Politics and Religion, the American Odyssey

Last updated on: September 27, 2011 at 12:14 am by Scot McKnight

Politics and Religion, the American Odyssey 2011-09-22T17:41:07-05:00 Scot McKnight

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American politicians, if they want to get elected at the national stage, prove themselves Christians or worthy of the vote of Christians. Many argue that without that element as a fixture in the campaign ideology, no one can become America’s president.

American religious leaders, too, mirror this issue. Their preaching and teaching and overall message often gets stained — and even controlled by — the politics at work in the USA.

This combination of politics and faith, brewed into a civil religion or into a religious politics or into a political religion, was also a significant feature of the preaching and ministry of none other than George Whitefield. Jerome Dean Mahaffey is an expert on rhetoric and Whitefield’s rhetoric in particular, but his new book — The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America — excels because it takes his research and pulls it all into a readable, biographical sketch of Whitefield’s impact on America as it approached the Revolution.

What are your suggestions for pastors and churches on their public statements that involve political issues? Should the pastor speak to political issues? Should pastors use religious language to explain political issues? If the gospel claims Jesus as the Messiah/King and Lord of all, is there not some kind of politic at work in the gospel itself? How then should this be expressed at the local church level?

His big theory is this: Whitefield preached the new birth, conversion, and he called people to act in order to set in motion that conversion. Thus, he called them to come to Jesus. Mahaffey sketches that message well and in an astute theological manner. He sketches Whitefield’s many tours throughout the colonies and down into Georgia as he both founded and directed an orphanage and as he participated in the Awakening. Whitefield, as historian know, was seriously opposed and many thought he was calling the New Lights out of the Old Lights (Anglican) churches and establishing a grass roots movement against a top down institution. In other words, they accused him of divisiveness, sedition and radical revolution. Whitefield’s course of ministry shifted a few years later as he pursued a more moderating and less radical approach to the relation of the New Lights to the Old Lights. But he never gave up on the new birth — the grace of God that regenerates and enables a human to begin anew. He kept up, in other words, the fundamental categories of his beliefs and preaching.

The “logic template” of that new birth, Mahaffey argues, is the same logic template at work in the founding of a new nation. As the new birth leads to a new person in a new community, so the (new) birth of a nation can lead to succession or breaking away from England and even the Anglican communion. In other words, Whitefield led his audience to reject arbitrary power embodied in King George, the Catholic Church, and Parliament of England, just as he had led them to pursue God and the new birth away from the Old Light religious establishment. Mahaffey’s point is not to minimize Whitefield’s gospel, nor to suggest he was using religion for politics; not at all. But what he’s arguing is this:

Whitefield deserves credit for being a founding father because he had garnered national support, he had the confidence of the country, he had pursued rational relations with all sides, and he had provided a logic template for the birth of a new nation involving breaking away from the mother country. To be an American, Mahaffey is arguing, was essentially drawn from an Awakening sense of identity: a new birth (spiritual and national) leading to a new life (spiritual and national). This logic template goes back to Whitefield, and he deserves credit for his contribution to American culture.

Mahaffey’s book impressed me with fine detail about Whitefield’s rhetorical abilities; he skillfully kept to the task of examining the relationship of religious and political discourse while keeping the narrative a human one about Whitefield.

Many may be uncomfortable with Whitefield’s attention to political issues in England and the USA, but there’s a big question here we need to discuss: Can a Christian pastor completely ignore the political? While the Anabaptist vision, as compared with the Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed views, may prefer more separation from the State and political issues, can the Christian preacher ever avoid the implications of the gospel for politics?

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