Some Thoughts on Church Attendance and Political Activism

I

We’re coming now to the end of Pentecost, the ordinary time of the Church’s liturgical year. In a matter of weeks, we’ll be celebrating Christ as King Sunday and then the Church year both ends and begins with the Advent of Christ, remembering his coming again in glory as well as his initial coming to us in the Incarnation. My own parish is using these last days of Pentecost to focus on the teachings of Scripture on the person and work of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost, of course, the fiftieth day after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, issues in a season of focus on the ordinary life of the Church, the life of mission and evangelism, announcing to all men the evangel that Israel’s Messiah has born her sins and through that enabled all peoples and nations to come together in alignment under a single hope and purpose – which is to say, Pentecost is the birth of the Christian Church, the gathering in one and all places of both Jews and Gentiles together into the arms of a single man, a second Adam, Christ our Lord. This was the focus of the readings for our most recent holy day just two days ago, the feast of Saint James of Jerusalem, the kinsman of our Lord, who led the Jerusalem Council in the first century, leading the people of God in how they might grow into its their new identity, not as one elect people among many, but the source of election of all men into a one order: the Church of God.

In faithfulness to that ministry, the ministry of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, we must continue to struggle through the unfinished enactment of Christ’s work on the Cross, the work of reconciling men to God and to each other and this has hardly been more on the forefront of the Church’s mind in recent generations than this past year, a year undoubtedly to make its way into the history books for years to come. Indeed, if Pentecost marks the “ordinary time” of the life of the Church in the world, then indeed, this has been a truly Pentecostal year, one in which the world (or at least, the United States) has been baptized in fire.

The massive political upheaval and social unrest that we have seen throughout the year, even if not always framed in these terms, is substantially ordered around the same concerns which we Christians claim to have a special interest in – that is, the common thread through every protest and social justice movement that we have witnessed over these months is an expression of concern that some men are at enmity with other men and that it is the responsibility of some (other?) men to seek after and work towards the peace and reconciliation that these men lack. On October 23 the Church prayed that: “your Church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity.” The overlap in concerns, such like Saint James and the Jerusalem Council labored to accomplish for the reconciliation between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians, should be apparent. In the midst of that overlap, what should be most clear is the inherently public character of that concern.

II

We live in a liberal society. It’s been well-stated that the fundamental conviction of liberal political theory is that a political system must not be dedicated to a fundamental conviction. The outcome of such a pathology, when it fully runs its course, is that political act itself becomes suspect behavior in the daily political ongoings of society. That’s a fancy way of saying that people don’t like troublemakers, agitators, rabble-rousers, protesters, and the like. In a polite, liberal society, status quo enjoys a certain privilege because it asserts itself without disruption. Despite the fact that the words “liberal” and “conservative” are often used as antonyms in United States political discourse, liberal political order is inherently conservative by this account. This isn’t just a theory about liberalism – it’s pretty plainly observable in the day to day ongoings of our society. Consider the common belief that you don’t talk about “politics or religion” at holiday family gatherings such as Thanksgiving. Consider that such types of discourse are generally forbidden in the workplace. Consider that such talk is restricted in public schools. Consider the Bill of Rights. In each of these cases, the shared understanding is that such discourse is inherently inimical to the aims of peace in a society. The shared understanding is that the outcome of a “politics” that is based on any particular moral conviction can only work itself out as enmity between people – the end of political (and religious) speech is not concord – but hatred. The shared understanding is that a person’s moral convictions are the root of all social evil.

And of course, the outcome of such a polity is that there is an unwritten expectation that, to the extent that a person dedicates themselves to the flourishing of humanity, a harsh divide emerges between what are called a person’s “private beliefs” and their “public positions” on any matter – the former being a matter of their own “moral compass” as it were – and the latter being their more restrained, carefully filtered take on a matter. The transgressive character of “protest” in a liberal society is that it brings private moral authority directly to bear on the public conscience of a people who may not already be persuaded of the moral wisdom of another – or even that their own private moral compass can fairly sit under the scrutiny of another.

