Power, Politics, and Public Life: Reframing How Christians Engage in Culture

On Power

He was a man who had stumbled into a little bit of power and seized it with both hands. She’d known that within the first few hours of his arrival, when he’d chosen the best room and gathered up the warmest blankets for his bed, when he’d taken all the pillows in the house and all of the candles, leaving Vivian a single oil lamp for her use.[1]

This reflection from the historical novel The Nightingale captures a common—perhaps the most common—way for us to think about power. As fictional character Vivian Maurice reflects upon the SS officer with whom she was forced to share her home during Nazi Germany’s occupancy of France, we see the temptations that accompany power. Power is used for selfish gain. This SS officer uses his power to dominate, deprive, and exploit other people.

History is replete with such stories of power. This is what happens, to draw on concepts used by Augustine, when the power game is prioritized over the justice game. For Augustine, this was the problem of the devil, who distorted God’s good intentions by seeking power over justice:

The essential flaw of the devil’s perversion made him a lover of power and a deserter and assailant of justice, which means that men imitate him all the more thoroughly the more they neglect or even detest justice and studiously devote themselves to power, rejoicing at the possession of it or inflamed with the desire for it.

When power is an end in and of itself, we are merely imitating the original lover of power, the devil himself.

Augustine’s profound sense of the ways power has been and continues to be distorted does not lead him to classify power as “bad.” He does not counsel Christians to reject the use and pursuit of power altogether. For Augustine, it’s a question of the end toward which power is used. If we use power to seek justice, with justice understood as the proper telos, then we’re in keeping with God’s intentions for power.

The challenge is that because of the disorder that results from sin, according to Augustine, we cannot keep power in its proper place. We follow the devil in prioritizing power over justice. But thanks be to God, Jesus Christ opens up a different way. As Augustine puts it,

It pleased God to deliver man from the devil’s authority by beating him at the justice game, not the power game, so that men too might imitate Christ by seeking to beat the devil at the justice game, not the power game. Not that power is to be shunned as something bad, but that the right order might be preserved which puts justice first.[2]

God sent Jesus Christ to free us from our disordered relationship with power. In Jesus, we see one who used power to seek justice; and in Christ, our disordered loves are reordered so that we too can seek justice with our power. This vision of power being rightly used harkens back to the creation narrative, when God said,

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26 NRSV)

Dominion is a power word. God used his power to create this world, including humankind, and then he shared his very power with us. God could have chosen, like the SS officer, to use his power for his own gain. He could have both hoarded his power and used it to hoard things for himself. But that is not God’s way.

God, with all the power in the world, used that power to create a world of beauty, harmony, justice, and delight—a world intended to delight not only himself but all who inhabit it. And then he shared his power with humans. As we read in Genesis 1, after creating humankind,

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:28)

The root of “have dominion” is radah in the Hebrew. This term has been much discussed, not least because of concerns that the Christian tradition has problematically drawn on this concept to dominate rather than carefully steward the created world. Elsewhere in the Bible when this word is used, it can have quite negative connotations—such as enslavement, harsh rule, and the subjugation of the weak by the powerful. But here, prior to the fall, the man and the woman are given the authority to use their power like God does. They are called to rule over God’s good world in the manner that God himself would rule over the world. God is giving them his power to use according to his will and his ways. To return to Augustine’s language, they were given power in order to maintain the justice that marked God’s good creation, a creation in which all things were rightly ordered and all of creation was designed to flourish.

God’s original commissioning of his people includes the use of power. This is significant. It suggests that part of what it means to be God’s people, even today, is to use our power to seek God’s will and ways in the world. From a Christian perspective, power is a gift to be received from God and offered back to God as a part of our daily discipleship. When we think about what it means to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God today (Rom. 12:1), or how to live out the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20), we have to acknowledge that using our God-given power to seek first God’s kingdom, justice, and righteousness (Matt. 6:33) is a part of our daily callings.

It’s worth pausing to underscore the significance of God sharing his power with us. Let’s consider, by way of contrast, the example of King Herod. Herod was king when Jesus was born. When he heard rumors that a young king—the “king of the Jews” as the Magi called him—had been born in the land, he was deeply disturbed. He did not want to share his power in any way. So definitively did he not want to share his power that he ordered every boy two years old and younger who was born in and near Bethlehem to be killed, just in case one of them should grow up and claim to have rival authority. This is power as exemplified by the SS officer, and truthfully this is power as we tend to think of it. Power is hoarded rather than shared. Power is used to serve one’s own selfish gains and to preserve one’s own position rather than to serve others.

