Is There A Christian Duty To Vote?

Today is Election Day in America. On Sunday, my pastor encouraged the congregation to vote. Though he stopped short of calling voting a "Christian duty," it's a phrase I've heard before. And I wondered: Does such a duty exist?

As a Weslyan by background, I try to do theology by focusing on Wesley's elements of Tradition, Experience, Reason, and Scripture.

Church Tradition is perhaps the least helpful in this regard, as most of the history of the church has existed outside of democratic forms of government. Thus, as far as I'm aware, there has been little in the way of accepted tradition on the matter of participation in democracy. More broadly speaking, much church tradition has focused on the God-givenness of rulers (usually kings), and Christian participation in the government of states has been ongoing in one form or another since Constantine. So it seems that church tradition can at least be said not to forbid voting outright.

Experience is a bit more helpful, though only just. My personal experience is that voting has in no way harmed my ability to act in the world as a Christian. What's more, voting and other acts of participation in democracy have enriched my faith life, as it has given me an opportunity to act on behalf of others in the way that Jesus taught. Taking a wider view, we can see that, while the experience of Christians with democracy has been a mixed bag, direct participation in the democratic process has on occasion been the means for Christians to end great social injustices, American slavery being among the more noteworthy. Experience speaks in favor of voting.

Reason might point out that, in most cases, your vote is effectively worthless. In itself, it is highly unlikely to effect change one way or another. On the other hand, it can't do much harm, either. At worst, then, it is worthless, and at best, it's an opportunity to do some good in the world, to advocate for others, to at least attempt to enact justice. Reason tilts toward voting.

Scripture was written without contact with democratic forms of government, and so can only speak indirectly to this issue. As Christians, our focus in reading scripture must always be Christ. While Jesus was certainly a non-voter, one might point out that he was actively engaged with the governments of his own day in a couple key ways. Notably, he was against the idea of a violent revolution to overthrow the ruling power of his day, Rome, even going so far as to endorse paying its taxes. (He was rightly concerned that it would lead to the destruction of his country.) So at any rate, an explicitly anti-government stance is not the simplest reading, though it has its proponents. When it came to local rulers and authority figures, Jesus engaged in direct confrontation and even condemnation when it was called for. As one of our tools for communicating with those in power, voting is an appropriate, though modest, way for the Christian to imitate Christ in this regard.

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So there are plentiful reasons for Christians to vote, and few if any not to. But it a duty?

Perhaps not: after all, it's not a commandment straight from Jesus' lips, or carved in stone on Mount Sinai: Thou shalt vote.

On the other hand, voting is certainly a means of carrying out the commandments. It is a small, indirect, but important way to love one's neighbor, and even to "do for the least of these," if we vote for candidates whose policies will shelter, feed, clothe, and take care of the needy.

So, though it is not a central pillar of the faith, I believe there is such a thing as a Christian duty to vote. And regardless of whether that duty is real, I'll be voting today, as an American, as a Christian, and I invite you, dear reader, to join me.

Compassion for the Oppressor

Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, peacefully oppose a line of police. Source

I've been using Tumblr for the past eight months or so, and one of my favorite Tumblr pastimes is heading over to the Yo, Is This Racist? page for some cathartic rage/laughter at racism and racists. Yo, Is This Racist? is run by a man named Andrew Ti, who answers questions about whether things are racist (the answer is yes, almost always) and lets people know that he thinks racism is terrible in a variety of colorful ways.

It's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, though, because while it can be both fun and cathartic to laugh at racism/racists, Andrew Ti's whole framework for addressing racism strikes me as flawed and potentially harmful. More troublingly, I think it exemplifies a large strain of online social justice activism that's grounded in some deeply problematic ideas.

Ti's driving principle seems to be that you shouldn't coddle racists, because "they have had plenty of chances to learn not to be racist." Racists, in other words, should be confronted with their racism. They should be told, "That's racist, and it's not okay."

