After the Vote – a Theological Postscript

Is America still Christian? Does it go Europe’s way? Does it matter?

Commentary by Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the Atlantic Times Nov. 08 issue)

Religious rhetoric marked much of this year’s election campaign in the U.S. Faith and politics were often strangely confused. Our correspondent, a Lutheran lay theologian, is taking stock, asking the uncomfortable question: How Christian is America really?

We heard Barack Obama’s former pastor holler, “God damn’ America.” We heard a Republican candidate opine that the U.S. Constitution should be made to conform to the Bible. Religious imagery, often crafted by newsmen devoid of catechetical instruction, bombarded us from television screens, making this Lutheran shudder: Whatever happened to the warning by the father of the Reformation that the devil himself “cooks and brews the two kingdoms together,” meaning the secular and the sacred realms?

To be sure, America is a more “religious” country than Germany. In the U.S., nearly 40 percent of all church members attend divine service every Sunday; in Germany, only about nine percent do so, and among Protestants the figure is even more lamentable – four percent.

But is this the only valid yardstick? As one who has spent on and off more than four decades in America, I wonder about the worth of religious rhetoric if the abortion rate in “Christian” America is almost three times as high as in “post-Christian” Germany?

I was thunderstruck when I read in the pre-election “Faith and Life” poll that even among white evangelicals abortion ranks only seventh among issues they considered “very important” in this year’s poll, well behind the price of gasoline. And as for African-Americans, thought to be the most faithful believers in the nation, they terminate pregnancies at almost three times the rate of their white compatriots. They abort with such a vengeance that demographers predict that by the year 2038 the black vote will no longer be of any relevance because much of the black electorate will have their opportunity to live denied as we speak.

Abortion is no hot-button issue among German voters either, to the sorrow of many traditional Christians. But it is hard to conceive of German doctors resembling remotely Dr. George Tiller who boasts on his own website with having performed 60,000 mainly partial-birth abortions in his own clinic in Wichita, Kansas; he says he is conducting an average 100 more every week.

If these figures are staggering so are the trimmings. In Dr. Tiller’s clinic mothers have themselves photographed, with their heads next to their dead offspring. Fathers bring aborted fetuses gifts, such as teddy bears.  Clearly, Dr. Tiller does not consider these fetuses useless clusters of flesh. He baptizes some before incinerating them in his own crematorium, and as a Lutheran he knows that one can only baptize humans, not lumps of cells.

Tiller evidently sees no contradiction between his handiwork and his faith. Excommunicated by one Lutheran congregation as an “unrepentant sinner,” he now receives communion in another Lutheran church.

As they say in New York, go figure…

There is a marked difference between the Lutheran and the prevailing Protestant-utopian views in America concerning the interface between faith and politics. The latter, be they liberal or conservative, often teach that the Gospel can somehow fix this broken world; hence the religious battle of words in political campaigns where they have no place.

The Lutheran position, which is currently receiving a new hearing in churchly circles, is more down-to-earth: It takes practical reason to run this broken world. The Gospel – the good news of the repentant sinner’s salvation by grace through faith in Christ’s work on the cross – can “illume” reason, as Luther said, but it has nothing to say about how to fix a sick economy, or to extricate yourself from a war. To figure out problems like these, requires brains.

Of course there are theological concerns about which the Church must speak up, and Dr. Tiller’s activities surely come under this rubric. It is hard to imagine him following a divine “calling,” which is what defines man’s vocations in the secular realm – vocations such as that of plumbers, parents, professors, students, and, yes, politicians and voters as well.

If the Christian performs those divine assignments in the world out of love for his neighbor, he renders the highest possible service to God, says Luther. This makes him a member of the universal priesthood of all believers. In other words, the altruistic man and woman in the voting booth are in reality priests exercising their ministry not at the altar but out here in our rough daily world.

For a long time, this hands-on doctrine governing the Christian’s daily life has been smothered by the weight of kitschy gobbledygook that has given American religion a bad name. Now, with the “Luther Decade” underway, meaning the 10-year countdown to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, Luther’s outburst against “false clerics and schismatic spirits” trying to tell secular rulers how to run their business, seem strangely topical.
At Concordia Seminary St. Louis, the largest Lutheran divinity school in the U.S., scholars and statesmen from Europe and North America have been comparing notes on precisely these issues last month at a conference titled,  “Faith and Politics in Luther’s Land – and Here.”

The overarching questions discussed were these: Is Germany already a post-Christian society? Are there still glimmers of hope for faith in Germany’s politics, considering that its Basic Law mentions the name of God in the very first sentence of its preamble, while there is no reference to God in the U.S. Constitution?

Finally:  Is America, where at many secular universities hostility to Christianity is more prevalent than in Germany, about to follow the Old World’s anti-religious footsteps?