This is not our God’s way. God, King of kings and Lord of lords, from the very beginning shared his power, giving us dominion over this world. He commissioned us to use this power to serve. To offer a visual image, the posture that humankind was to have before God was one of open hands. With those open hands we would receive life, love, and power from God, and with those same open hands we would offer all of that back to God as we lived out his calling on us to steward his creation. This was God’s intention for this world, in which we would have lived in dependent trust on God, receiving from God all that we needed and offering it all back to him.

And then we get to the fall of humankind. Here at the infamous tree, for the first time we see humans taking rather than receiving. Our open hands became clenched fists, first clenched around that piece of fruit. Rather than receiving and offering back, we take and we begin to hoard. The power that had been given to us to use for God’s glory and the flourishing of the world, we used instead to seek our own gain. This ushers in a whole different posture. This is another way to describe incurvatus in se, a concept attributed to Augustine and further explored by Martin Luther: we become curved in on ourselves.[3] Our fists become tight, we hoard power, and we look out for ourselves and our kind rather than serve the wider world. Our use of power is like Herod, leading to death and destruction, rather than like God, in which power leads to life, beauty, justice, and love.

And yet our calling to use power like God is not erased by the fall. While Augustine is right that our loves become so deeply disordered that we cannot use power as God intended, that gift of dominion persists. As David writes in Psalm 8:6–8,

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

Using power to seek God’s vision for the world continues to be a shared calling of God’s people.

Within the context of the covenant, God gave his law to guide his people in the way of life he intended for them. Here we find all sorts of windows into God’s vision for how his people would use their power, even in very small ways. In an economic system that involved weights and measures, for example, God forbade his people from using their power to create dishonest measures and weights that would give them unfair advantage (Lev. 19:35–37). In the law, God directly prohibits hoarding, by commanding his people not to reap to the edges of their fields or gather the gleanings. Instead, they are to leave some of their harvest to share with the poor and the immigrant (Lev. 19:9–10). They were even prevented from hoarding Sabbath rest, which would have been rather tempting to do after their own long season as slaves. But God commanded that they share Sabbath rest with servants and immigrants (Exod. 20:10). Those who were placed in positions of power, such as judges and eventually kings, were explicitly told to use their power for justice: “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue,” such officials are told in Deuteronomy 16:20.

Of course, in Jesus Christ we see the law fully embodied and perfectly fulfilled. We learn how God in human flesh uses his power. We see Jesus Christ,

who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:6–8 NIV)

Being in very nature God, having all power available to him, Jesus uses this power to empty himself for the life of the world. He uses his power toward its true and proper end, to return to Augustine’s language: beating the devil at the justice game. In so doing, God in Christ delivered us from the devil’s authority and opened the way for us, too, to use our power to seek justice.

We have been called from the beginning to use our God-given power in this world in keeping with ways God would use his power in this world. In Christ, we see as concretely as we ever will how God uses power—not for his own advantage but for our sake, by becoming humble to the point of death on a cross that we might have life. Through the cross, our own disordered loves are reordered so that we can at long last, by God’s grace, fully and freely offer our power back to God. Having been justified and made right with God through the salvific work of Jesus Christ, we can now seek what is just and right in this world with the ongoing help of the Holy Spirit.

To put this differently: by God’s grace, at long last, we can return to the posture of having open hands before God. In creation, we received life, love, and power; in our new creation in Christ, we receive new life, reordered loves, and the power of the Holy Spirit that enables us to freely offer our lives, our callings, and our power back to God. God can replace our clenched fists and our hoarding ways with open hands and dependent trust.

I have (perhaps) belabored this opening theological reflection on power, but I have done so for a couple of reasons. First, power is so often distorted and misused that many people, Christians included, have tended to view it as negative. This is a point Andy Crouch makes in his constructive account of power, in which he notes that Christians often avoid talking about it. In so doing, they can miss the gift that comes with the divine calling to use our power to seek flourishing in the world.[4] In our account here, we have seen that both in creation and in redemption, power is used for good, to create life and offer new life, to create a world of justice, and to deliver justice to a disordered world. We see that humans were given the gift of power and that the use of this power to seek God’s vision for the world was, and remains, central to our calling from God.

