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The Eucharist and Public Life
Rethinking the Relationship Between Faith and Politics
by Professor WILL COHEN
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As Christians and as Americans, we often see the border between faith and politics heavily patrolled to prevent incursions from either side. From the side of politics, there is the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” and the 1954 Johnson Amendment that says religious groups will lose their tax-exempt status if they endorse a political candidate. Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual from Germany known for her writings on totalitarianism and the Holocaust, argued in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” that only empirical facts should carry weight in politics. Arendt acknowledges that truth also comes in other forms, but in her mind, ultimate truth has to butt out of political deliberation within a constitutional democracy, or the result will be theocracy.
At the same time, we see a parallel line of defense signaling that politics has no place in the realm of faith. There is the First Amendment clause barring Congress from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. There are the various iterations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) advanced at federal and state levels to shore up faith’s perceived vulnerability to unsympathetic interpretations of the “free exercise” clause. In these instances, faith paradoxically must use political means to prevent political encroachment.
But in other ways, we may say that faith patrols itself. Parishioners often make their discomfort known when sermons get “too political”; bishops tend to discourage priests from making such forays. Terms like “sanctuary” that apply to a portion of the worship space underscore the sense of church as a place relatively sheltered from the tumult of world events, social tensions, and breaking news. By the words of the Cherubic Hymn to “lay aside all earthly cares” and by the stable structure of the Divine Liturgy as a whole, we may find ourselves steadied on Sunday mornings from the buffeting and gusting winds of contemporary society, with all its rapid changes and complexities. Church is where we breathe more deeply, where we encounter the eternal mystery of God.
Yet when does the desire to remain in such an atmosphere of exalted beauty go too far? When does our deep human longing for transcendence cross over into escapism? It can be a fine line. We might be encouraged by spiritual texts or the advice of a pastor to get less caught up in politics; perhaps during Lent we “fast” from taking in political news. Certainly, there are moments where such an approach has its place, but as an overall way of thinking about the relationship between faith and politics, it is limiting and incomplete, indeed often damaging both to politics and to faith. The two need each other. Exactly what place our Christian faith should have in our politics, and what relevance our politics should have to our faith, is a perennially challenging question. We will always struggle to get it right. But we’re assured of getting it wrong (and badly so) if we fail to recognize and respect the question itself, and its importance for the health of our politics and our faith alike.
According to Israeli philosopher Moishe Halbertal, “Politics needs a reference point outside of politics.” The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (not known, among opinionators, as the most religiously oriented) recently quoted this insight with a view toward our own ailing democracy. Arendt’s claim that ultimate questions must not enter into political deliberations has been challenged by contemporary political theorists. The work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has been especially important in shifting the conversation away from the idea that the civil sphere ought to be a purely secular space, one that polices its borders to keep out religion. It is important for people of faith today to be aware that in the “secular” world of scholarly discourse on faith-and-politics questions, there is much greater openness to the positive contributions faith can make than there was a half-century ago.
Yet just what influence religion ought to have on judicial and legislative processes continues to be a contested question—not only in more secular circles, but also among people of faith themselves. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the more hands-off Christianity’s relationship to the political sphere, the better (for Christianity); at the other is the view that Christianity’s declining sociopolitical influence is unmistakably bad for everyone. In a 2013 column on the then-intensifying debate over same-sex marriage, the Orthodox priest and journalist John Garvey of blessed memory, reflecting the hands-off view, observed that “we Christians have, by acquiescing to the coercive nature of law, painted ourselves into a corner.” He noted that Orthodoxy, before the ninth century, had no distinctly religious marriage rite, that marriage conformed to local custom, and that it was the “empires, East and West, [that] made the church responsible” for marriage in a way that obscured the difference between the sacramental and the legal. “To this day,” he added, “we haven’t gotten over this confusion.”
Garvey’s view offers insight to help free Christian faith from the entanglements of civil law and its enforcement, which can so easily obscure the Gospel. But it’s not so clear whether the state and its laws stand to benefit when Christianity retreats. In that situation, does a different set of values replace those of Christianity? If a values-neutral civil society is a myth–if governmental policies and laws inevitably embody and enshrine values of one kind or another–
then from a Christian point of view, isn’t it better to ensure as far as possible that societal structures reflect a Christian vision of life, rather than some other? Socalled “Constantinianism” gets a bad rap, but when church and state were “wed” in the cooperative model of Byzantine symphonia, it spurred many social advances, including the spread of hospitals, for which St. Basil (among others) is well known.
Today, in what used to be the center of Byzantine symphonia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is so far from having a “symphonic” relationship with civil authority that it could only look on helplessly as Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, recently turned Hagia Sophia, the world’s most glorious place of worship built by Christians, back into a mosque, after it had
functioned as a museum since Turkey’s founding as a modern secular state. If the Byzantine conception of symphonia lives on anywhere, it might be in Russia, where the Moscow Patriarchate has a mutually supportive relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime. But it’s debatable whether that relationship has served Russia’s civil society well. To take one example, after the Putin regime recently imprisoned its most outspoken critic, Alexei Navalny, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets; but instead of publicly criticizing the regime’s unprincipled action, the Moscow Patriarchate found a way to be critical of the protests.10 In the process, the Orthodox faith is obviously not well served; its true radiance is dimmed. What some may espouse as symphonia, others thus have reason to decry as religious nationalism.