Thus, there is nothing more rude than standing in a shared public space and engaging (without their permission!) the public in morally corrective language. That is, a prophet is inherently unwelcome in liberal paradise. A protest is “peaceful” to the extent that it is not overly disruptive to public life. But protest explicitly aims to disrupt public life with private concerns. Therefore, there is no such thing as a peaceful protest.

III

The Gospel proclamation is exactly a protest. It is the pronouncement of the judgment of rulers and authorities. It is the announcement of the victory of the Christ over those same powers as well as the publication of the reality of his own authority over against theirs. It is not polite data or information or facts about God and man, but rather bears with it a very clear and serious demand that all men, women, and children, from all peoples and nations would repent and believe in its call. The morally demanding aspect of the Gospel is such that the apostle Paul speaks of this particular “viewpoint” or “private belief” as a thing that requires obedience from all who hear it – and even attaches the threat of hellfire and damnation to those who refuse to be persuaded to his “personal position” on the matter.

In a liberal society, the Gospel proclamation is, in its very form, at odds with what passes for cordial discourse. It is aggressive in articulating its own claims to a population that, by its own account, has no interest in hearing what it has to say. (In this way, every Gospel proclamation is preaching to a captive audience.) Additionally, it simultaneously mocks the positions of its opponents and lays them open to public ridicule. Further, it explicitly enacts this public protest with the intention of continuing to speak in this way until the whole world is converted to its position. In the Gospel, the Spirit will not rest until he has fully upended the existing order and brought into reality the world deemed fit by the Father himself, bringing all things under the subjection of his Son, the ruler of heaven and earth.

IV

By the reckoning of liberal political theory, the Gospel that we read about in the Bible seems to be practically at odds with the aims of peace. But the Gospel claims that peace – especially peace through reconciliation – is exactly what it aims to accomplish. How can this be?

The Gospel enacts the peace it aims for by calling into question the very intelligibility of the liberal concept of peace. It’s not that the Gospel wants peace through one means and the liberal desires peace through another – it’s that the Gospel protests that the liberal cries “peace, peace, when there is no peace.” And one of the primary ways it does this is by calling into question the distinctions a modern man may bring to the table about which kinds of claims get permission to have a bearing on public conscience – which is to say, in some very nearly literal ways, the Gospel says, “to hell with your public/private distinction” (cf. the Harrowing of Hell).

If this is the case, then the proclamation of the Gospel of peace is the disruptive entrance into public discourse of (at least some) specific demands about how we function as political actors in our society. Which is to say, the Gospel makes political activists of us all.

How can this be though? What can this even mean?

V

The use of ekklesia as a name for the Church is sometimes interpreted as “called out ones,” with the understanding that the Church is the sum total of all individual people who have been chosen by God for the salvation of their souls. While this connection with divine calling and election are not completely mistaken, this betrays an ignorance of the more historical meaning of the word. The ekklesia in ancient Greece was the name for the formal assembly of the citizens of the city gathered in one place for the explicitly political purpose of government. Any apolitical rendering of the term lacks historical plausibility. The Church as ekklesia is the Church as a gathered political body in one place for the purpose of deciding for itself and for the world in which it inhabits “how now shall we live?” In the naming of the Church as ekklesia, the New Testament names the Church as inherently public and political. It is not a collection of private individuals with “personal beliefs.” It is the gathering together of a priestly and prophetic voice within a preexisting society precisely in order to direct and lead that society.

But the Church’s voice is not primarily oriented outward. It is democratic in the sense that it speaks to itself and its members in the voice of its own members. It is protest against itself as much as it is a correction of wayward Herods. Hence, a regular part of its call is a routine commitment to confession of its sins and repentance. No one is left out.

It is democratic in a different sense, too. In some respects, the primary protest of the Church is simply that there are those who refuse to be identified with the Church. But as wide as Christ’s arms are stretched out upon the Cross, that many are embraced as being under its call. Therefore, it is democratic in that all people are invited into its citizenry, regardless of their station. In the Gospel, there is no station. Our own Lord bid us to welcome women and children, the poor, the sick, the powerful and the weak, the religious and the morally destitute into its citizenry – not that the poor and the sick might not find comfort, not that the righteous and the wicked might remain as they are, but that all people might become citizens of a new kingdom. In this way, the Church’s radically inclusive identity is a correction of the highly restrictive classical understanding of who may and may not participate in the ekklesia. Thus, even by simply acknowledging the breadth of who the Church will initiate into its citizenry by Baptism, the Church protests against the powers of this world.

