Within the past 12 months anxiety has been expressed about the political activity of religious people. Commentators in both Australia and the United States were clearly unimpressed that religious beliefs and denominational affiliations had become critical factors affecting election outcomes in both countries during late 2004. While much of this comment amounted to little more than self-inter­ested special pleading, I believe there needs to be limits on the influence of reli­gion on civic affairs for the sake of the church’s integrity and the state’s indepen­dence.

This article poses three related ques­tions. First, can Christians be active members of political parties and not com­promise their beliefs? Second, should Christians who are active in political parties use political processes to assist the church’s mission and ministry? Third, do public policies that are apparently consis­tent with Christian beliefs receive divine assistance? To provide an analytical framework, I will outline the three con­trasting views of B.A. Santamaria, William Temple and Stanley Hauerwas. In the interests of diversity, I have chosen an Australian Catholic, an English Anglican and an American Protestant. I am not suggesting here that their positions are typical, only that they reflect the range of opinions held within the broader Christian community.

B.A. Santamaria and direct involve­ment: Santamaria was born in Melbourne in 1915. As a young man, he became a virulent opponent of commu­nism, and believed the Roman Catholic Church had to be involved in politics to combat its spread and to curb its influ­ence. But this appeared to contradict the traditional Catholic position on church-state relations known as the “Gelasian doctrine”. Towards the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius wrote to the emperor in Constantinople about this matter. After identifying and separating the “consecrated authority of priests” and the “royal power” of the emperor, the Pope asserted that Christ “has divided the functions of the two powers, assigning to each one its proper task and dignity. The spiritual power keeps itself detached from the snares of this world and, fighting for God, does not become entangled in secu­lar affairs, while the secular power, for its part, refrains from exercising any author­ity over Divine affairs. By thus remaining modestly within its own sphere, each power avoids the danger of pride which would be implicit in the possession of all authority and acquires a greater compe­tence in the func­tions which are properly its own.”

In other words — a very clear pro­hibition on fusing religion and politics. But Santamaria was worried that communists were subverting Australian polit­ical process and had to be stopped by political means. He side-stepped the “Gelasian doctrine”.

To promote religious influence, Santamaria envisaged three specific types of Catholic lay organisation. The first were those created by the church dedi­cated to non-political causes under the direction of the bishops. The second were thoroughly unofficial political associa­tions formed outside the church that did not involve the bishops in any way. These represented two extremes. In between, Santamaria asserted there was a place for organisations of lay Catholics using polit­ical means to further the moral and reli­gious interests of the church, acting on their own responsibility but “united with the hierarchy” and “effectively under its control”.

The secret anti-Communist organisa­tion founded by Santamaria in 1942 was known as The Movement. It eventually became the National Civic Council (NCC). The aim was to infiltrate trade unions and the ALP industrial groups in order to engineer the election of Catholic candidates in key positions as part of a broader campaign to eradicate communist influence in Australian public life. Movement members met secretly and attempted to achieve their goals covertly. Santamaria believed that the Catholic hierarchy was obliged to give its blessing to direct Catholic involvement in secular affairs when the outcome of those affairs had immediate consequences for the Church and Catholic lay people. The Vatican directed in 1957 that ‘the Movement’ be reconstructed as a lay asso­ciation that “must exclude from its pro­gram all direct or indirect action on unions or political parties”. The NCC then became an ostensibly private organi­sation.

The difficulty faced by those like Santamaria who advocate direct Christian political involvement is the existence of theological diversity and sometimes acute differences of opinion within the churches, even the Catholic Church, over the Christian vision of social and political life. As Father Richard Neuhaus has pointed out,

Christians 'must never equate their penultimate judgments about what might serve justice with the ultimate truth that impels us to seek and serve jus­tice in the first place. To declare some­thing to be ‘Christian politics’ implicitly excommunicates those of good standing in the Church who disagree. It is more likely to turn Christian against Christian, rather than Christian against secularist or pagan'.

While religiously-inspired move­ments and organisations might constitute effective and efficient means of securing power and exerting influence, is their aim to challenge the ethos driving political life and establish a more Christian society or give the secular a religious veneer? In effect, does direct political participation always involve the promotion of only those objectives that reflect values and ideals that only Christians hold? If so, why should non­ Christians be obliged to endure them and why can’t Christians secure them privately? If not, are these movements really Christian or, in fact, something else? These questions are rarely answered with precision or clarity.