How, then, might the realms of faith and politics benefit each other, without faith being coopted by political power? There are other models that may be considered, such as the Civil Rights movement, in which the language and energy of faith entered politics, and at the same time political action deepened and enriched the participants’ faith. This movement arose within an African American ecclesial culture that had long understood faith and politics to be deeply interpenetrating.
We might make two observations about the tradition in which Martin Luther King Jr. stood. First, King and his fellows considered challenging and changing the civil law to bring it closer into alignment with a Christian vision of God’s kingdom as a valid and realistic religious goal. In their minds, this required spiritual disciplines (of trust in God’s providence, turning the other cheek, and so on) and therefore involved a growing in faith; thus both the “secular” and the “sacred” realms were enhanced in the process. 11 Second, according to this tradition, even where a movement rooted in faith fails to bring about
11. Granted, there are differences between Orthodox ecclesiology and that of African American Christianity (with its largely Protestant roots). But there is nothing in Orthodoxy that precludes the kind of “realized eschatology” that King promoted with his vision of the beloved community on the sociopolitical plane. Indeed, the Roman Catholic scholar William Cavanaugh, who explored the implications of eucharistic ecclesiology for social justice in Pinochet’s Chile, drew heavily on the work of Alexander Schmemann (W. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist [Blackwell, 1998]). Orthodoxy typically emphasizes the eternal kingdom’s inbreaking into the Divine Liturgy more than in social relations or political developments. But the Liturgy contains within itself seeds of a political theology grounded in Scripture. Properly understood, the exhortation to “lay aside all earthly cares” must be interpreted in terms of Matthew 6:24-34 with its commandment to not prioritize temporal needs for oneself above concern for God’s kingdom and his righteousness, which requires us to attend to the temporal needs of others as per Matthew 25:31-46.
desired political change, the prophetic voice from the church resounding in the public sphere nevertheless serves a tremendously important purpose of its own. This purpose is to remind the civil power that it is not the arbiter of ultimate questions of value. The voice of faith, even when it’s heard coming from outside the corridors of power—perhaps especially coming from the outside—enables human beings to look beyond government as the source of answers to life’s most vexing questions. The state and its power are thereby relativized. Consider King’s remarks about the war in Vietnam: “God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment,” he said at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, “and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! If you don’t change your ways, I’m going to rise up, and break the backbone of your power!’” Here, King was desacralizing American power by reminding Americans of God’s sovereignty over all the nations of the world, including their own. This was not different in principle from the way St. Augustine desacralized the power of the Roman empire in his great work, The City of God. The state needs to be reminded by the church that it is not supreme, that God is above it. This truth must be conveyed, however, in a prophetic and not a theocratic key.
Considering these observations, we may say that when and where there is injustice, the church committed to announcing the good news does not have the luxury of staying out of politics. In fact, it may be asked whether a church that encourages and embodies an apolitical way of being in the world is not acting from a place of tacit political privilege, in contrast to the oppression from which King and others sought to help African Americans gain greater freedom.
In naming and challenging injustice in the political realm, then, the church is doing something intrinsic to Her nature. If this is so, then engagement with politics can contribute to the fullness of our faith. In recent years, a variety of religious thinkers have recognized the need for a public, politically active faith, and have developed what may be called a spirituality of political engagement. The title of an insightful book by Princeton scholar Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, is emblematic of the trend. So too is A Theology of Public Life by University of Virginia theologian Charles Mathewes. A section in the most recent encyclical of Pope Francis carries the subheading “Political Love”. Among Orthodox theologians, Aristotle Papanikolaou has written an influential book relating theosis to political life. The idea may initially strike us as strange, accustomed as we are to thinking the two realms should be separate." But when we overcome our impulse to separate political and ecclesial life, we can see the fruit of their proper interrelation.
The logic and spirit of the eucharist should be carried with us from the Liturgy, not only into our families but into our communities, shaping our participation in public life on various levels. Before I receive the eucharist, I must be at peace with my brother or sister, and this spurs me continually to reevaluate all my relationships: including those with people at a distance from me, with whom I might not be in right relationship because of how I benefit from a policy that harms them, that I have been happy to see remain in place. It’s equally important that I allow eucharistic thinking to shape my political and economic judgments. I must bring all my swirling and competing questions of policy into the ambit of prayer and the church’s sacramental life. In the proskomedia, when the priest thrusts the lance into the Lamb that will shortly become the body of Christ, he says, “In His humiliation justice was denied Him.” It was at every level of judgment, not only religious but political as well, that Jesus was denied justice. As I prepare to receive Him, I must ask myself to whom in the world of laws and policies, in which I am a participant, is justice denied in my own place and time? And what am I doing about it? If on the days between Liturgies I am prayerfully wrestling with these questions, as integral and not extraneous to the spiritual life, then the wisdom and creativity of God will offer avenues and moments in which for Him to act through me in His love for human beings. Politics is a disheartening business, yes, but God will not refuse to cross the border with us even into the realm of politics, if it is in a spirit of self-giving love that we seek to unite ourselves with Him in our forays there. And who is so great a god as our God? He is the God who does wonders!
DR. WILL COHEN is a professor in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Scranton. He is the former president of the Orthodox Theological Society in America.