VI

The events in the past 6 months (which are not new) and the protests they have sparked throughout the nation, have drawn Christian attention afresh to the question of social justice as well as opening the question of how Christians should relate to political movements such as Black Lives Matter. I want to bracket that specific question. Asking whether or not Christians should be involved in “protest” betrays the assumption that the Church is not already in protest. I have argued above that it is. What I want to suggest is that participation in the ordinary life of the Church, insofar as she remembers herself, is always already a form of protest. I am arguing that the gathered assembly of the Church in her members, as they form together the Body of Christ, are formed together as political activism par excellence.

If this is the case, then it reorients what we might mean when we ask, “Should Christians participate in any particular political protest?” – because to be Christian is to find oneself united to Christ’s body, and thus to already be joined with him in his cruciform denunciation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The protest has been going on for two millenia. A more careful asking of the question would be something like, “Is the protest of Black Lives Matter the protest of Christ?” There are certainly more and important questions that would follow in exploring such an issue, but the baptized Christian’s first and final identity is to be found with Christ, wherever Christ is, because the Christian is first and foremost a citizen of heaven – Christ’s own forever. The Christian knows nothing but the foolishness of the Cross. And so every subsequent question about action and mission has to start with that primary self-awareness of identity and vocation.

Whatever else we can say about the Church’s voice in the matter, we know this: that the gathered Church habitually coming together in prayer, confession, and praise, sharing in the Gospel together, in the Word and in Sacrament, as well as in lives that embody practices which mirror what is laid forth symbolically in the liturgy – we know that just this sort of activism is the kind in which no man can find fault.

It is in coming together that we are most “Spiritual”, in the biblical sense. The Holy Spirit is the builder of new worlds, the breath of God hovering over and against the chaos and emptiness of the world. We are a Spirit-filled people when we are a people being built together into one Body, the Church.

Of course, the Holy Spirit is quite often the Spirit that comes upon the prophet in order to issue out the voice of protest. And thus, the Holy Spirit as prophetic anointer is the voice of God in the picket, the voice of God the agitator, the voice of God the disrupter.

And so we see that the Spirit-filled Church, the Church in action, the Church most itself, is the Church gathered. The Church as ekklesia is the Church in its truest historical form and so it follows from there that when the Church is not gathered, when the Church’s members are dispersed into the world, she is less herself – at least, formally. If the Church’s name is ekklesia and the ekklesia is the actual coming together of a citizenry in one place to guide and lead the people, then when the Church is not gathering together, the Church is not living up to its name. And if the Church is not the Church of ekklesia, then she is not the Church so named in Scripture. And if she is not the biblical Church of ekklesia, then she is no longer the public voice of one crying out in the wilderness. She is, instead, the sum total of a certain number of hidden individuals who have private beliefs about a certain metaphysical being, with opinions about the way that people maybe should sometimes live.

VII

In the midst of the pandemic, the Church has come to face new challenges. While this is by no means the first or only plague that the Church has weathered, the occasion for the Church to struggle here is complicated by at least a couple newer aspects. In American-styled politics, the Constitutional principles regarding the separation of the Church and the State pose awkward questions in the matter of whether to obey man or God. While, classically, the Christian position was that the State bears its authority as a ministry from God, and thus the authority of the State bore an organic relationship to the authority of the Church, the Church herself being a ministry of God as well, the American position posits the challenge to the individual believer whether yielding to the authority of those in political power constitutes idolatry. The establishment clause in the Bill of Rights makes certain that the State transgresses itself by putting into place any law which finds its origins in the teachings and practices of the Church rather than, say, being derived from some obliquely secular source. Which is to say, public policy is inherently the domain of the State, while the Church is guaranteed the right to exist as an irrevocably private enterprise. Constitutionally, the Church has the right to remain silent. Were the existence of a political State somehow inherently threatening to the existence of the Church as such, that may provide some measure of comfort or shelter. But the subtle implication of this separation is that the Church is only guaranteed an existence under our Constitution insofar as it adopts this identity of private practice for itself. Which is to say, under the first amendment, the Church can go by any name but ekklesia. The separation of Church and State is the constitutional guarantee that the authorities of the State are under no real obligation to listen to the prophetic word of the Church. Rather than multiple coordinated public voices guiding and leading the people of the nation towards truth and justice, the American State is defined by the solitary nature of its own voice. If the Word of God should call the nation to “Repent and be baptized, every one of you,” the most authentically American response might be, “Who the hell are you? Mind your own damn business.”