William Temple and conditional par­ticipation: Temple was born at Exeter in 1881. As Bishop of Manchester, Temple was prominent in a group of senior clerics who sought to settle the crippling miners’ general strike in Britain during 1926. This prompted a good deal of concern that the church had improp­erly interfered in a political matter. He answered his critics at the time but more fully in Christianity and the Social Order which was published in 1942 to coincide with his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Temple argued that the church was bound to “interfere in political affairs” on four distinct grounds:

(First), the claims of sympathy with those who suffer; sec­ond, the educational influence of the social and economic system; third, the challenge offered to our existing system in the name of justice; fourth, the duty of conformity to the ‘Natural Order’ in which is to be found the purpose of God.

For Temple, the Church is bound to “interfere” because it is by vocation the agent of God’s purpose, outside the scope of which “no human interest or activity can fall”.

Temple was equally succinct in his description of the manner of the church’s interference.

(First), its mem­bers must fulfil their moral responsibili­ties and functions in a Christian spirit; second, its members must exercise their purely civic rights in a Christian spirit; third, it must itself supply them with a systematic statement of principles to aid them in doing these two things, and this will carry with it a denunciation of cus­toms or institutions in contemporary life and practice which offend against those principles.

It was also clear to Temple that the church ought to recognise and respect the limits of its competence to comment on and interfere in social and political ques­tions, and leave to informed Christian cit­izens the implementation of religious principles in their own social and political contexts.

The Church must announce Christian principles and point out where the existing social order at any time is in conflict with them. It must then pass on to Christian citizens, acting in their civic capacity, the task of re-shaping the exist­ing order in closer conformity to the principles. For at this point technical knowledge might be required and judg­ments of practical expediency are always required.

Therefore, according to Temple, the church ought to distance itself from party politics and refuse, as an institution and a community, to be drawn into political par­tisanship in any way. This is not to demand that Christians abandon political parties and movements or vacate forums for political discourse. Rather, the church must continue to focus on those princi­ples that emerge from its understanding of the Gospel. These are things that the church, and only the church, can offer to social and political life. Meanwhile, the followers of Jesus, acting as citizens rather than as members of the church, are to par­ticipate fully in social and political life while always and everywhere conscious of Christian principles.

There are three difficulties associated with Temple’s position. First, there are frequently as many principles associated with implementing a policy as there are with determining its objectives. The devil is usually in the detail. There is rarely a clear or absolute divide between means and ends. They are usually related, and both involve matters of principle. Restricting involvement merely to defin­ing principles might be an abrogation of responsibility.

Second, Christians who belong to political parties are conscious of the need to compromise in order to achieve certain objectives. After all, politics is said to be the “art of the possible”. But when do those compromises conflict with the moral integrity of the Christian and demand that they dissociate themselves from a movement or a party?

Third, some serious ambiguities are created by the tendency of some politi­cians to self-identify as Christians and more particularly to disclose their denom­inational affiliation. When they are pub­licly associated with a policy that allegedly conflicts with Christian principles or a decision which draws criticism from a church (including their own), how will they respond? Indeed, how will they actively dissociate the church from a potentially objectionable policy or deci­sion, and how might they respond to counsel or direction from a leader of their church that they do so? The “Christian” politician is vulnerable at this point and faced with choosing perhaps between the lesser of two evils.

Stanley Hauerwas and comprehensive disengagement: Hauerwas was born in 1940. He has been associated with various denominations, but mainly United Methodists, and claims a particular sympathy for the Mennonites. He holds a personal professorial chair at Duke University’s Divinity School in North Carolina and, despite being a layman, was declared to be America’s best theologian by Time magazine in 2001. His popular works include A Community of Character, After Christendom? and The Peaceable Kingdom.

For Hauerwas, Jesus’ insistence that his disciples were “in the world but not of it” is of critical importance. The followers of Jesus were called to live a life faithful to the biblical story of human origins and destiny. Jesus had imparted to them a spiritual outlook and moral ethic that gave rise to different habits and hopes in every living. Their peculiar vision of social and political life was not, Hauerwas claims, worked out in the enveloping “world” but elsewhere. Jesus established a community — the church — shaped by cer­tain practices necessary to sustain partic­ular beliefs. Community interactions were characterised by forgiveness and redemption, and served as a witness to the truth of Jesus’ message and their wit­ness to him as the incarnate Son of God. The church denied the existence of a uni­versal moral code from which political or social consensus could be drawn. The divine revelations contained in its Scriptures taught that human will is in permanent rebellion against God’s com­mands while human reason is blinded by self-centredness. Consensus is therefore impossible in a world fractured by human sinfulness and divided by its conse­quences.

According to Hauerwas, religious wor­ship involves “a clash of narratives ... the one who gets to tell the story is the one who determines the politics”. As different narratives shape human character and per­ception of political situations, Christians must content themselves with living in a permanently fragmented world. In the new secular society, “paganism is the air we breathe, the water we drink. It cap­tures us, it converts our young, it subverts the Church”. So Hauerwas speaks of Christians as “resident aliens” — borrow­ing a phrase from 1 Peter — as people who live in this world but whose citizenship is located elsewhere. He refers to the church in one place as “a colony of heaven” and elsewhere as “a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another”.