Former German defense minister Hans Apel, a Social Democrat, described the glass as “half empty,” as far as the interface between faith and politics in Germany are concerned. Christian Meissner, national secretary of the Protestant cause of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said it was “half full.” Taking a pessimistic view of faith among young Christians in Germany, historian Mark Ruff of St. Louis University, described them as “fading embers.”

But in all papers given at this conference, dire warnings were sounded against a “post-Christian void.” Irving Hexham, a religious studies professor of Calgary University in Canada, established the direct lineage of the neo-pagan substitute for Christianity from the rabidly anti-Christian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) to the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, who was hanged as  a war criminal in Nuremberg in 1946.
And Rev. Larry Nichols, one of America’s leading experts on cults, compared this phenomenon with the growing impact of neo-pagan cults, including Satanism, on segments of American society.

While all agreed that the “two kingdoms” – the secular and the spiritual – must never be “cooked and brewed together,” it was hard to argue with Hans Apel’s warning that churches giving up their fundamental theological positions in order to “please their memberships… lose their right to exist.”

“Who else could provide values?” Apel wondered aloud. “A democratic society cannot force its fundamental values by law. If it cannot be based on common fundamental values, our democratic society is in great danger, as demagogues get their chance to overwhelm and change it.”

Comments

[Norman Teigen]

Thank you for this post. Interesting.

My hope is that right-wing oriented Lutherans will go back to the Lutheran teaching on vocation, which you have re-stated here. The ideal of changing the culture of the country from secularism to Christianity has now been, I think, discredited among the population at large as a result of this election.

[Rev. Robert Waters]

Norman, certainly the idea of "changing the culture of the country from secularism to Christianity" is problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's mixing apples and oranges; secularism is an ideology, whereas Christianity is a religion. For another, it often involves the unbiblical Reformed notion that it's somehow the Church's responsibility to "christianize" society in the sense of making the Church God's agent in the Kingdom of the Right as well as in the Kingdom of the Left, promoting faith in Christ as well as common decency.

But make no mistake Norman: the Kingdom of the Left is, indeed, precisely God's kingdom, and we whose vocation includes that of Christian voter have an absolute obligation to oppose injustice and the defiance of God's Law in the political as well as the spiritual realm. What I'm about to write is Luther 101. It's elementary Lutheran teaching with regard to the Two Kingdoms. You might want to reflect on it.

The Law, St. Paul writes, is written on the human heart. And as C.S. (and others) have pointed out, its rough outlines are found in the laws, social codes, taboos and religions even of the inhabitants of completely heathen tribes on remote islands before the missionaries ever arrive. The Ten Commandments (especially the Second Table) are embraced in rough but recognizable analog by literally every society on earth. They are the basis for human society.

It's not the responsiblility of the State to promote the preaching of the Gospel. But Romans tells us that the government is precisely "the minister of God to execute wrath upon evildoers." All human beings, and not only believers, are subjects of God's Kingdom of the Left Hand- whose law is precisely the Law of God, written on the human heart and shared by all decent people of all religions, and none.

Thus Luther insists that it is not only the right but the obligation of the Church to "tweak the prince's nose" when he fails to exercise his divinely ordained task of protecting the weak against the strong- and that emphatically includes protecting the unborn.

Thus it is the absolute obligation of individual Christians, in our vocations as voters, to vote for candidates who will protect the unborn and the other weak ones against the predations of those who would abuse them.

As has been convincingly argued elsewhere and by others, your suggestion that the result of the recent election- which was decided, as poll after poll has shown, pretty much exclusively on the basis of the economy- represents in any sense a repudiation of the pro-life cause or other manifestations of the attempt by decent people of all religions and none to call our culture back from the worship of death is mistaken. But even if it were accurate, that would not relieve us of our obligation as Christian voters to insist that God's minister who has been given the sword precisely by Him in order to protect the weak from the strong do his job.

[Norman Teigen]

Thank you, Bob, for your earnest response to my short comment. I am a 'Natural Law' kind-of-a-guy because I, too, have read Romans. This is not, Bob, exclusively an issue of being grounded in Luther 101 but it also involves a serious study of the origins of the American legal system. I respectfully suggest to you that a serious study of the History of American Law and Jurisprudence will not result in the same conclusion that you make regarding the Ten Commandments. Remember that as Christians we are in the world, but we are not of the world. As Americans we value religious expression but we need not expect that the society-at-large is devoid of secular interests.

[Rev, Robert Waters]

Norman, I totally concur. My concern is that we not forget that- as in the case of the legality of abortion, for example- the Christian duty to advocate for the weak and for justice not be somehow missed through a misreading of Luther (or Paul) as advocating the abandonment of the secular realm to the devil.

President Obama, of all people, put the case well when he made his well-known speech suggesting that such concerns be advocated on the basis precisely of natural law- of information available to believer and unbeliever alike. It is foolish to argue in the public sphere that abortion is wrong because Scripture says so; unbelievers will be unimpressed with that argument. But to argue that abortion should be illegal because it is both unjust and bad public policy.