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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Fast And Feast

In front of us is an opportunity. For the next twenty-four months candidates for president, congressman, senator, governor, representative, judge, county clerk, and sheriff will be seeking the Christian vote, and our money, and our energy. Every politician needs evangelicals. And like a teenage boy on a date with a beautiful girl, they will say […]

In front of us is an opportunity. For the next twenty-four months candidates for president, congressman, senator, governor, representative, judge, county clerk, and sheriff will be seeking the Christian vote, and our money, and our energy. Every politician needs evangelicals. And like a teenage boy on a date with a beautiful girl, they will say anything and everything to get what they want.

Let’s not give it to them. Let’s tell them we are fasting from politics for a season. ~David Kuo

I have to say that this sounds like a good idea, at least in certain respects.  As a blogger and something of a political junkie, I am only too aware of the potential toll focusing on such things can take on more important priorities in life (he says as he writes on his blog about a political question).  I am not even particularly politically “active” in the sense that Mr. Kuo is talking about, but I can imagine how much more distracting and exhausting actual campaigning and regular activism would be.  Still, I am reluctant to adopt this proposal straightaway, even though I can see a great many advantages to what he proposes.  It seems almost undeniable to me that if Christians in this country put the energy they put into supporting the GOP or this or that ballot initiative or railing about liberal perfidy, they would probably accomplish more in their own communities, would build stronger families and would raise more God-fearing children.  (The story of the conservative Congressman or staffer who goes to D.C. to shore up moral values but ends up wrecking his own marriage in the process has been an all together too common one.)  But I am not certain that we can temporarily suspend our responsibilities as citizens. 

The country will not go to rack and ruin (or at least not much more than it would have anyway) if we sat out for one cycle, but whether or not there would be negative consequences does not answer the question of whether we are free to dissent, that is to sit apart, from politics all together for such a time.  And if we are free to do so, what does oblige us to enter the arena in the first place?  Now the Catholics learn from their Catechism that as “far as possible citizens should take an active part in public life” (CCC 1915) which comes in the context of having an obligation to work for the promotion of the common good.  To koinon agathon, a concept unfortunately derided of late by some because of its popularity as a phrase among left-liberals (which should make conservatives wonder how they ever allowed these people to hijack the concept in the first place and why there is not a robust conservative understanding of the common good widely known today), is the standard by which Catholics would judge how and when to participate in public life, and it includes the conditions that contribute the most to the fulfillment of our nature and true human flourishing.  If seems clear that if it is plausible that Christians can do more for the common good outside of party politics for a couple years than they can do in the middle of them, they not only can but ought to pursue those other activities with the same zeal with which they have pursued their political goals.  If Christians judge that they can contribute more to the common good through political action, the same obligation to act in the political realm would be there.   

But there is much wisdom to the idea that a man won’t buy the cow if he can get the milk for free, as the old saying has it, and that the GOP has to earn the support of conservative Christians before they lend it their support in the future.  Letting them have a taste of what a completely demobilised, disenchanted Christian base would be like for them and what it would mean for their election prospects would bring a number of the party’s leaders to their senses, at least for a short time.  We would need to understand that this would almost certainly ruin the GOP’s chances in 2008 and guarantee a Democratic President.  The simple response to this would be: yes, and what’s your point?  What good has GOP rule been?  Certainly, conservative Christians should be a lot less forthcoming with their support unless they see the chance of some real return on what they are giving.  The parable of the wicked servant should be foremost in the minds of Christians who have been entrusted with even one talent, as I think too many Christians have taken that one talent and, instead of burying it as the wicked servant did, donated it, so to speak, to the local Republican candidate for Congress or a PAC aimed at stopping the godless liberals.  Stopping godless liberals is all well and good, but perhaps there are better ways to use what you have been given.  To ponder the question is not to betray anything.  When the Master comes to make an accounting of what we have done with what we have been given, He may look dimly on frittering away our gifts on something unworthy. 

