A Political Boy Grapples with Loving Our Neighbors

I've been asking these questions for a very long time, and I have the t-shirt to prove it

I was an odd child. On election eve 1980, when I was 8, I made my own campaign t-shirt: one of my dad’s oversized white Hanes with “Reagan Bush” in red scribble across the front. My family was not overly political, so I’m unclear how this fascination emerged. My parents had imbued in me a strong sense of right and wrong alongside a bedrock conviction that loving God required loving our neighbors. My adolescent political energy stemmed from a youngster’s Sunday School belief that we should be making the world good for everyone. This somehow led to a boy’s political fervor spilling onto his dad’s undershirt.

High school only ratcheted up my vibe. One year, I ordered the GOP catalog, marking items for my Christmas list: blue polo with the stitched red elephant, coffee mug with the Republican seal, a throwback ‘80 campaign shirt to replace my ragged childhood artifact. I was a fan of C. Everett Koop (and his beard). I followed the plot twists of Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court nomination. I was a real hit at parties.

In college, I read economic articles, then added an economic book to that Christmas list because trickle down, entitlements, deficit, tax rates, and social programs — this was the political parlance and gristle. I was mostly lost in the weeds, but I wanted to at least try to understand the ideas. I wanted to know how these things actually work, in the real world. And as a Christian, if the motivation for everything was loving God and neighbor, I really needed to understand how these policies were good for people, good for my neighbors. I adhered to the political doctrine of lower taxes and a smaller Federal government, but I needed to know how Jesus’ teaching about our neighbors, about the poor, about the strangers, shaped my political convictions.

That earnest 8-year-old-boy with his campaign Hanes is still trying to figure out how to participate in making the world good. Good for everyone. Still trying to understand how my fundamental Christian convictions, before any party or nation, shapes what I ask of my government. Clarity arrives slow; answers are often tenuous — and people of good will and shared values can certainly disagree on temporal means of how to get there. My logic gets muddled. I often go sideways and have to change course. But I’m still grasping after the same thing.

At 53, I remain a misty-eyed American, indebted to my home and heritage. Give me all the July 4th fireworks and snow cones. Our national ideals touch something deep in me, even when I realize how far short we fall. But I’m a Christian first, and a question dogs me: what does it mean to confess Jesus as Lord in this moment, with this issue — and what is my responsibility to love my neighbor as myself? Scratching at these questions explains recent pieces I’ve written (here and here). This is my own grappling, my own repentance. I’m unnerved by my steady inclination to protect my resources. I like comfort. Yet I’m persistently challenged by the responsibilities my faith imposes on me, my responsibility toward those who are suffering. If I’m a Christian, this is not something I’m permitted to skirt.

When I was younger, I maintained a bright line of demarcation, an orthodoxy in the religious/political circles I knew. It’s important to care for the poor and the stranger, so the thinking went, but this is the Church’s job, not the government’s. Recently, I’ve heard this thinking emerge with new force.

In those early years, the axiom confused me because in almost every other instance, the logic went exactly reverse. The whole rationale for the fervent emergence of our religious political machinery was the insistence that we must exert political power to shape governmental policy to reflect “biblical values.” But a simple word count, rummaging through a standard concordance, demonstrated caring for the suffering was one of the Bible’s most persistent concerns. Why then, when it came to our money, did we suddenly do a 180°?

Further, the math never added up. If genuine Christians were the minority (which we were always told we were), did we really believe we few Christians were (all by our lonesome) supposed to take care of the crushing needs of the entire globe, without any help from anyone? And did we really believe our fellow humans, fellow image-bearers of God, had no responsibility for others’ wellbeing so long as they didn’t confess Christian faith? As I’m typing now, the idea sounds ridiculous.

While nodding in agreement with our moral mandate to care for the poor, some went so far as to insist the government was explicitly not to be involved because the Bible never clearly ordered governments to do so. The idea assumed Scripture provides a comprehensive blueprint for what human governments are to do — and even noble actions must be avoided if they don’t make the list. But this strained hypothesis never worked for me either because these same folks regularly argued for the government to throw muscle behind all manner of things I’d never read in the Bible (free speech, lower taxes, better roads, court packing, foreign policy, etc.).

It all felt so selective, ad hoc.

Maybe these arguments would carry more weight with me if anyone who was making them was exerting energy advocating for creating the global Christian infrastructure required to address the world’s pressing horrors. Tithing and $50 a month to World Vision will never come close to what’s needed to care for 153 million orphans. And if we think our taxes are high, imagine the strain on our wallet when Christians pony up to carry these immense concerns on our own.

Then there’s the incredulous assumption that we could sustain such a massive institutional operation by relying on the whim of voluntary donations, notoriously recalcitrant denominations, and the fickleness of independent churches whose very raison d'être is going solo and never being beholden to any larger structure. We have no legitimate framework (nor can I fathom one) to manage (over decades) mass migration, millions of refugees, rapid response to catastrophe and disaster, HIV, and terrifying pandemic outbreaks. Anyone suggesting we have any comprehension of how to manage all this is unserious. If we didn’t have governments to respond to these crises, we’d have to create something that looked pretty similar.

Whatever the ideal might be (and we’re miles from it), how could any of us be okay with allowing children to starve or HIV patients to die all because the help is supposed to be coming from the church — or while we wait for the church to rise up and do what we’ve been incapable of doing for two millennia?

Of course, tragically, we’ll never be able to meet every need. It’s entirely appropriate to have debates about budgets and effective policies and good stewardship. When the government is more impediment than help, it’s loving to argue this point and help us correct course. However, what we must never do is suggest God’s command to love our neighbor has nothing to do with the governments who act in our name.