This puts the Christian in a precarious position. God commands the Church to listen to his voice and to trust in the leadership and guidance of our political leaders. Christian civil obedience grows out of a more particular teaching to “Honor your Father and Mother.” Thus, listening to our leaders is divine pedagogy for growing and maturing in holiness. Under more classical forms of governance, this might mean that the Christian honors his Lord Christ by honoring his President. But what is the Christian to do when the President or the Governor or the Mayor prohibits him from doing the most Christian thing he can do – which is to participate in the ekklesial gathering of the Body of Christ, to be Christ’s body for the life of the world?

The answers to that question are complicated by the fact that, in our specific circumstance, the intention of the governmental authorities is by no means persecution, but is rather for the protection of the citizenry of the nation. If the Christian ethical question is whether the governing authorities are acting in line with the act of Christ, which is the act of self-emptying love for neighbor (as well as hospitality for the stranger), then the fact that our leaders have commanded us in some times and in some places to stay quarantined rather than to gather together as the Church cannot be evaluated neatly under a rubric of obeying man or God.

Good intentions notwithstanding, the tension raised by the predicament exposes the tension inherent in American public policy vis-a-vis religion. And this has not gone unnoticed. To paint in the broadest of strokes, those embodiments of the Church that are least institutionally-oriented (non-denominational, evangelical, Baptist, free Church), and least sympathetic to the idea that the State is in any way compatible with the workings of the Church, have found the guidance of the State highly difficult to comply with, seeing it as a direct affront to the “free exercise” clause enshrined in the Constitution. Conversely, those churches that are more institutionally-oriented, especially those more in the mainline, have found the direction of the State somewhat straightforwardly reasonable. While I find myself more in line with the pattern of thinking in the mainline rather than the “independently-minded” bodies on this matter, I really do sympathize with the raucous Baptist – though perhaps not for the same reasons. Enshrined within the evangelical protest against State frustration of Christian practice is the realization that the State actually does have the capacity – particularly when malformed – to be frustrating to the function, form, and practice of actual, historical Christian practice. What the free Churchmen might not see, though, is the irony of their protest on the basis of “free exercise” restriction – that clause, especially as paired with the establishment clause, is the very condition of their restriction.

VIII

This is a very long way of explaining that our particular liberal arrangement of the relations between Church and State and public and private cause us to run into all sorts of antinomies that strike at the heart of our identities. If the Christian can envision the Church having the name ekklesia without allowing it to operate in any form as an ekklesia, then he has already forfeited the capacity for Christians to have anything appropriate to say on any such matter of any sort of significance. If we cannot imagine the Church as public voice, then we cannot imagine the Church as prophet. And if we cannot imagine the Church as prophet, then the question of the Christian and protest is answered before we begin because protest is the prophetic idiom.

I am (if it is not yet clear) persuaded the Church can speak prophetically, and that protest is essential to (though not the essence of) what it means to be the Church. I believe that our current situation finds us in a crisis of identity. I think that the Church is currently finding itself unsure how to navigate through the waters of operating during the Pandemic and during the unrest related to and drawn attention to by the Black Lives Matter movement. I believe that this uncertainty grows out of and exposes tensions inherent to this identity crisis. Further, I believe that this loss of identity stems from the Church’s failure to “know thyself” and to instead receive its naming and limit from those who know or love it poorly. I believe that the way forward is absolutely dependent on the Church relearning who she is and who she is called to be. I believe that this clarity can only grow from the faithful reading of Scripture – faithful in its ongoing commitment to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures, as well as faithful to follow and be formed by that digestion. A faithful Church both eats the Eucharistic Word and lives eucharistically.

IX

If I can be highly practical for a moment, this cannot be accomplished until we expect our members to come to Church as a fundamental act of Christian discipleship. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then that means the Church is a body.

