The Church as Alternative Politic

An overlooked problem with “third way” approaches and the need for a more political ecclesiology

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A few months ago, I wrote these words in a post entitled “How the Gospel Changes Our Politics”:

In this present cultural moment, it is easy—and correct, in my view—to identify Christian nationalism as a threat to the church’s witness to the gospel. What is more difficult for many of us to recognize is that classical liberalism and pluralism and secularism are threats as well, and so is every power that is not grounded wholly and completely in love for the righteous rule of King Jesus.

I’m not convinced that secularization has shifted the relationship of the church to culture from positive to neutral to negative. I’m more inclined to think that the relationship has always been a combination of negatives, neutrals, and positives, but the church failed to notice the precise nature of past “negatives” and the corrosive effects of the supposed “positive” and “neutral” worlds. Every human political structure is infected with libido dominandi and thus poses a threat to the purity of the church’s witness. The threats of each political structure simply fall in different places. And so, part of the church’s task is to emphasize the aspects of its witness that preserve the purity of the church’s political and prophetic witness.

How the Gospel Changes Our Politics

Now, in this post, I want to expand on my earlier line of thinking—so, be sure to read the earlier post “How the Gospel Changes Our Politics” before reading this one.

What has happened in recent decades is, in my view, not a movement from a positive world to a neutral and now to a negative world but a reconfiguration of a cluster of positives, neutrals, and negatives. That’s not the primary point of this post, but this contention from my earlier post remains in the background of my thinking here.

The Inevitable Corruptions and Contradictions of Human Political Structures

Because our political systems necessarily include fallen human beings—not only of the Christian inclination but also of other persuasions—no human political structure is grounded wholly and completely in perfect love for God and neighbor. Human political systems and structures achieve partial and proximate goods, but they are also inevitably doomed to corruption and contradictions.

One simple example to illustrate the inevitable corruption and contradiction of any human political structure: People cannot be governed without a shared commitment to some transcendent person or ideal. And yet, any deity or transcendent ideal that is broad enough to be believable by all—or even most—participants in a political domain will inevitably be or become a false god, since many of these persons will not be Christians and thus are unwilling to embrace the one true God. This false god may conceptually overlap with the God of Christianity to a sufficient degree for Christians and non-Christians to coexist and to cooperate in the same political spheres. Yet that very overlap—which may seem like a “positive world” when the overlap is greater than the differences—is corrosive to the distinctive counter-narrative of the city of God. While desirable to a certain degree, such an order is also inevitably a challenge to Christian faith and practice.

To be Christian is, therefore, to live within political systems that are corrupted and contradictory. Part of the calling of Christianity is to configure—and, when necessary, to reconfigure—our witness in a way that recognizes the positive, neutral, and negative aspects of the structures in which we find ourselves.

For this reason, what matters most is never the relationship of church to culture. It is, instead, the maintenance of ecclesial politics and political ecclesiologies that resiliently sustain the church’s distinct counterculture in the context of each social, cultural, and political structure.

Considered historically, what this means is that, for example, Christians in the era of Constantine weren’t wrong to embrace the opportunity to secure power and even to cultivate a Christian empire. (After the horrific persecutions of the late third and early fourth centuries, who among us would have said, “Imperial favor? No thanks—the past few decades have been great”?) Where they may have erred—I am thinking here of Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century and of Paulus Orosius a century later—is in receiving the opportunities of this newfound arrangement without acknowledging the dangers.

Of course, it is always easy—and frequently arrogant—to read the times with clarity when those times are in the distant past and we have no personal stake in those times. But how might this model speak to our current cultural moment in secularizing and increasingly polarized Western cultures?

Right now, many seem to see Christian nationalism as a solution while others see it as the ultimate horror. Others view classical liberalism and pluralism as problematic solutions which doom nations to inevitable secularization. What I am contending here is that both of these perspectives—and others that I haven’t mentioned—miss the centrality of the church as a divinely-designed alternative politic. When the church is centralized as the actual political structure of which every Christian is a citizen, Christian nationalism and classical liberalism, progressive socialism and pluralistic deism, and every position in between represents a differing configuration of power that results in different points of positivity, negativity, and neutrality in relation to the church as an alternative political structure.

