egypt before the Exodus, to people in Israel after the period of the Judges, to Israelites living under Babylon and Persia, and to Jews and Christians in the middle of first-Century Rome. By looking at those biblical-era governments together and comparing and contrasting them to how modern government works in the US, we’ll be able to start building a more nuanced and constructive approach to faith in the public square.
Definition Three: Policy Development
Policies are the specific rules and regulations that governments develop and enforce. We can use the word politics to mean “having to do with public policy” or “having to do with the process of creating public policy.” In the US, different kinds of policies are developed through different processes, but most of those processes try to strike a balance between allowing elected officials to exercise discretion on the one hand, and instituting procedures to allow members of the public to weigh in on the policies being developed on the other hand.
Policies always have tangible effects on people. Sometimes they’re people we see and whose voices we hear. Sometimes they’re people whose voices we don’t. But whose voices do we listen to when we are developing policies? Whose experience do we seek out? Whose interests do we consider? Scripture says that these are important questions with moral implications, and people who give shape to government policies are going to have to account for them.
Definition Four: Power Dynamics
How do we make decisions when two or more people are trying to make a decision together, or get something done together? Whose ideas get used? Who takes the lead in making the decision, or executing the decision?
Power dynamics exist anywhere two or more people try to relate to one another or solve a problem together or reach a goal together. It’s what we mean when we say “office politics.”
Definition Five: Partisan Competition
This is a very specific kind of power dynamics, centered around who gets the most influence over our policy development, and who gets the most influence over our cultural norms.
The US developed a two-party political system after George Washington retired, and for most of the time since then, on the national scale, we’ve generally had two major organized factions of people working in government and talking about government at any given time. These two factions generally compete with one another for favor among the voters, and for power over the process of government. The parties change over time. Sometimes a third one pops up for a few years, but it usually either falls apart, or one of the legacy parties falls apart and the new guy takes its place.
A lot of our debates about government in the US, about public policy, and about our cultural norms in the public square usually end up getting folded in to the competition between whatever our two parties are at the moment. A lot of times when we say something is “political,” we actually mean that it’s something that gets brought up by one of these parties when they’re competing for favor among the voters and for influence over the process of developing policy, or when they’re trying to convince people to join their team.
Why Keep These Definitions In Mind?
At the start of Christian Civics Foundations, we're going to focus mostly on the first two definitions—life of the many, and government. As we progress through these talks and conversations together, we’ll work our way down the list. As we do, I’ll try to use the more specific terms wherever I can, but old habits are hard to break, and I’ll probably fall back to saying “politics” far more often than I mean to.
BUT, even if you aren’t taking this class, I hope that you’ll make an effort to keep all five of these definitions in mind when you go on social media, when you read the news, when you see a campaign ad, really when you interact with anything political. When you see an elected official Tweeting or giving a public statement, look at the meat of what they’re saying, the point they’re trying to make, and ask yourself which of these “versions” of politics are they engaging in. And which version of politics do you think their time would be better spent on?
If we make an effort to always distinguish between the public square, government, policy development, power dynamics and partisan competition, we’ll probably start to notice how big of a gulf there is between an elected official’s job and the kinds of things people usually talk about on campaigns, and it’ll be harder to win us over. Not because we’re more cynical, but because we’ll actually care about the job MORE.
Keeping those five different definitions in mind will make it easier for us to salvage conversations with friends or family members that are going south. And it will probably force us to be a little more careful about the way WE talk about issues that are important to us, too.
Prayer
Heavenly Father,
You are king of kings. You are lord of lords. One day, every crown will be set at your feet. Every knee will bow before you. Your people will join your royal parade. And every mouth will sing your praise.
The day is coming when your son will sit on a throne and rule with wisdom and mercy and justice and glory. But until that day comes, you trust us to live our lives as a testament to what you’ve done for us in the past and what you’re preparing to do in the future.
You tell us to live our lives not just innocent as a dove, but also wise as a serpent. Too often, we set aside the command to live with that kind of wisdom, because it’s just too much work. We’re more comfortable than we should be treating complicated things as if they were simple, or conforming to the patterns of the world, because doing anything else seems overwhelming.
We know that if we start digging in to questions about government, and partisanship, and civic life, we’ll never reach the bottom, and we don’t want to live obsessive, unbalanced lives. We don’t want to ignore everything else you call us to be. But we also don’t want to stop loving you with all of our minds when the thing on our minds is politics. So please, help us. Help us to recognize when problems are more complicated than we want them to be. Help us to not let your church be seen as an easy mark by people who are more interested in amassing power and shoring up votes than living lives of humble faith before your son. And help us to do all of this with hope and endurance in a cynical and tiring world.
We pray these things in the name of Jesus, who will one day bear all government upon his shoulders.
Amen.