Second, throughout the biblical narrative, we see a consistent emphasis on power, but political power is not given a particular priority. Power, in all of its forms, is to be used for God’s glory as we seek God’s will and ways in the world. Within American society, we have witnessed the increasing politicization of our collective life. This means that we have placed more and more emphasis on politics, public policy, and legislation when it comes to addressing the public issues of our day. Politics is seen as the way, rather than a way, to engage the matters and concerns that arise within our life together. Within this context, political power becomes emphasized over every other kind of power.

Politicization and The Pattern of this World

To make this more concrete, let us consider some of the institutions that make up contemporary society in the United States: the family, education, and news media. These institutions are a part of our collective life and have public components to them, but they do not need to be political. As sociologist James Davison Hunter shows in To Change the World, however, each one has become political within recent decades. He writes, “There is hardly an issue relating to the family that has not been politicized in our days and divided by ideology.” Similarly with education, “whether the question is standards of excellence, curriculum, funding policy, or extracurricular life, all are divided politically and contested legally.” With news media, the issue is both that media outlets are positioned and judged by their political orientation and that “news reporting on almost any issue is framed in terms of who is winning and who is losing in the contest for political advantage.” Other examples would bear out as well how areas of our civic life that are not inherently political have become politicized.

Because this is the air we breathe within our contemporary political culture, it can be hard to step back and realize there are other ways to inhabit the public sphere. As inhabitants of the same political society, we share a public life together that has components to it that do not need to be political. As I have written elsewhere, in our contemporary imagination, “public” has come to mean “political,” but it does not need to.[6] To use Hunter’s language, “Politics subsumes the public so much so that they become conflated. And so instead of the political realm being seen as one part of public life, all of public life tends to be reduced to the political.”[7]

“Public” simply means united by a common interest or good. We have many areas in our public life, and many accompanying common interests or goods that can be attended to using other forms of power than political power. In this cultural moment, this is hard to see but not impossible. We will explore shortly what this might look like.

Before we do so, let us pause to note that the politicization of this cultural moment includes a certain kind of political engagement: one characterized by anger, resentment, a sense of embattlement, and a drive to dominate the other side. The “culture war” mentality is predominant, with each side driven by narratives of injury that fuel their desire for political victory over their perceived enemies. Compromise is no longer a viable political goal; domination, resulting in the legislation of one side’s convictions, has become the objective. We can think about the larger politicization and this particular mode of political engagement as part of the pattern of this world, to use Paul’s language in Romans. From a Pauline perspective, the questions are: What have Christians done to resist being conformed to this pattern? Have we offered an alternative witness that does not mirror these marks of our world in this cultural moment? Have we embodied a different mode of political engagement?

For many scholars and commentators who study and reflect on such things, the answer to these questions—at least when considering white, evangelical Christians—is “no.” We see this in insider Kaitlyn Scheiss’s reflections on the ways politics has shaped and formed evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. context.[8] It’s evident in historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s searing and best-selling account of how in recent decades white American evangelicals have been shaped more by notions of Christian nationalism and rugged masculinity than by their own faith commitments.[9] Even before the political tumult of the last couple election cycles, Hunter argued that the Christian Right and the Christian Left, by allowing politics to become their dominant witness to the world, had largely succumbed to the spirit of the age.

We all know exceptions to these generalizations, but Scheiss, Du Mez, and Hunter point to a troubling reality: by and large, the public witness of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. context has become a politicized one that conforms more to the pattern of this age than it resists it. In so doing, Christians have focused on only one type of power, that of politics. Further, their mode of pursuing and/or using that political power has been marked more by domination than a biblical notion of dominion. The question we turn to explore now is: Could Christians in America, by resisting the politicization of this moment and using our power for more than political ends, inhabit a more biblically faithful posture in the public square?

Public Witness: Beyond the Political Sphere

Christians are actually well equipped to consider this question, as part of our heritage lies in using our power, even when we had no political power, to address issues of public concern. Indeed, Christians pioneered the creation of institutions to address the needs of the poor, the sick, and the orphaned. Kavin Rowe reminds us that attending to such needs, and the people with these needs, was nowhere in the social imagination of the Roman Empire. Christians, according to Rowe, were the first who had the eyes to see “the poor,” using ecclesial structures to attend to the distribution of goods in their local communities, developing shelters as places to serve and house the poor, and eventually becoming known within the empire as “lovers of the poor.” All of this is linked to the history of the church’s tax-exempt status: by attending to the needs of the poor in their communities, churches became exempt from imperial taxes. Rowe notes that “this combination of caring for the indigent and receiving tax benefits elevated the church’s ministry to the poor into a work of civic goodness.”[10] The church’s public witness as “lovers of the poor” was not about political power, but about using the power they had received from God to create structures that enabled them to share what they could with those in their community who had need.