The advantage of Kuo’s recommended “fast” seems obvious to me because I see how things are in the Orthodox Church in this country, or at least how they have been in my three years as an Orthodox convert in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.  We are, with the exception of a few concentrated areas, too small of a church in America to wield any great influence, and there are numerous jurisdictional boundaries that prevent widespread cooperation across the country, which has many disadvantages for church life but which also has the advantage of making concerted political action by a united front of American Orthodox next to impossible.  Therefore secular politics does not enter into the Church to the degree that it seems to do in other churches, and the kind of cultural warfare that evidently takes place in parish life elsewhere is largely absent.  There is no question of what is to be preached in our parishes.  It has been and will continue to be the Gospel, and homilies almost always are about the Gospel reading.  I have never heard a homily on a contemporary political issue in an Orthodox church.  The closest to something “political” I have ever seen was a moleben for the Orthodox victims at Beslan, which was an entirely appropriate commemoration of deceased Orthodox Christians.  Thus politics does not enter into the equation, and I am able to be united to fellow Orthodox who I happen to know hold sometimes radically different politically views.  It also creates the beginnings of unity in Christ that make it possible to speak intelligently and soberly to one another about these questions and, often enough, we find (especially the green and paleocon Orthodox out there) that we have much more in common politically than we would ever have supposed had we not encountered each other in church. 

I have heard it said that those who do not participate in the fasts of the Church do not participate as fully in the joy of the feast when it finally comes.  Certainly the move between the kenotic work of fasting and the fullness of the feast is a powerful one that has the greatest meaning for those who have faithfully kept the fast.  Moreover, fasting reminds us of the transitory nature of all things here below, it reminds us of the sacrifice and death of the Lord and of the call to die to ourselves, and it is through fasting that we make a few small steps in this denial of ourselves.  As a priest once told us, “Fasting is to be called into the company of the saints.”  In denying the world and the will of the flesh in ourselves through actual fasting, we become more alive to the work of the Spirit and possess more of the mind of Christ.  There is a sense in which the denial of the world represented by renouncing political activity for a time fits very well into this experience of fast and feast in the life of the Church.  Ironically, I fear that Mr. Kuo’s appeal will make the most sense to those of us, like myself, who belong to a church that is not terribly politically active in the first place.  It will unfortunately likely be met with hostility in precisely those churches where it is most needed because it comes from someone who (gasp!) once worked for Democrats in some capacity; in my view, the worst thing that can be said about Mr. Kuo’s political record is that he worked for the Bush administration, but he seems suitably aggrieved by this as well so I won’t hold it against him.     

Naturally, at NRO they are not enthusiastic about this.  Says Ponnuru on Kuo:

Kuo sometimes writes as though they’re [conservative Christians] the only kind of Christians around, which is a bad habit.

It would be a bad habit if Kuo were doing this.  But it seems clear that Kuo doesn’t claim to be addressing all Christians here, but very clearly has targeted this message to Republican-voting, conservative Christians.  The entire context of the post tells you as much.  Ponnuru says that you shouldn’t expect politics to save your marriage (no kidding! I thought that was a recommended method!), which badly misses Kuo’s point about divorce.  The point, surely, is that while evangelicals have, for example, been banging the war drums to stop gay “marriage,” no one has been doing very much that has been successful in creating more stable heterosexual marriages.  While they have been successful in many states in protecting the definition of The Institution of Marriage, real marriages continue to break down at the same rates they have done before.  Surely the real point is that this is far more socially and culturally destructive and also something that churches might well be able to do more about if they weren’t distracted with highly symbolic, oftentimes seemingly irrelevant pitched battles with radical leftists.  The more that the Faith can be understood and embraced as a living, transforming Faith rather than a battle standard in a political conflict, the better.  If I were a GOP flack, I would, of course, be very nervous that that any prominent Christian is saying things like this, because the GOP needs Christians to keep serving as useful idiots and cannon fodder, so to speak, for each election cycle.  It can’t start letting the cannon fodder think too much about whether they should even be in the army. 

Update: Poor David Kuo!  Not only is he getting all the usual grief for being part of an overarching liberal conspiracy to sap our purity of essence (I exaggerate only slightly), but because of links to his blog from Rod Dreher the Con Crunchy hyenas have descended upon his comment section.  If you need confirmation that Kuo’s proposal is an idea whose time has come, just read the comment thread that follows his post.

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