Random Thoughts on Faith and Politics

I was in Louisville, Kentucky yesterday morning and I was over at Blog and Mablog this morning. The following post is a response to some of Doug Wilson's thoughts on political philosophy. I don't know the details of the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor did I bother reading the Archbishop of Durham's defense of the Arch of C's comments on Sharia Law. The point is that I am not defending either one. Though technically an Anglican--so says my college transcript information--I have never thought the Anglican Church as is much more than an outdated curiosity. (They do have nice architecture.) What I want to address in this post is Doug Wilson's disdain for pluralism.

Before rebutting his views, it is important that we consider his shoddy definition of the pluralistic society. For Mr. Wilson, the term pluralism is almost equivalent to that of relativism or multiculturalism; in other words, an odd sort of cultural soup in which everyone changes their values to accommodate everyone else, and, in doing so, emasculates himself because, if everyone is right, no one can be. But this is relativism, not pluralism. The central idea behind pluralism is that many views should be tolerated not because everyone is right. On the contrary, it is important to tolerate a wide range of views because many people are wrong.

Mr. Wilson asserts that for the church to share governmental authority with any body outside of itself amounts to idolatry. By this rational, he may as well argue that living in the same municipality as a mosque or Roman Catholic Church makes one a Muslim or a Roman Catholic. Neither of these religious groups teach or preach the gospel, and yet I doubt that Mr. Wilson would outlaw the latter, were he president of the United States.

But a further problem with Mr. Wilson's theory that Christ must be lord of political life as well is that Christ did not seem to think this was possible and, in fact, said "My kingdom is not of this earth." (Incidentally, I don't use this verse, as some do, to assert that Christians should withdraw from secular or political life entirely.) The sort of government which would implicitly be under Jesus's headship has never been clearly defined by Doug Wilson. He has been pressed on the issue of homosexuality before, and, when asked how a Christian society should treat homosexuals, his answer, so far, has been that he does not know.

In any case, Christ and Paul teach that secular authorities are authorities nonetheless, and, implicit is the assumption that one can submit to Christ while seeding the monopoly of violence to others. Nonetheless, Christ did have one "follower" who wanted to take the monopoly of violence back from the Romans. His name was Judas Iscariot.