One King, Two Kingdoms: Where Religion and Politics Connect

By Robert Benne

Throughout the month of September, The Lutheran Witness will be sharing articles from our August 2020 print issue on topics related to religion and politics. Stay tuned to LW online to follow along.

The fall of 2016 was quite a time to teach a course on religion and politics to a large adult Bible class. The country was already politically polarized, and the two presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — awakened incredibly strong reactions. Although the majority of the class was politically conservative, Trump’s unusual traits made many skittish about voting for him. Some supported Hillary, and others looked to third-party candidates. Uncertainty abounded, and I was apprehensive that the course would stir up a hornets’ nest.

I used my book, Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics, and I hoped that its Lutheran two kingdoms approach would sort out ultimate from penultimate concerns in a helpful way for the participants, thus fending off angry controversy. I did not want good Christians shouting at each other.

Setting the foundation

At the outset, I outlined the important Lutheran observation on the two ways that God reigns — exclusively through the law with His left hand and through both the Law and Gospel with His right. I wanted to root the class’s Christian identity in the work of God’s right-hand kingdom, the church’s proclamation of the Gospel, the free gift of grace in Christ to the repentant soul. Before the good news of God’s grace, however, we had to attend to the second use of the Law, which holds up a mirror to us to reveal our sin and need for grace. The Holy Spirit brings us to recognize our sin and need for grace. After our recognition that we are “all beggars before God” (Luther’s last written words), the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to that extravagant grace of God in Christ. And we are enabled to receive it. That makes us ordinary saints before God, not because of our heroic obedience, but rather on account of God’s justifying grace in Christ.

With that initial emphasis, the class found great comfort and solidarity in uniting around the “One King,” Jesus Christ. He is the work of God’s right hand. He is our first loyalty, the guarantor of our eternal destiny with God. The awareness of that deep truth by the class further meant that we were sisters and brothers in Christ, our only King.

Places of responsibility

We were now ready to take on more divisive, political topics. That meant delving into our ordinary life on this earth, where God reigns with His left hand, the law, which includes the realm of politics. The law is not just written, codified law, but all the work of God through many agencies to maintain a measure of justice and order in the world. God has instituted and sustained “orders of creation,” or, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase, “places of responsibility” for those purposes. There are four of those places of responsibility — marriage and family life, work, politics and church. When humans perform God’s will in them, the world experiences a measure of peace and harmony.

Humans, however, are sinners and their institutions, including politics, are full of the conflicts that arise among sinful humans. Those conflicts are magnified by powerful groups when their interests collide. The devil uses sinful human propensities to draw humans away from behaviors that make for order and justice, and toward behavior that brings chaos and violence. Lutherans are realistic about the likelihood of such disturbances in life. We admit that our own actions are distorted by sin and that we even add to the problem.

Are we then supposed to escape the disturbed life of politics? No. Luther thought that Christians had callings as citizens. Indeed, the Reformation sought to provide schooling for all children so they might make responsible citizens of them. Luther spent a good deal of time and effort cajoling the princes to act justly, though he was sometimes over the top. For instance, we cringe at his violent denunciations of Jews and rebelling peasants.

Bad notions of church and politics

Back to the class of 2016. Everyone in the class recognized their responsibility to be good citizens, but that did not mean that everyone had the right idea about the relation of their Christian convictions and their political actions. Some thought that the separation of church and state meant the separation of religion and politics. Some believed the secularist claim that the First Amendment — separating church and state — meant that it is illegitimate for Christians to exercise their religiously based moral convictions in the public realm of politics.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to make an institutional separation between the church and state. They did not want a state church at the national level, but they did want churches and individual Christians to be free to exercise their religious convictions. Americans have done that since the beginning of our country; one cannot understand American history without noting the lively interaction between religion and politics.

Another bad notion that some folks had in our class: Being a Christian meant being a Republican. They felt there was a Christian duty to vote for Donald Trump. They fused Christianity with a political party. Such fusion is dangerous because it denies the transcendent nature of the Gospel and reduces the church to an earthly interest group. It religionizes politics and politicizes religion, a lethal combination.

Core Christian convictions

Most of the participants in the class knew better than to separate or fuse religion and politics, but they wondered how to exercise their core Christian moral convictions. I proposed that our religious convictions should critically engage our politics. Such engagement, however, is not a simple matter. There are many steps we make from our core biblical and theological convictions to political ideologies, parties and choices. At each step Christians of goodwill and intelligence often diverge. There are few “Christian” political choices in any simple sense.

For example, take minimum wage legislation. One Christian might argue that it is simple justice to offer a living wage to working class people. Another, however, might argue that such legislation simply increases unemployment because employers will automate or cut back their labor force. In each argument, other judgments are also at play, including self-interest, economic philosophies, relevant biblical principles, family political traditions, social location and more. It is no simple matter.

My class recognized the complexity of making such judgments. They acquired a dose of humility. And because the Holy Spirit had united us under one King, we could grant each other a good deal of tolerance in God’s other kingdom, that of His left hand, the law. Such a deep realization produced amazing results. One woman exclaimed: “I am so glad to be in a church that allows us laypeople to have the freedom to make such choices.” Others began publicly telling the class how they were going to vote. Even the Hillary supporters. I was astounded and pleased. We could really practice Lutheran two kingdoms teaching — one King but two kingdoms.

This recognition of Christian freedom by my class did not mean, however, that anything goes. We agreed that some political policies — overt racism, for example — were beyond the pale, along with abortion, the suppression of the freedom of religious expression or physician-administered suicide. But, for many political choices, Christians grounded in their one King could respect and tolerate each other regardless of where they come down in the other kingdom, the political world.

This article first appeared in the August 2020 print issue of The Lutheran Witness.