There might be nothing more public than a body. The Church will not regain an awareness of who she is and how she relates to the world around her until she comes to peace with the fact of her bodily existence. Christ himself has a body. This is the whole point of Christmas! The Gospels tell us how he moved in his body throughout a specific place in a specific time, gathering together more bodies who literally followed his body around in their own bodies. Christ’s body walked around as a prophet, calling other bodies to repent of their sins. Some bodies hated Christ’s body as well as the bodies that continued to move about, following his body. Some bodies saw how Christ’s body would literally bring healing to other bodies. At other times, Christ’s body might protest against the violence of certain bodies against other bodies. As Christ’s body entered into the civic body of Jerusalem, he entered the Temple, the bodily heart of the body of God’s people. Christ’s body entered into that body in order to purge that body of sin and death. Certain (anti-)bodies attacked Christ’s body and expelled it from the body of Jerusalem in order to mutilate and kill his body. Christ’s body suffered, died, and was buried, bodily, in the body of the earth. Upon the Resurrection, the earth was opened to show that the space and place of the tomb of the dead body had been emptied of the body it was supposed to contain. Instead, the body of Christ had been Resurrected, given new life, bodily life, and as that body made known its identity in the physical presence of other bodies, their eyes were opened to see that this body was not just any body, but a divine body, a body transfigured by divine life. This body continued to show itself to other bodies, gathering more and more bodies unto himself so that this body could show itself and its wounds to other bodies, and through that, give hope to other bodies that, by faith, their bodies too could enjoy the incorruptible life that pervaded Christ’s body. Much more, when that body finally left us, he did not do so in annihilation of his body, but in eternal preservation and glorification of that body, a holy body that sits at the right hand of the God the Father Almighty. Much more, he has done so making a way for our bodies, that our bodies can follow him. And in the absence of Christ’s body from earth, he brings our body up to his eucharistically, by the Spirit, feeding and nourishing us and our bodies, as we gather as bodies together as one body, receiving the eternal gift of his own most precious body, until his body comes again to judge us for what we have done to honor him in our bodies, even and especially with respect to how we have used our bodies for the sake of the bodies of our neighbor.

To put the matter quite bluntly: I do not know a way to fairly rewrite that narrative using Zoom or Facebook Live.

I pass no judgment on the widespread practice of livestreaming services of the Church and communicating with members of the Church through online services such as Zoom. I have participated in and helped organize such efforts for months now. To condemn that use would be absurd hypocrisy on my part.

I am deeply concerned, though, at how easy it is for the Christian imagination to translate what is going on in a Zoom meeting or a “watching” of Church as just a different version of the pervasively bodily practice that is Christian discipleship. Ideally, every Zoom meeting and livestreamed service should begin and end with tears. Not tears of hopelessness mind you – but tears that really and truly recognize the inherently tragic quality of what is taking place. My concern is that the basically private mapping of the Church’s identity that I noted above has enabled Christians to follow the path of believing that sitting their body in front of a computer screen for a certain amount of time is equivalent in any historically meaningful or recognizable sense to the intentions of a wandering Nazarene who said, “Come and follow me.”

There are churches that absolutely should not be meeting right now. There are people who should not be leaving their house. But we believe and perpetuate a lie if we communicate in any way that this is not heartbreakingly sad. This is not a “new normal” anymore than death is a new normal.

I am convinced that this is not universally understood and that many people are being misled to their own spiritual destruction. If we are not transparently clear that coming together bodily is the specific work of the Church, the work that only the Church can be and do by grace – if we are not unmistakably plain in our language that any substitution for this ordinary practice is an impediment to our mission, then I am arguing that there are at least two specific outcomes we must expect: first, we consign our people to the liberal lie that our Christian religion is merely a matter of the heart and private conscience and that at the end of the day, we are as morally binding as any other hobby, interest, or personal fantasy – the free exercise of Christian religion need not ever take bodily ekklesial form; and second, that in so consigning our people, we make it clear that the Church simply has no grounds for protest as it (quite literally) has no legs to stand on. Who has heard of a prophet with no eyes to see injustice, no ears to hear cries for mercy, and no mouth to speak against evil?