Even more sacrificially, Christians used what power they had to address the needs of the sick in their communities. As Rowe paints the picture, at a time when community-wide health care did not yet exist, people typically sought remedies from pagan temples dedicated to gods of health, from magicians, and from private physicians in their homes (if they could afford them). Regardless of one’s wealth, plagues were devastating experiences with no remedies available, and people were terrified of visiting one another or being near the sick or the dead. Some historic accounts show that some threw sick people, even from their own families, out of their homes and into the roads to avoid catching the illness. In this context, Christians, rooted in their new life in Christ, offered their lives back to God to visit and tend the sick in their homes. This practice enabled many to recover from the plague who otherwise would not have—though in the process, it cost many Christians their lives. Over time, Christians used monasteries to create infirmaries for the sick, and then they created the first hospital to provide a designated place for the sick to receive care at no cost by those who were trained. Here we see another institution created and offered by Christians to the wider community to serve a public good. While this first hospital was funded by both the church and the government, it was not political in the sense we think of today. Eventually, Christians created hospitals throughout the eastern part of the Mediterranean and in the West as well.[11]

Equally important as we consider Christians’ use of power in public ways, Rowe notes that more of them became physicians in the early centuries of Christianity than went into any other profession or trade. As they used their vocations to care for the ill, they did not simply copy the cultural practices of the day, which involved the wealthy receiving private treatment in their homes. They instead reimagined the practice of health care, using their vocational power to provide a greater public good. As Reformed Christians today who prioritize a robust theological understanding of vocation, we can build on the longer history of the creative public service embodied by these earliest Christians, learning from the ways they used their callings to seek what is just and right in this world.

One of Hunter’s concerns about Christian acquiescence to the politicization of our time is the way it has limited our imaginations:

Politicization has delimited the imaginative horizon through which the church and Christian believers think about engaging the world and the range of possibilities within which they actually act. Politics is just one way to engage the world and, arguably, not the highest, best, most effective, nor most humane way to do so.[12]

We have become so used to thinking about politics as the way to engage the world and the issues of our day that we struggle even to imagine other ways of addressing public concerns and seeking public goods. The reality is that the turn to politics, which has marked our culture and American Christianity in recent decades, is not based on the fact that politics is the best way to address most issues or to enact lasting change. Political and legislative action can certainly have their place; but when you consider what shapes people, at the kardia-gut level that Jamie Smith often talks about—what forms our desires and our imaginations—it’s not usually laws in and of themselves.[13]

Consider, for example, the “Billy Elliott effect.” When a movie about a working-class British boy (Billy Elliott) who pursues the ballet exploded onto the scene, the number of boys interested in pursuing ballet markedly increased (for the first time in its history, the Royal Ballet School had as many boys audition as girls after the film released).The movie is also associated with a cultural shift in attitudes toward male dancers; and twenty years later, people continue to attribute the rise of male ballet dancers to this film.[14]

More recently, we can look at the impact of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit about a fictional chess player. Amazon sold out of chess sets after the show came out. One director of marketing for a game company attributed a 1,048 percent increase in the sale of chess sets in October 2020 (compared to the previous October) to the release of the show.[15] The show created a desire for chess playing in very different ways than a law requiring the purchase of chess sets would have done.

Laws certainly have an important role to play and can well be used to enact much-needed societal change. Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, which helped to open employment, transportation, education, and buildings (such as churches, theaters, and restaurants) to people with disabilities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin—is another significant piece of legislation that had a real impact on society. Yet, it is important to recognize that photography played a powerful role in the civil rights movement, both bringing awareness of the realities of segregated life and exposing the brutality of the violence experienced by protestors and children. Such photographs helped persuade many in the nation that change was needed and paved the way for the legislation that was enacted.[16]

These examples underscore that while legislation has its place, we do not need to rely on political power to engage public issues or shape our culture’s imagination. Likewise, in Scripture we see God calling humans to use the power he has given them to seek justice in the world, not only politically but in every area of life. The illustrations we have explored from the early church, as well as from recent contemporary culture, illuminate the possibilities that exist for using our power to address public issues beyond the political sphere. Hunter encourages Christians today to recognize this:

To decouple the public from the political will open up other options for engaging the world and addressing its problems in ways that do not require the state, the law, or a political party. There are innumerable opportunities not only in art, education, the care for the environment, and the provision of relief for the widow, orphaned, and sick, but in the market itself to engage the world for the better.[17]

Even from within the very vocations we already occupy in areas such as education, the arts, and business, we as Christians can think creatively and imaginatively about how to use our power to seek God’s will and ways in the world.

