JESUS AND OUR PARLIAMENT
Recently hundreds of Christians gathered outside the Beehive to petition the Speaker to bring back references to Jesus Christ in the Parliamentary prayer. Supporting this, MP Alfred Ngaro emphasised the important role Christianity played in our society saying, ‘‘New Zealand is a Judeo-Christian nation’’.
Now I am very happy for our elected representatives to engage in Christian prayer in Parliament – but, from the point of view of what Jesus is actually about, Christians petitioning politicians to do so is misguided and ultimately harmful as far as promoting genuine Christian influence in society is concerned.
This is because what lies at the root of the myth that we are a Judeo-Christian nation, and that parliamentary practice should reflect this, is the Christian conviction that the Church occupies a special place of privilege which entitles Christians to use political power to enforce their righteous will upon others.
This conviction is grounded in the long history from the fourth century onward following the privileging of Christianity under the Roman Emperor Constantine – the long history known as ‘‘Christendom’’ in which the kingdom of Jesus became fused, and therefore confused, with the kingdoms of this world. But during the first three centuries when Christians were a persecuted minority no Christian would have dreamed of petitioning Caesar to incorporate the name of Jesus into the rituals, symbols, and religious processes of the Empire.
Rather these early Christians sought to live faithfully by the words of Jesus; ‘‘You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant. For the Son of Man came, not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’’.
And the great tragedy is that from the fourth century onward when the Church did get its hands on the political machinery of the state it did precisely what Jesus said rulers and tyrants always do – it ‘‘lorded it over’’ those who resisted being Christianised instead of simply being content to serve people in faith, hope, and love. Now it is common for Christians close to political power in so-called ‘‘Judeo-Christian’’ countries to argue that all the humble stuff Jesus said about loving and serving others was because he just happened to live in a context in which Christians had no political influence – but that where Christians do have this influence then it is their God-given duty to use political power to advance the kingdom of God.
But the historical truth is that this kind of reasoning has for the most part produced bigotry and intolerance, inquisitions and persecutions, crusades and religious wars, colonial conquests and the oppression of indigenous peoples, and the demonising of the alien ‘‘other’’ – to name but a few of the ways that the Church using the power of the state have perpetrated great harm in the name of Jesus.
Yet in many ways this
The most effective way to undermine the truth of Jesus is to give political power to the Church.
Christian temptation to use political power for good is entirely understandable. And I think J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, recognised this in The Lord of the Rings in the scene where Frodo offers the ring of power to Gandalf. ‘‘Don’t tempt me Frodo – I dare not take it,’’ he says, ‘‘I would try to use it for good but it would be a power too great and too terrible for me to wield’’.
Because the reality is that the most effective way to undermine the truth of Jesus is to give political power to the Church. And this is because, despite its best intentions, the Church will inevitably end up using this power to ‘‘lord it over’’ others. And standing in support of this is 1,500 years of deeply regretful historical evidence. For there are very few nations in the world that have experienced a significant history of the Church using the power of the state to lord it over others with a view to advancing the kingdom of God that haven’t eventually repudiated this misuse of power and become thoroughly secularised as a consequence.