In the modern post-Christian liberal democracy that is 21st century Australia, every Christian can and should be an active participant in our national political discourse.
Traditionally, the Australian church has opted for more benign forms of engagement: letter-writing, meeting with local MPs, and signing petitions—old-school lobbying. But recently, many Christians particularly among Gen Y have turned to social media campaigns, public protests, and even some forms of civil disobedience.
Whichever form of engagement we may adopt, what five key attributes should distinguish a faithful Christian political witness today?
1. Pray to the King
1. Pray to the King
If we have a high view of God’s kingship and a realistic view of human sinfulness, prayer should be the single most influential form of political engagement.
In 1 Timothy 2:1-2, Paul urges that ‘supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way’.
One of the effective means by which Christians live out their godliness is through prayer for the king to the King of Kings.
Our prayers are to be holistic: not simply asking for political outcomes but also interceding and giving thanks for our government—even a government for which we may not have voted!
If God can change the hearts of pagan kings, then it is to him that we must direct our greatest attention. No amount of lobbying, letter-writing or leafleting will be effective without prayer.
God works through the prayers of his people to rule his governments over his world.
2. Care for their souls
2. Care for their souls
If I had a dollar for every piece of hate mail, abusive phone call or smear article written about Australian politicians, I’d be richer than Gina Rinehart. The overwhelming experience of our politicians is one of ingratitude, ridicule and abuse.
Believe it or not, politicians are people too. It’s easy to dehumanise them but just like us, they have souls and are people in need of the gospel.
They bear responsibilities that few of us could fathom and all too often, the collateral damage of political battle is their families. Prime Minister Tony Abbott writes: ‘Politicians are volunteers. They choose their life. Families are conscripts.’
We Christians must ‘shine as lights in the world’. Instead of participating in the national sport of pollie-bashing, we should be caring for their souls. Pastor them, support them, care for their families, invite them to church, pray with them and tell them about Jesus—just like we would with anyone else.
If we will not care for their souls, few others—if any at all—will.
3. Do your homework
3. Do your homework
John Stott famously advocated ‘double listening’. He said that ‘we are called to listen both to the Word of God, and to today’s world, in order to relate the one to the other.’
One of the greatest challenges of Christian political engagement is to understand not just God’s word but also God’s world.
When we do our homework and have a strong grasp of the issue, we will more readily appreciate complexity and avoid oversimplification. We will minimise the danger of simplistic linear thinking, which clumsily transliterates a broad biblical principle to a complex policy issue. And we will more clearly distinguish between the righteous biblical end and merely one of many disputable political means.
If we fail to appreciate the complexity of God’s world, we will risk simplistically advocating one particular policy as the only possible expression of a broad biblical principle.
The path to biblical justice is fraught with good godly intentions and complex practical difficulties. The only way for us to graciously navigate that path is if we listen discerningly to both God’s word and God’s world.
4. Counsel, don’t just criticise
4. Counsel, don’t just criticise
Tiled on the vestibule of the Victorian Parliament House are the words of Proverbs 11:14: ‘Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.’
In many ways, this proverb captures the wisdom of our representative democracy—we as electors are those counsellors.
Christian political engagement must be more than a protest movement. We must not be all protest but no proposition, or all criticism but no counsel.
For the Christians of the New Testament, Caesar was the ruler ‘over us’. But in a representative democracy like ours in Australia, Caesar is actually ‘the sum of us’; we, through our Parliament, are the collective ‘Caesar’.
This means that we too bear Caesar’s responsibility to rule justly; not simply by complaining about a perceived injustice, but by actually providing wise counsel to fix the problem.
Christian political engagement must be more than a protest movement. We must not be all protest but no proposition, or all criticism but no counsel.
Our responsibility to rule as the collective Caesar demands that we as Christians connect God’s word with God’s world and then constructively commend Christ-centred solutions to the injustices of society.
5. Distinguish a gospel-centred worldview
5. Distinguish a gospel-centred worldview
Whilst effective Christian political engagement must be pragmatic, it must also be explicitly gospel-centred—both in substance and form.
Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson once said:
‘There is nothing distinct about a worldview that takes the language of the Right or the Left and dresses it up in religious language and calls it ‘Christian’.’
The gospel is distinct in that it conforms to no party platform, yields to no superior worldview and challenges every “ism” and “ocracy” in human history.
We ought to commend not just the temporal creative good but the eternal redemptive good of the gospel which our political engagement must then adorn.
For if ‘Christian political engagement’ is to be at all genuinely ‘Christian’, it must point to Christ.
In Romans 13, Paul instructs the saints in Rome to honour an evil and despotic tyrant. How much more should we then seek to honour our democratically-elected Parliament which, unlike the Caesar of Rome, is actually ‘not a terror to good conduct, but to bad’?
(Photograph of Australia’s ‘new’ Parliament House by John O’Neill)