This is what Amy Sherman calls stewarding our vocational power for the common good. Sherman calls Christians to consider how they can use the power they have been given in Christ to seek God’s kingdom of justice and shalom from within our everyday vocations. Stewardship is about more than stewarding the money God has give us:

[It is] about devoting all that I am and all that I have to God, recognizing him as the ultimate owner of everything (ourselves, our lives, our time, our money). As members of one body, as humans created for community, God calls us to fight the ingrained selfishness with which we all struggle and to recognize that his gifts are given to all for the common good.[18]

To put this differently, we are called to have open hands, recognizing that everything we have received is a gift from God and offering it all back to God to be used to seek his vision for what is just and right in the world. By God’s grace, we can resist the clenched fists that lead us to use our power to look out for ourselves and our kind, to hoard the gifts we’ve been given. By the power of the Spirit, we can offer our vocational power to engage and address issues of public concern, like the earliest Christians who became physicians and creatively reimagined how to provide health care in a world that did not yet have any institutions dedicated toward that end.

To embrace a vision like this one is to believe that Christians ought to be engaged in “culture care” rather than culture war, to use the language of artist Makoto Fujimura:

After many years of culture wars, no one can claim victory. We have all been further dehumanized, fragmented, and exiled from genuine conversation. Culture at large is a polluted, overcommoditized system that has failed all of us.

We need to recognize that “culture is not a territory to be won or lost, but a resource we are called to steward with care.”[19] “Culture care,” as Fujimura describes it, attends to our culture’s soul, restores beauty, and is generative, meaning it is life-giving and helps create environments in which people can thrive.

Drawing on his knowledge of artists, Fujimura suggests that they often become aware of dehumanizing trends in a society more quickly than others. Even in the face of tragedy, artists can point toward hope and reveal new aspects of human flourishing. Fujimura further notes that artists tend to be on the margins of contemporary society, not fitting easily into homogeneous groups, which equips them in this divided cultural moment to help people learn to appreciate the margins and to bridge the spaces between groups. Fujimura encourages us to learn from these aspects of the artist’s calling as we consider our own cultural engagement. In this vision of culture care, we can find nonpolitical ways to use our vocational power to attend to some of today’s most pressing public issues. We do not need to be in the center of political power to contribute to society.

This is a truth that God taught his people when they entered into exile in Babylon. When the neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, leading to the loss of land, temple, and kingship, the nation of Israel ceased to exist as a political entity.[20] God’s people had to ask some difficult questions about their posture and role within an empire in which they had no political power. This is the context of Jeremiah 29:5–7, in which the prophet speaks these words to God’s people on God’s behalf:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

God instructs his people to make their homes in this foreign place, because their exile is not ending anytime soon. He does not tell them to isolate themselves, withdrawing from the public good to seek only their own good. Nor does he tell them to try to take over Babylon and turn it into Israel. They do not and they will not have political power in this context, but they are still commanded to seek the welfare, or shalom, of the city where they reside. They are to use their power to seek the common flourishing of the cities they inhabit together with their enemies.

Many centuries later, Augustine drew on this passage in Jeremiah to help the Christians of his day navigate a different set of political realities after Rome, “the Eternal City,” was sacked for the first time in seven hundred years. Facing a season of political uncertainty, Augustine reminded Christians that they are pilgrims in this earthly city and not fully at home in any political society. And yet, they are called to seek the peace and prosperity of the earthly city in which they live. This is a peace Christians share with their neighbors and are to pursue on their behalf with whatever power God has given them.

As we consider how to engage our culture within our day, with its own set of political realities, may we remember the wisdom of Augustine and the counsel of Jeremiah as we offer our power to seek the peace and prosperity of the cities in which we live. By God’s grace, may we use our power to seek God’s vision of justice in this world, creatively caring for culture and addressing public needs as we offer our vocations to God with open hands.

Kristen Deede Johnson (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is dean and vice president of academic affairs and professor of theology and Christian formation at Western Theological Seminary. She is coauthor of the award-winning The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance (Brazos Press, 2017) and author of Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She also has a range of articles and book chapters in the areas of formation, discipleship, culture, politics, and theology.