A conversation with a younger brother at church yesterday came round to Charlie Kirk and the Christian presence at the Unite the Kingdom march recently. He’s been a dissident over COVID and related deceptions, but has been asking himself recently whether Christians should be involved in politics at all, or whether the Kingdom of God ought to be seen as a completely different kind of kingdom.
I can see where he’s coming from on that. After all, Jesus told Pilate that his Kingdom is not from this world (John 18:36), as he refused either to plead his cause or resist political power. And as I myself observed recently, phenomena like the sinister Dominionism of the Seven Mountain Mandate apostles show just how dangerous it is to turn the gospel into a political movement. Although “Thy kingdom come” is ultimately associated with the universal rule of God after the second coming, which is the epitome of theocratic politics, the gospel is intended to call people of all nations, not to create one global nation. This is in direct contrast to Islam, in which from the very beginning force and all necessary means were to be used to establish a worldwide Caliphate and so make Islam universal.
Yet if Christians are to be in the world, the Kingdom must inevitably have a political dimension, because the interaction of people in the world is politics. The New Testament covers the period in which the Church was an apparently insignificant mustard seed. It was simply too small to have much political role, although that was no longer true by the time the Jerusalem temple fell, and the Church and Pharisaism were the only Jewish institutions left standing.
Even so, Jesus’s prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem was a judgement of political upheaval for the rejection of his Davidic kingship by his nation. In Acts Paul deliberately embarrasses the Philippian authorities for their illegal treatment of him as a Roman citizen. This was a political act on his part to show that Christianity should not be treated as criminal. Then again Paul evangelises Agrippa in his defence, and apart from human concern he must have been aware that the conversion of the king would have changed the political situation for Christianity dramatically. Defending the same charges, Paul finally appeals to Caesar, and it is clear he is not just using Roman law to escape the Sanhedrin, but is hoping to, perhaps, convert Caesar himself, which would greatly change Christianity’s status in the whole empire.
For better or worse, the conversion of kings did change the religion of subjects throughout early church history. Constantine’s reign is the prime example and (like Solomon’s!) is still rightly regarded as an ambiguous blessing. But there is no doubt that the gospel’s spread was greatly facilitated by the Christianisation of the Empire. And it’s also a fact that many other nations, like the Post-Roman and Saxon kingdoms of Britain, became Christian through the conversion of their kings. My friend, Church historian Nick Needham, has gone so far as to say that much of the spread of the gospel across the world has been enabled by various empires (think of the British Empire in Africa, for example). We ought therefore to regard these political institutions at least as God’s providential means, and so pay them due regard.
The use of political means does not necessarily mean confusing church and State. Mediaeval Catholicism and Orthodoxy showed this was a real danger, not least because the Christian Empire of the Eastern Roman Byzantines became the model for the Islamic Empire of the Arabs, which lacked even Byzantium’s limited separation of church and state. And yet it is also true that, when the Western Empire was at its lowest point from barbarian invasion, it was the Bishop of Rome who supplied the political leadership through which Christian Rome survived, rather than becoming a pagan wasteland.
So just as imperialism generally (viewed without today’s ideological blinkers) provides a mixed picture of exploitation and the blessings of civilisation, empires both facilitated and corrupted the Kingdom of Christ. But how else could it be, once rulers themselves embraced Christ and sought, imperfectly, to rule under his authority, as those like King Alfred certainly did?
Thus it was that essentially, by the early 7th century, Christianity was co-terminous with the two branches of the Roman Empire, disregarding outliers like India’s Kerala. Yet when the Arab onslaught of empire-building came, between 2/3 and 3/4 of Christian lands were conquered, either obliterating, or all but obliterating, the faith up to the present. For example, Egypt had been almost entirely Christian, but Christians now number only 10% of the poorest people, through a millennium of oppression. Turkey was the very heartland of Paul’s mission, and yet is now only 0.2% Christian, suffering persecution even before the recent re-Islamification under Erdogan has intensified it.
It was only armed resistance by the Imperial State that saved the remnants of European Christianity at the end of the first millennium, and indeed over the second, as Islam took Spain, and finally threatened Vienna in the 17th century. Names like El Cid, Charles Martel and Charlemagne are inextricably linked to armed resistance to Muslim aggression. The Crusades were initially a response both to the threat to Byzantine Christian states and to the oppression of Christians in conquered lands.
And it appears (to my surprise, at least) that even the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Henry the Navigator, as late as the fifteenth century, were partly attempts to resist Islam: Columbus was looking to find lost Christian allies East of the Ottoman Empire, and Henry was following rumours of Christian kings in Africa.
In the seventeenth century only the Battle of Vienna prevented the whole of Europe becoming like North Africa, in a war that eventually regained Hungary from Muslim rule. Christian Russia assisted Greece in becoming independent of the Ottomans, and hence proudly Orthodox again rather than Muslim.
