This week I was summoned for jury duty. I arrived Tuesday at the Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville ready to perform my civic duty. I figured I might be sitting in a room for a while with little to do, so I took my Holy Week planning resources. I ended up with ample time to select hymns for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. It was a good morning, which included a chance to chat with a Quaker jurist who likes literature as much as I do and a young woman who used to work for the Springdale Police Department.
Many conversations with fellow clergy around the country had left me skeptical as to whether I would make the cut and serve on the jury. Theories on why clergy are not selected abound: Perhaps prosecuting attorneys believe pastors will be too lenient, acquitting too many offenders. Perhaps defense attorneys believe pastors are too moralistic and will not be able to presume innocence until proven guilty. Or, perhaps, juries will defer to pastors.
One attorney in particular -- who also now works in the church -- said lawyers for both sides worry a clergy person would dominate a jury. One pastor -- the only pastor who reported serving on a jury -- said he had served on two juries and, in both instances, was selected as the foreman of the jury. Apparently, in the eyes of the court, a religious leader tips the scales in the jury room enough they dismiss the pastor.
All of this raises the larger question of the relationship between the political system and the church. We are a nation that has enshrined -- as its First Amendment a commitment -- neither to establish a religion nor to prohibit the free exercise of it. Those protections are embedded in a larger amendment protecting a wide range of forms of free speech.
Transport these commitments back into the life of the church itself, and you have individual people of faith interpreting their rights to the free exercise of religion in diverse ways. I think the majority of Christians prefer politics not be established in the church and religion not be established in the state. Yet there are exceptions. Some clergy use the pulpit, and some churches use their voice, to align directly behind specific partisan political positions.
Perhaps the way to think about this is to say the church lives in a strange tension. It is not supposed to be caught up in partisan politics, taking one side or the other in a bicameral system of government. Yet, on the other hand, the church is itself political. John Milbank -- one of my favorite theologians on this topic -- says, what political theory is to human history, theology is to the understanding of reality and metaphysics.
In this sense, it is impossible for the church not to be political. The church has something to say to the polis -- the city -- through its voice, what it says in its confessions, proclamations, sermons, newsletters and more. It automatically speaks its commitments through its actions in the world. The moment the church opens its doors to feed those who are hungry -- or opens a health clinic or offers English as a second language classes for immigrants -- the church speaks politics.
As a pastor, I hope this kind of church politics would transcend the more typical partisan politics. I'm not against partisan politics, per se; there is a nitty-gritty aspect to politics that is unavoidable. We are always working out how to live together as a community and as a nation, through the systems that have been given to us and the cultures that form us. In the end, as much as a Christian would like to transcend partisan politics, he will go to the polling place and vote for candidates of a specific party.
The church, on the other hand -- or any religious community, for that matter -- is called to practice a kind of politics that points away from the political theory that applies only to human history, and instead guide our eyes and our hearts toward the fusion of the metaphysical and political understandings that is sometimes called "political theology." Religious communities are free to transcend partisan politics because, only through the politics they themselves practice, can the partisan political landscape be transformed. This will seem paradoxical, but perhaps, faith communities matter to the political -- not because they are apolitical, but because they are a different kind of political.
What I love about this, when it is done well -- at least in the Lutheran congregations I have known -- is that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Green Party people all can share a common life together, confess a common faith together and then make commitments to change the world in specific ways that will look like politics. But it will be, if led by prayer, a kind of divine politics or an echo of divine government -- small and edgy and never as powerful as the systems of the world, but always hinting at another kingdom, another realm, that is sneaking its way into this one.
Which is probably why -- after sitting for two hours of really fascinating questions for the jury from the prosecuting and defense teams -- the prosecuting attorney, when asked if juror No. 38 could remain, said politely and thoughtfully, "We thank that juror and excuse him." At which point, I left the building, got in the car and went to the elementary school to have lunch with the kids.
NAN Religion on 04/05/2014