This is a great principle. Racism should be challenged and opposed at every opportunity. Trouble is, Ti takes it a step further: what he means by "not coddling racists" is, in fact, yelling at racists, insulting racists, and generally letting racists know that they are worthless. He also uses "racist" to mean not only unrepentant white power enthusiasts, but also anyone who has any racist opinion, or who doesn't understand what white privilege is. He ends up yelling at a lot of people.* 

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Where does all this come from? I'm not in any position to psychoanalyze Andrew Ti, but his attitude is part of a broad consensus around two big ideas that have emerged lately in online social justice activism:

1. It is good to be hostile toward or denigrate opponents of social justice.
2. People who don't know the basics of social justice are willfully ignorant.  

Idea 1 is rooted in the distinction between the anger or violence of the oppressor and the anger or violence of the oppressed. This distinction is valid. As one Tumblr user has noted, "A cornered mouse will bite a cat. This does not reclassify the mouse as a predator or the cat as prey." It is why I reject terms like "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism"—they imply an equivalence between people who benefit from a system of oppression and those who are oppressed by it.

If you are the victim of a system that conspires to devalue your life and make your very existence a challenge, your anger at that system—and at those who create, benefit from, and perpetuate it—is understandable, and it is justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger; there is such a thing as justifiable outrage.

But some activists have moved one step beyond this principle, from "anger is justified" to "anger is a virtue." In other words, it is positive to express anger at the oppressor in whatever form; open hostility, rage, and denigration aimed at the oppressor is beneficial and fitting for the oppressed. While this idea may be older than online activism, it gets a uniquely prominent and virulent expression online, where anger and denigration flow all too easily.

Idea 2 seems to be more uniquely an online phenomenon. Social justice activists who work primarily online, writing articles, maintaining social media pages, and the like, regularly deal with people who don't seem to know the first thing about misogyny/transphobia/racism/homophobia/etc. People see something the activist wrote, and they write an email, send a tweet, post a comment, asking a basic question the activist has answered before, maybe a dozen or a hundred times. In an era when so much basic information is a mere Google search away, it can be extremely frustrating to be continually responding to people who are completely ignorant of the subject you're passionate about.

It's easy, then, to make a small logical leap and conclude that your questioners are not simply naive but willfully ignorant: that is, they don't actually care about the activist or their ideas; rather, their questions are simply an expression of hostility toward the activist. And many times, this will in fact be the case, though often it will not, and a genuinely ignorant or naive person—who didn't realize at all what they were stepping into, didn't know what phrase to Google, and really wanted an answer to what they thought was an easy enough question—will end up caught in the crossfire of the activist's hostility. A hostility that, by the logic of idea 1, is a virtue.

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I'm concerned about these ideas, not primarily because I worry about activists hurting people's feelings,** but because I think they allow activists to sacrifice effectiveness for a feeling of superiority.

What's missing from this ideological framework is compassion for the oppressor. Jesus' radical statement, "Love your enemies," sounds trite today because we've heard it over and over, in church and outside it. It's been abused: when oppressors preach it to those they oppress, what they mean is "Tolerate our abuse of you. Accept your situation. Love us in spite of our oppression. Obey."

Yes, that sentence was partially just a setup for a They Live reference. Source

That's not what compassion for the oppressor is about, though, not at all. Compassion for the oppressor means refusing to let anger or rage about oppression turn into hate for the oppressor; it means standing up against abuse without the intent to enact retribution on one's abuser; it means actively trying to convert the oppressor into an ally by demonstrating respect for them; it means, as bell hooks put it in an essay about Dr. Martin Luther King, "commitment to love as political praxis."

It's the only effective means for turning an enemy into a friend. Compassion for the oppressor is vital for dismantling oppression and replacing it with something better.

Importantly, this commitment to compassion was, for Dr. King and for most people who have adopted it, a fundamentally religious notion; in bell hooks' words, it is a "love rooted in spiritual commitment to the Divine."

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One other prominent characteristic of this type of online activism is unfamilarity with and/or disdain for organized religion. And when I say organized religion, I mostly mean Christianity.