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Not “a Third Way” but a Different Genus of Humanity

So what are some practical implications of what I’m arguing?

If the church is an alternative politic in the way I have described, the church does not possess a position on any continuum of the world’s political structures.

And this reality reveals, in my view, the primary problem with some of the “third way” rhetoric that has dominated certain strands of evangelical political discourse.

What has occurred in some expressions of this third-way discourse is that proponents have positioned the church at some particular point between right and left in the existing political continuum. From this position on the political continuum, practitioners of this sort of third way discourse attack moral deficits on the right and on the left, recognizing both as deficient.

In many ways, I am sympathetic to the third way approach. On the one hand, far too many conservative Christian leaders have rightly assailed the overreach of the political left and sexual progressivism while simultaneously ignoring racist elements on the right or downplaying Donald Trump’s idolatrous appropriations of Scripture for political gain even as he wallows in misogyny and vulgarity. On the other hand, a good many left-leaning evangelicals and post-evangelicals seem to seek every possible opportunity to attack complementarianism as the root cause of a vast range of abusive behaviors while turning a blind eye to the radical deviancies tacitly embraced in transgender “pronoun hospitality” and drag queen story times.

And yet, I am critical of certain “third way” approaches, though for very different reasons than some others. (And, to be clear, not all third way approaches are the same; on the varying “third-way” approaches, see this article by Chris Watkin.)

The Real Function of Third Way Rhetoric

The pursuit of a “third way” can rightly recognize the harm of giving a free pass to one political perspective while relentlessly critiquing the other. And yet, one key problem with some expressions of this third-way approach is that the church becomes a position on the existing political continuum instead of an altogether alternative politic structure.

One of the many problematic results of positioning the church on the political continuum of the culture is that, whenever the culture shifts right or left, the church tends to shift as well. A point between right and left on the political continuum is never permanently static, since “right” and “left” can move one way or the other as the culture and the social order change. And so, if the social and political order swerves to the right, a church that sees itself as a third way between right and left will be pulled to the political right as it still seeks to be a halfway point, equally critiquing both sides. A model that positions the church on a cultural political continuum also fails because it can limit the church’s prophetic voice to speaking in two directions when, in fact, cultural and political realities are more complex than right and left, especially when populist and alternative movements on the right and left eclipse historical conservatism and liberalism.

That’s why the solution, as I see it, is not to seek a via media somewhere on the existing political continuum and then to critique both sides from that position. The answer that I’m suggesting is to situate oneself as a citizen of an entirely different political structure—the church—and to array one’s way of life to preserve every virtue that is grounded in the church’s constitutive text. This way of life should critique every iniquity and inequity, particularly those that stand in the way of living “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:2). And yet, this critique is not merely one that seeks to punch both right and left. Instead, it speaks from the perspective of an entirely separate citizenship and a wholly different genus of humanity.

In the second and third centuries, Christians were not merely seen as providing a “third way” within existing political structures. Christians were referred to as a “third race” or another “genus” of humanity. (See tertium gentium in Tertullian, Ad nationes, 1:8; see also γενος in Πρὸς Διόγνητον Ἐπιστολή, 1 and Aristides, Apologia, 2.) Christians are a new people with our own political structure—the church—which has no place on the world’s political matrices. If our churches find a place on any current political continuum, it is because we have surrendered some part of what it means to be the church.

I do not fear changing political structures around us. Neither do I see any of these structures as an answer that will shift the prevailing political climate from a negative reception of Christianity into something more neutral or positive. I also reject the claim that, with the rise of a negative world, combative and vulgar responses to the culture are now somehow acceptable.

The church is an alternative political reality that will outlast the rise and fall of all the kingdoms and empires of earth. If the church is an alternative politic with no place on any early political continuum, our responsibility is to configure the church’s political structures to maintain our witness in the world, resisting every corrosive power around us, regardless of whether that power presents itself as persecution in a negative world or as a dilution of our counter-cultural uniqueness in what seems like positive world. Of course, we are also participants in particular nations and empires, and we are responsible to support structures of virtue that are most conducive to the Christian pursuit of “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” And yet, we have no resting place on the ever-shifting political continua of the prevailing culture. What we have instead is a kingdom “not of this world” that “cannot be shaken” (John 18:36; Hebrews 12:28).

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