Even the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate after 400 years was only due to the expansion of European Empires, and finally to the First World War. By way of contrast the present rise of Islamic extremism, seeking re-establish a worldwide Caliphate, has been allowed by the political inertia and self-loathing of Western powers. Pakistani rape gangs and Albanian drug dealers are the direct result of the failure of politics, and ruin thousands of lives. Where Islam has prevailed, Christians (not to mention Jews and others) have always been persecuted and suppressed. And so it would appear that had Christians retreated from political, and even military action, Islam must surely have obliterated the faith altogether – and then the apolitical Kingdom of God would have been no more than a theoretical construct.
Taking another tack, my own church was founded by Baptists who, in order to have liberty to practise their faith, felt constrained to take up arms against King Charles 1. They had justifiable suspicions that, given his own way, Charles would eventually have re-imposed compulsory Roman Catholicism, as his son James II did. The main political institution – the House of Commons – consisted predominantly of Non-conformists. Not to have resisted Charles politically would therefore have been to outlaw their own faith, although one might still argue about the justifcation for Civil War..
As I have described before, my church’s founders leaned dangerously towards Fifth Monarchism, a belief which sought to establish an ideal millennial kingdom to which Christ would return. But accepting the error of this, should they have simply carried on meeting in secret, thinking that politics was not Christian? My church’s own Proceedings Book shows the results of that: under the repressive measures of the Clarendon Code at the Restoration, our membership plummeted and evangelism was impossible, and meetings were rare until political action by the Earl of Nottingham largely abolished the restrictions, through an Act that had been promised to dissenters for their support of the Glorious Revolution. It was also political action by dissenting ministers that gained further relief in the 1770s.
One way of addressing the question of political involvement is to ask if it is right for Christians to vote. Most would reply in the affirmative, for the very good reason that our nation’s polity is (supposedly!) democratic, government being chosen responsibly by the people, making one’s vote as much a civic duty as the elected government’s duty to govern, rather than to play cards all day. Until recently ithas seemed easy to see voting (or not) as a minor issue of conscience. Christians from industrial areas would prefer a moderate socialist government, and those from white-collar areas a moderate conservative one… Non-conformists tended to vote Lib-Dem to get the worst of both, safe in the knowledge they’d never get in anyway!
But the stakes are now far higher, as has become obvious since 2020 and even before. It actually matters to the very existence of Christianity how you vote. In that case, is it better to vote for a party that would impose Muslim dominance and Sharia Law on society, or one that would maintain the Christian basis of law and act to retain freedom of conscience? Quite apart from this existential question, is it a matter of indifference if we live under a government of “cultural Christianity,” under a militantly secularist one, or under one moving the country inexorably towards Islam? For believers to distance themselves from these questions is to cast a significant vote against the first alternative, and so to shoot the Kingdom in the foot. It may well be that, in Tertullian;s words, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” but we are not called to promote persecution deliberately.
If I’m correct in that conclusion, then if a government seemed to be imposing Sharia Law by force or stealth, whether for venal or ideological reasons, would it be wrong to engage in armed resistance, and instead simply to accept a choice between conversion, dhimmi status or death, on the basis of non-involvement in politics? The loss of most of Christianity’s original heartlands was, no doubt, subject to God’s wise providence. But many millions have gone to a Christless eternity as a result.
But if armed struggle is a horrible extreme, then surely it is incumbent on Christians to prevent it by active involvement in the process of peaceful political action: exposing criminality and two-tier justice, and speaking up for the socially beneficial effects of Christian ethics (including justifying them by reference to the gospel).
In C. S. Lewis’s space fantasy Perelandra, the protagonist Ransom, an academic, finds himself, at God’s direction, on an Eden-like planet Venus, placed between the equivalent of Eve, and a demonic figure attempting to engineer her Fall. At one point Ransom comes to the shocking realisation that the conflict is not to be one of ideas, for the satanic figure is not interested in ideas. His role is to be, instead, bloody physical conflict, to the death. I have always suspected that Lewis had an eye to historical realities in this. We are political simply by dint of participating in society, of “being in the world.” Wilberforce had to engage with the mess of parliamentary corruption to abolish the slave trade, and millions of ordinary people realised the need to take up arms if the world was to escape the barbarism of the Nazis. So perhaps we need to make a nuanced distinction between the Church as a political institution, which is antithetical to Christ’s Kingdom, and the Church as engaged with society through politics, which history has proven to be inevitable, and which therefore needs to be addressed with serious, and applied, theology.
Perhaps the difference between the two approaches is like that between Francis Schaeffer, who taught that Christians should not be in a ghetto, but be salt and light in every area of society; and the Seven Mountain Mandate of the NAR, which says that every area of society should be submitted to the rule of the Church.
But to me it is certain that if we do not affect the politics of our nation, its politics will certainly affect us – and there are plenty of examples of that effect being total extinction.
