The people rule

Donald Trump is president again, and inevitably, the alliance of progressive and centrist evangelicals aligned against him will accuse conservative evangelical Protestants who overwhelmingly voted for the former president—some seeing him as the lesser of two evils—of sullying the witness of the Church by supporting him. The idea behind this, of course, is deeply theocratic. The Church, so the idea goes, must affirm a specific type of politics, and that the specific type of politics the Church must affirm and that the state must consequently practice is determined by clerics—what evangelicals call pastors. This is the normal order of life for many educated evangelicals, but it’s deeply antithetical to the settlement of Church and state brought about by the Protestant Reformation.

There has been a tendency among evangelical ministers to prescribe a certain politics to the laity. This is because evangelicals operate in two categories: morality and the Church. Politics, in this reading, is subsumed into a moral category that is overseen by the Church and pastors. This is a dangerous imposition on the rights of Christian conscience. For Protestants, it’s what Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and others so detested in medieval Roman Catholicism. Moral government, the Reformers believed, along with the ancients, was the province of the Church and the state. The prince gets a say in the moral discourse. The human endeavor to work out great moral truths in temporal society was never meant to be a one-way dialogue dominated by the Church, but by the late medieval era, clerical power was so great that the pope regularly invaded the rights not only of princes but also of his subjects.

In Martin Luther’s “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” the Reformer warned that the chief sin of the medieval papacy was its encroachment on the moral authority of the magistrate. “It came to pass of old that the good Emperors … and many other German emperors were shamefully oppressed and trodden under foot by the popes, although all the world feared them,” he wrote.

Luther developed this theme in his letter. Unbiblical papal power, he noted, relied on three “walls,” the first and most expansive of which was “when pressed by the temporal power,” the popes had “made decrees and said that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them, but, on the other hand, that the spiritual is above the temporal power.” Luther rejected this outright, as did all the other Reformers. The spiritual powers and temporal powers ruled together, and neither was supposed to subordinate the other to itself.

In a republic where our Constitution makes every voting citizen a sort of prince who exercises magisterial power through the franchise, specific types of clerical invasiveness disorder a Christian citizen’s ability to think about the relationship among politics, morals, and the Church. The type of political power that in monarchy is given to one man is given to the citizenry in our republic. This means that citizens must rule, even in circumstances where the choices are not perfect, even when the choices are bad, and even when the circumstances are tragic. We don’t have the luxury of only living in the heavenly city. Indeed, we have to rule in the messy here and now and thank God for it.

A country where we don’t have to make hard decisions is one where we, the people, don’t have a say in our government. So when evangelical pastors scold the laity for choosing the lesser of two evils, they’re overstepping their boundaries. In the United States, the people are the prince, and it’s our right and our duty as Christian citizens to govern our country in the best way we can, even in less-than-ideal circumstances.

Much has been made of the tendency of folk evangelicals—often charismatics. More concerning is the tendency among some evangelical ministers to bind the conscience of the people, the equivalent of the Church stealing the people’s God-given right to make decisions that are hard but perhaps necessary.

In Another Gospel, Joel Looper—an ordained evangelical minister—stated flatly that “because we are Christians, we must not vote for this man.” He added, “By voting for and publicly supporting Donald Trump, Christians distort the gospel and erect a barrier to hearing that message that for many none but God can surmount.”

Society and the state, of course, aren’t the Church. They’re ruled by Caesar, not the Church. Caesar, the Apostle Paul notes, gets a voice in how to morally govern human society, and that voice was to be honored. Christians and pastors—the Church—were commanded to honor the emperor. In the United States, there is a real sense in which the people are the emperor. And like Caesar, they are imperfect and called to rule an imperfect order. Still, in the United States, the people rule. And pastors should honor them even as they make decisions in an imperfect order.