Andrew Ti and his readers have criticized members of the New Atheism movement for their racism and sexism, but Ti's stance toward Christianity is wholly of the New Atheist school. The distinguishing factor between New Atheism and its classical forbears is intentional ignorance and dismissal of religion; as one commentator put it, "atheists used to take the idea of God seriously; that's why they mattered." Like a good movement atheist in the modern school, Ti dismisses the Bible as a "transcript of some horny, racist teenager’s Dungeons and Dragons game" and seems to think Jesus wasn't real. These are not the hallmarks of someone who has taken much interest in studying the Bible, much less any historical or critical scholarship on Jesus, Christianity, or Christian scripture.

On one level, this disdain for Christianity is understandable: as the primary religion of the oppressive elements of American society (and, often, one of its tools for oppression), it's easy enough to conflate Christianity with oppression itself. That's all it is though: conflation. A mistake. Christianity is not inherently oppressive; it is not a form of oppression. Its use as a tool of oppression is a historical accident, not an inherent characteristic of the religion itself.

Dr King with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman, and Ralph Abernathy. March 1965. Source

And this is easily demonstrated, because the absolute reverse is so often true. Abolitionism and women's rights in America were primarily Christian movements, driven by itinerant frontier preachers like Charles Grandison Finney. Dr. King was a preacher first and an activist second; his Christianity drove his activism, not the other way round. The Moral Mondays movement is grounded in Christian faith; many of its leaders are ministers, and its based is comprised, in large part, by church members. Pastors and lay people at my former church in Chicago are active in protests on behalf of the poor and the environment.

We can, of course, push this beyond mere Christianity: the activism of Malcom X would never have occurred without his contact with and adoption of Islam. Thich Nhat Hanh's peace activism during the Vietnam War era and beyond is inalterably Buddhist in character. But in the United States, Christianity is the primary religion from which social justice movements have drawn their power; it is Christianity from which compassion for the oppressor, love for the enemy, has welled up into the hearts of American activists and enabled the kind of activism that creates lasting change.

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Attacking and alienating Christians is in fact a severe tactical error on the part of social justice activists. Even if secular activists advocate compassion for the oppressor apart from any religious notions, they will miss out on an opportunity to incorporate an enormous segment of the American population that has already absorbed the need to love their enemies if they dismiss Christians out of hand. What's more, any American social movement that does not get at least some Christians on board is likely to fail, for purely demographic reasons:

Source

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I've been following the protests against the death of Michael Brown, police brutality, and police militarization in Ferguson, Missouri, with close interest this week. Over the last year or so, my private concern about the interlinked issues of police militarization, mass incarceration, and the curtailing of American civil rights (especially those of people of color) has grown steadily, so it was encouraging to see a serious move to push back against these forces in the form of these now nationally publicized protests. Though of course it is disheartening that it took killing a child to make it happen, and that Americans are being teargassed by officers sworn to protect and serve them.

Protester in Ferguson removes a teargas canister before it can do more harm. Photo by Robert Cohen.

What concerns me about the situation is the looting and the fighting back; not that those are the real story of what's happening in Ferguson, but that those are what many people already perceive as the story. The true narrative in Ferguson encompasses the tragic death of a black teenager, the apparent attempt to cover up or excuse police responsibility for it, and the outrage of the community who have long felt less than protected by their own police force.

So much in the American heart wants this story to be about black violence and rage already. The stereotype of the angry, criminal black man is worn deep into the American psyche, and for many Americans it will be the first thing to spring to mind when they hear about a young black man killed by police and the protests have sprung up in response. I believe it will take a serious commitment to loving one's enemies to steer this narrative away from that image, to scrub the angry black person stereotype out of Americans' minds and replace it with the flesh and blood and bullet wounds of Michael Brown. It will require serious, committed compassion for the oppressor to overturn systemic racism and replace it with something better. I hope to God it's enough. I hope to God it happens.

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*On balance, I'm not sure this is the worst thing in the world. Going overboard in opposing racism is probably superior to keeping quiet on the matter. Also, Ti is quick to point out that he's not actually an expert on race and there's no real reason to listen to him. Additionally, his podcast is a more nuanced space than his Tumblr, and I do actually recommend it.
**Heaven knows that people on the receiving of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are having more than their feelings hurt, after all. These things maim, scar, and kill people.

The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.