Demagoguery, Political Idolatry, and Other Shenanigans
Where were you on January 6, 2021? Our family was driving back from an incredible National Parks road trip to Utah, where we took in the beauty and serenity of Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. Somewhere between East Texas and North Louisiana, I checked my phone at a gas stop only to catch the headline that Trump protestors were moving from the White House to march down the National Mall toward the U.S. Capital.
As a local church pastor over the last two decades, I have pivoted from a written and prepared sermon to addressing something that happened in our world. And after the initial shock of what I witnessed live, an attempted insurrection of the United States government, I knew that I would be preaching a different kind of sermon on January 13. My sermon title that day out of 1 Peter 2:9-12 was “The Call of Jesus, Not Political Demagogues.”
David T. Koyzis, a political science scholar, examined political ideologies among Christians over the last several decades in his work Political Visions & Illusions. Koyzis stated that this conversation goes beyond the relationship between faith and political life, church and state on an institutional level. [1]
What is critical in understanding Koyzis’s argument is what he means by ideologies. Typically, most people think of ideologies as conceptualized nature of reality, held by individuals and shared by a group of people. Koyzis focused specifically on ideologies of politics and faith, stating that this kind of ideology forms communities, binding together for the purposes of doing and maintaining justice. [2]
But Koyzis wanted to draw a clear correlation between ideologies and their capacity for idolatry. He argued, “Idolatry takes something within God’s creation, attempts to elevate it above the boundary separating Creator from creature, and makes of it a kind of god. Because religion is all-embracing, idolatry further tries to bring the rest of creation into the service of that invented god.”[3]
And ideological capacities for idolatry are not owned by a particular governmental outlook, whether conservative, liberal, democratic, or socialistic. Koyzis did a historical analysis of these different governmental and political ideologies over the last few centuries to reinforce this idea.
The crux of Koyzis’s argument is around justice and the common good. The challenge in our climate of Christian fragmentation and political ideological divides is whether we can come to a shared definition of justice and the common good. For one Christian tradition, justice is to create thicker and higher border walls to keep out those they believe to be job thieves, drug dealers, and rapists; that was the rallying cry of the 2016 Republican Presidential candidate. For other Christian traditions, justice is creating an equitable future for all marginalized groups and honestly sorting through a complicated history of Christian involvement in injustice.
Koyzis is right that ideologies will ultimately lead to idolatry. It’s why Conservative Christians rallied behind Donald Trump, not just in the 2016 election but in the years of his presidency, and attempted to overturn the 2020 election results. Moreover, associating a particular belief system with specific policy goals and political parties can lead to demagoguery.
And to be clear, Conservative White American Christians do not corner the market on this form of idolatry. However, the prostitution of Jesus for the sake of political figures, allegiance, and agendas has disillusioned my soul. We are where we are today because too many American Christians throw away their fidelity to Jesus by giving it to a political demagogue.
The complexity of the relationship between Christianity and politics is fraught. It would take a lot of work to unwind the threads to get to the source of all of this, which makes it even more challenging to come up with solutions. How nice would it be to merely ask people to check their political allegiance and return to Jesus as the starting place for reframing their worldview? The challenge we would find is which version of Jesus people go to for that reframing.
Koyzis helps frame a historical and current contextual understanding of Christianity and government. He raised challenging issues and asked even more difficult questions for clergy, congregational leaders, and everyday Christians, pointing them to reconsider their ideologies around justice and the common good. As he contested, “While the church intuition may not necessarily address politics directly or very often, it must equip its members to live lives of service before God and neighbor, and this includes political life.”[4]
[1] David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies, Second edition (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019), 275.
[2] Ibid., 3.
[3] Ibid., 10.
[4] Ibid., 286.
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