Have you ever heard someone negatively describe another person as “too political”? Perhaps they are the person who always steers the dinner conversation to current events or posts long diatribes about breaking news on their social media feeds. Spending extensive time with them can leave you feeling exhausted and jaded. They are just too political, you mutter to yourself.
The temptation is to overcorrect in the other way. You don’t want to be too political so you become apolitical or even anti-political. In many ways, this is exactly the shift that has taken place in evangelicalism over the last fifty years. The Eighties were the decade of the Moral Majority, a politically organized group whose goal was mobilize socially conservative Christians and promote traditional family values. Many of the individuals running evangelical institutions today see their mission as undoing the perceived failures of the Moral Majority. They lament the culture war, promote a “winsome” approach to the political process, and ensure us that Jesus was neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
But political may be the wrong word. Really, when we mean someone or some group is too political, we are lamenting overwrought partisanship or factionalism. Those may indeed be regrettable character traits, but being partisan or factional is significantly different from being political. It is imperative we recognize the latter (rightly defined) as a fundamental aspect of the human character and, therefore, something worth pursuing if we hope to reinvigorate our body politic.
“Man is by nature a political animal,” argued Aristotle. Being social by nature, man cannot pursue happiness in any ultimate sense without the company of others. It implies a question of how men should organize themselves to best secure their common good, a question investigated by Aristotle’s teacher in The Republic.
Interestingly, the insights of Aristotle and Plato map on well with what we learn about man in the early chapters of Genesis. In Genesis 1, God creates man in his image with an explicit task: to be fruitful and fill the earth and to have dominion over it (vv. 27-28). The creational mandate, as it is called, proximately serves the ultimate end of mankind: enjoying fellowship with God and glorifying him through the multiplication of his image and ordering all things in service to him.
In Genesis 2, we see that man by himself is insufficient to the task. “It is not good that the man should be alone,” says God, “I will make him a helper fit for him” (v. 18). Together, man and woman form the family, the basic building block for society which functions as a natural good for heavenly ends.
Of course, the introduction of human sin in Genesis 3 corrupts man’s political nature with consequences evident as early as Genesis 4. In a poignant moment, Cain kills his brother Abel. The man created to multiply God’s image on earth actively destroys it in his own kin. He is now the unsocial man, a contradiction in terms which must be resolved if mankind has any hope of finding its ultimate happiness in God.
One passage that demonstrates the resolution is Mark 5:1-20. Besides being a masterful example of storytelling, it also provides a clear illustration of sin’s capacity to destroy the political nature of man and the Gospel’s power to restore it.
The man Jesus confronts in the country of the Gerasenes is a walking testimony to The Enemy’s attack on God’s good creation. Satan has done his best to undo what God made good. The man is irrational, driven to insanity by the unclean spirit that possesses him (v. 5). He is naked and isolated from the rest of society. He shares more with the beast than he does with his fellow man. Finally, and as if to drive the point home, the man literally dwells among the dead (v. 3).
When he meets Jesus it is no less than a clash between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of heaven. Christ has come to take back his Father’s domain, conquering it for the salvation of his beloved people and for the glory of God. Christ expels the minions of Satan into a herd of pigs who immediately cause them to tumble into the sea, revealing what was their ultimate goal for the man.
Afterwards, the people come to see what has transpired and find the once-possessed man “sitting there, clothed in his right mind” (v. 15). Each of these attributes speak to the man’s restored political nature. Rather than flailing violently against his neighbors, he sits peaceably before them. The shame of his nakedness moves him to put on clothes, revealing also that his rational faculties have returned. The redemptive power of the Gospel has restored the essential political qualities for the man to participate in society.
There is no escaping the political quality of our lives because there is no escaping our political nature as human beings. There is virtue in participating in politics as God intended—for the sake of the common good, securing justice, and ordering men and women to their ultimate end. To abandon these pursuits even in an already-but-not-yet redeemed world for the sake of some false purity is misguided. You have been saved for more.