He rejects the obvious accusation that he is advocating withdrawal from social or political engagement by asking:

how can the church possibly withdraw when it, by necessity, must always find itself surrounded? There is no place to which it can withdraw. I am not asking the church to withdraw, but rather to give up the presumptions of Constantinian power, particularly when those take the form of liberal universalism.

He does not believe the “Christian colony” can use the dominant culture of the world without betraying its identity as a com­munity set apart.

Hauerwas presents a form of Christian radicalism that preserves a sharp distinc­tion between Christian faith and cultural values by surrendering one form of partic­ipation — that of utilising the world’s power structures — in deliberations over public policy.

This is an attractive position in many ways. It is principled, consistent and disciplined. It avoids any attempt at bring­ing nearer the kingdom of God in a man­ner that violates the character of that kingdom or conflicts with the manner in which it was inaugurated by Jesus. But critics argue that the biblical records show Jesus was directly involved in many con­temporary political, social and economic controversies. What else would account for the number of questions he received on these matters? The same texts reveal that the first disciples did not constitute a sect. They did not renounce the world, live in social isolation or shun political debate. They were instructed by Jesus to be salt and light within the community and to work for the world’s redemption by challenging false truths and pulling down demonic institutions. The early church also accepted that God worked outside the Christian community and that they were not to hinder providential activ­ity of this kind.

Adopting Hauerwas’ approach might encourage the kind of disengagement, common in religious history, Hauerwas wants to avoid. There is also the chance that such a mindset might further fracture the nation into divided moral communi­ties — something that would not trouble Hauerwas — that eventually lost their capacity to speak in a common language — something that would. If all but Christian claims to truth are without foundation, it might be argued that they are immune to rational criticism and unyielding to suggestions of compromise. In effect, this posi­tion leaves no room for dia­logue — only con­version. If it is all or nothing, those presently disin­clined to listen might resolutely refuse to hear.

Some limits on involvement: In answer to my first question, can Christians be active members of political parties and not compromise their beliefs? The answer is yes. They can and ought when they are clear about what their membership has the potential to achieve and when they are confident their party will promote princi­ples consistent with their convictions. This requires sustained thought and reflection. Involvement in politics is hard and demanding work and few are equipped for its rigours.

And what of Christian political par­ties? In my view, they face a number of objections. In practical terms, how can a ‘Christian’ political party claim that its platform is genuinely Christian when it does not have any means, such as a synod, or any statement of doctrine, such as a universal or historic Creed, of validating such claims? And given the difficulties human beings often face in resolving dif­ferences of opinion, how would a “Christian” political party authenticate any assertion that its own processes reflected biblical standards of behaviour? And how should they respond to allegations that they have compromised core convictions when they agree to drop opposition to one aspect of public policy that might offend Christian sensibilities in order to secure the party’s objectives in another?

Christian political parties also weaken the church’s capacity to act as a distinct and exemplary community, and turn the church into a political ghetto ignored by the major parties unable to secure the so-called Christian vote. From my observation, “Christian” parties are usu­ally supported by churches that have lost their capacity to influence political processes or whose members are not in positions of political leverage but would like to be.

Second, should Christians who are active in political parties use political processes to assist the church’s mission and ministry? Possibly, but within strict limits as I have previously argued.

Third, are policies consistent with Christian beliefs assisted with divine favour? Again, the answer Christians can give is “Yes” when the outcomes are prin­cipally expressing love and upholding justice. Most Christians would also say that the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus will come nearer with or without human agency because “God makes the sun to shine on the wicked and the good”. But there are obvious limits to what political programs can achieve in any domain of human activity and it is doubtful whether they have much influence on changing the focus of the human heart and the orienta­tion of human will that is at the core of religious life.

It is apparent from the foregoing dis­cussion that the crucial question is not whether Christians should be involved in politics. All but the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren and some Quakers believe that some involvement is consonant with responsible citizen­ship and ultimately unavoidable. The point of difference is the character and limits of that involvement and whether some forms of participation by their nature constrain or conflict with Christian beliefs and customs, and cer­tain political responsibilities and liber­ties. The Christian churches in Australia have not engaged in productive dialogue on this matter, nor have they shown effective leadership through formal teaching and preaching. The churches cannot claim any common mind or any sophistication of thought among their members on these matters. Perhaps they ought to declare a moratorium on fur­ther involvement until the theological dimensions have been clarified and some consensus reached.