For the Common Good
Good and Bad Ways to Think
About Religion and Politics
by Robert Benne
Eerdmans, 2010
(128 pages, $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Robert Benne, Director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society and Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion (Emeritus) at Roanoke College, writes from within the confessional Lutheran tradition. In his latest book he is concerned with the mode by which people of religious conviction interact with the political process. He begins with a brief sketch of several factors that have helped galvanize cultural reaction to religion since the 1960s. Among these were the election of Jimmy Carter, a professed Evangelical Christian, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that found a constitutional “right” to abortion, the subsequent emergence of groups such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, and the very public faith—and influence—of John Paul II.
Serious religion, Benne insists, always has a conspicuously public dimension. The burden of the volume, however, is to critique two prevalent modes of thinking about religion and politics, what Benne calls the “separationist” and “fusionist” fallacies.
The Separationist Distortion
The first common distortion is to divorce religion and politics by claiming, or requiring, that they have nothing to do with each other. This separationism is produced by both militant secularists and the ardently religious, and in both crude and sophisticated forms. Its fruit is what the late Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square,” wherein public life is tightly sealed off from religious presence and religious action. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, these groups, in their distaste for religion becoming a public influence, tend to confuse the interaction of religion and politics with the “separation of church and state”; in the end, to conflate the two is to corrupt both.
Most of the objections to the role of religion in political life, in Benne’s view, amount to a “selective separationism” that invariably is opposed to a politically active conservative religion, frequently stigmatized as “fundamentalism.” In fact, “selective separationists” are so bothered by conservative religion’s influence that they seem utterly blind to the ongoing and pervasive role of liberal religion’s influence on political life. And when they rail against public religion, it is almost always the so-called religious right receiving the brunt of their criticism.
While one form of separationism seeks to keep religion and politics separate because of its fear of religion, another type—“classical sectarianism”—operates on the assumption of politics’ corrosive effect on religion. Given their optimism about the Church and thoroughgoing pessimism about the world, its representatives invariably take the pacifistic elements of the “Sermon on the Mount” as the key to Christian belief and activity. Because the world is full of violence, and politics is based on coercion by the state, there can be no compromise. Either the believer is devoted to “peace” or he must participate in a violent public sphere; there is no reconciling these two elements.
This form of sectarianism continues to flourish among Anabaptist (particularly, Mennonite and Brethren) and Amish communities, as well as in the thought of theologians like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. Benne views this form of sectarianism, whatever salutary features it may have, as deficient precisely because it gives up on the world and, in its non-engagement, denies God’s sovereignty over history. From the standpoint of Christian theology, however, there can be no realm of human existence in which the presence and the commands of a Creator-God are not found and mediated. Christians must actively participate in God’s care for the world.
The Fusionist Distortion
A second distortion of the relationship between religion and politics is to bring them so closely together that they become fused. Fusion creates politicized religion or theological politics; in either arrangement religion and politics are both corroded. Benne understands Nazism and Communism as bastardized and utopian versions of this fusion, in contrast to the more intentional theocratic model by which a particular political party might be associated closely with faith and the divine purpose.
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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