What's God doing in politics?

The Christian Peoples Alliance, in a document called "The Mayflower Declaration", lays out its core principle in just one sentence: "We believe that Jesus Christ calls us to follow Him in every area of our lives, including the realm of politics."

This is a radical position indeed. The established religious order in this country has avoided politics for centuries, preferring to leave political reform to the politicians. Whilst it is true that Christians have been involved in politics on an individual basis, and have sometimes managed to achieve tremendous things (for example, the abolition of slavery, prison reform, and the like), the Church has basically kept out of the political arena.

It's interesting to consider why this might be the case. I'm no historian (and so you should treat historical references in this article with a touch of scepticism - be ready to look stuff up if you think I've got it wrong), but it seems to me that the Church is suffering from guilt - and what's more, it is suffering needlessly.

Why the guilt? Well, we have to go back at least as far as the Crusades. Between 1096 and 1291 AD, the Crusaders waged war against the Muslims, originally in response to a call to arms by Pope Urban II. The Crusaders answered that call, and they waged war in the name of God. They shouldn't have done that. Their motivation was ostensibly the persecution of Christian pilgrims by Muslims in the Holy Land. But Jesus's teaching on persecution is very clear: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven" - Matthew 5:43-45a.

As you will note from the quotation, Jesus makes it clear that loving and praying for our enemies is not optional; it's mandatory, and our status as children of God is made conditional upon our obedience. It's certainly true that Jesus can forgive sin, so we might fail to love our enemies and yet receive redemption through that forgiveness, but the point is that it is a sin to disobey God by failing to love and pray for those who persecute us. It's against the teachings of Jesus. To wage war instead of seeking a peaceful settlement is not the act of a Christian. (I will accept that there are times when fighting is unavoidable; for example, the Second World War had to be fought. But the Crusades were fought over a comparatively minor issue, which was little more than an attempt at justification.)

And so we turn to the Spanish Inquisition. From the fifteenth Century to the early decades of the nineteenth, the Inquisition was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people. Torquemada himself ordered more than two thousand Spaniards to be executed. The purpose of the Inquisition was to root out non-believers from the whole of Spain, and a diabolical purpose it was. But was God in it? Of course not. Jesus taught us to be tolerant not just of non-believers, but even of occupying forces! So, again, the Inquisition was against the will of God.

These matters, and other similar abuses of power, do not in fact say anything about Jesus. What they do show us is that cruel and ambitious men are often prepared to use the prevailing political climate as a way of climbing the power ladder. The political systems of the day were predominantly authoritarian - whatever the boss said was what happened - and our modern checks and balances of power were conspicuous only by their absence. Abuse was inevitable. It is no coincidence that the last hundred years or so have seen the steady erosion of some of the checks and balances in the British political system - a dangerous trend, which we must reverse quickly if we wish to remain a free people.

The fundamental point here is that Christ's message is one of love, and truth, and gentleness; those who persecute and torture and kill are not following the teachings of Christ. They might call themselves Christians, but "Ye shall know them by their fruits" - Matthew 7:16. The so-called Protestants and Catholics who murdered innocent people in Northern Ireland over the last third of the twentieth Century showed by their fruits - misery, destruction, and death - that they were not Christians.

The Church's political track record, though, is not good, is it? How can anyone vote with a clear conscience for a political party rooted in a faith whose "followers" are responsible for such crimes? Well, let's see.

In the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, eleven people were killed and around four hundred wounded by the Manchester Yeomanry. The party in power at the time was the Tory party. They, therefore, were responsible for the activities of their troops. I should perhaps add that, up until the point where the troops waded in, the protest they were "policing" had been peaceful and good-humoured.

The Potato Famine in the middle of the nineteenth Century has been characterised as an attempt at genocide. The Tories and Liberals shared the responsibility for that one.

In the late nineteenth Century, racial minorities were being persecuted in South Africa, then a British colony. It was the so-called "Liberal" Party that presided over Mohandas Ghandi's imprisonment in 1913, and over the Amritsar Massacre in India a few years later.

The Labour Party are comparatively new on the scene, but of course their roots are bound up with Communism. Even as late as the 1980s, many Labour party members were proudly proclaiming their support for Communism. In 1932-33, Stalin's Communists murdered seven million Ukrainians. The Crusades are almost irrelevant in comparison.

So let's see now - if we can't vote for Christians because some people calling themselves Christians abused their power to wage war or run authoritarian regimes hundreds of years ago, then the same reasoning means we can't vote Tory, Liberal, or Labour. Not much left, is there?

Do the Tories agonise over Peterloo today? Does Tony Blair lie awake at night, wondering if he should dissolve the Labour Party because of Soviet genocide? Of course not. These tragic abuses happened, but they're in the past, and the world has moved on. And nobody seriously blames the Labour Party for the excesses of the Soviets. Neither should we blame the Church for the abuses of sinful but powerful men in its history.

The Church has no reason to feel guilt over past abuses of power. The abusers were not, in fact, following Christ's teaching. Had they done so, the abuses would not have happened.

In a parallel essay on War and Religion, David Bamber makes this same point in an even more compelling way; he demonstrates that atheistic and humanist philosophies were responsible for well over 150 million deaths in the twentieth Century alone. This is a far higher death toll than even the most desperate atheist could lay at the door of the Church. Thus, if we accept that Christians must not be involved in politics because of the violent excesses of those who misused their position within the Church and abused the power entrusted to them, we must also accept that non-Christians must not be involved in politics. So either we do without politicians altogether (which, perhaps, wouldn't be such a bad idea!) or we accept that anyone should be allowed to get involved in the process, and rely on our Constitution to protect the country from abuses (although we must be quick, since Tony Blair is busily dismantling our Constitution).

Sorry to go on so long about that, but it's amazing just how much woolly thinking we have to clear out of the way before we can get to the important bit - which is coming up right now.

So - having dispensed with a spurious reason for Christians not to get involved in politics as a united political party, are there any reasons why they should? Of course there are.

God has given us lots of precedents, by placing many of His worshippers into positions of authority. He set Adam to rule over the entire world! He placed Joseph in one of the most powerful positions in Egypt, in plenty of time for Joseph to deal (very competently) with what would otherwise have been a nation-destroying drought. He summoned a rather unwilling Moses to conduct negotiations with the Egyptian Pharoah concerning the slavery of the Israelites. He chose David, and then his son Solomon, to rule over Israel. He raised up Nehemiah to be cupbearer to King Ataxerxes (it may not sound like it, but this was a very responsible position). Nehemiah was able to use his proximity to the king to persuade him to allow the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

King Nebuchadnezzar appointed Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (or, if you prefer, Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) as courtiers, and they were able to act as effective witnesses to the power and goodness of God, in the very midst of Babylon.

And let's not forget the greatest king of all time - Jesus himself.

Oh, yes - there's lots of precedent. God uses His people for good, and if that means putting them into positions of power, then that's what He'll do. There's no escaping it.

The CPA is trying to do God's will, by challenging the leaders of this country to adopt good and righteous policies, for the benefit of our nation and the world. This is God's work. Will you help them, or fight them?

Post scriptum...

I was going to conclude this article with the Edmund Burke quotation, often wheeled out by the CPA, about evil triumphing when good men do nothing, but I was unable to track down the original; in fact, I have no good reason to believe it's a genuine quotation. It doesn't appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, for one thing - very odd. If someone can source it to a particular document by Edward Burke, could they please let me know? Thanks.