Jim Wallis Discusses The Tea Party

Jim Wallis of Sojourners has started an interesting and provocative discussion on the topic, "How Christian is the Tea Party?"

I can't imagine anything I could say would not be found in the labyrinth of links and comments there, but here are a couple of reflections.

A lot of that debate generally has its root in a simple perception about what government is and can be and can do.  I don't mean merely that it's a matter of how much one trusts government, but rather that how one thinks about and perceives government will tend to predetermine how he feels about its role.

If you begin by seeing government as automatically intrusive and hostile to civil liberties, it's just a matter of details as you traverse the ridges of libertarianism and conservatism and try not to spill over into anarchy.

If you see government as a legitimate and even necessary extension of human community, you have a different matrix of possibilities for government doing some good.

Personally, I think government is what you make it, and what you force it to make itself.

To say it's intrinsically intrusive is obvious: whatever is there to govern is there to co-opt and coerce you into patterns of behavior that you aren't necessarily inclined towards.

But on the other hand, that's what simple community does too.  And to the degree that the community's values are given expression by government, that seems to me perfectly legitimate.  I can be deeply sympathetic with the small business owner who's driven out of business by government regulation of his workshop.  But on the other hand, I don't want to live in the nation where children are employed for twelve hours a day for pennies a week.  And the market corrects itself on some things, but not things like that.  It is amoral by its nature.

Biblically speaking, of course this can go both ways.  Judges laments a time when there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes. 

Samuel, on the other hand, speaks for Yahweh who warns that kings can be awfully intrusive.

Jesus sets up a kingdom, and there's no point in denying that this is political.  On the other hand, he remarks that it's a kingdom not of this world, which seems to refuse the burden of administrating the thing in real world terms.

Similarly Paul says that "The present form of this world is passing away" (so much so that he mistrusts family life for Christians as being a distraction), but enjoins one to submit to government because it's given by God.

In modern political terms, therefore, the Bible isn't much help at distilling "the right attitude" towards government.

The Tea Party has a lot to react against.  Government is intrusive.

They want to choke the beast.

Well, okay.

What do they want in its place?

Does that have a claim to goodness?

Or does it merely give them freedom?

Are those the same thing?