The Church as Politic

 I'm just as tired of hearing Christians say "the church should stay out of politics" as I am of hearing them idolize certain politicians and political parties. It all depends what you mean by "politics," doesn't it.

Building the community and securing the common good is what traditionally taken to be the goal of politics. In that regard, the church IS a politic, embodying Jesus' command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Thus one could well substitute "politics" for "ethic" and "social ethic" in the following:

<The Church, argues, Hauerwas, is a social ethic. Moreover, from what we have already seen, we may deduce that there is no ethic that is not social. Every ethic is qualified; that is, it operates within a community or people with a particular history or story. It is our community that makes us who we are ethically. In that sense ethics is always social.

That the Church cannot simply have a social ethic is apparent from the fact that Christian ethics is an embodiment of the story of Jesus in the life of the Church. That story addresses the world as a story embodied in the lives of Christian people. And if our ethics is necessarily a consequence
of the story that forms us, then we have nothing ethical to say apart from our participation in that story> https://bilynskyj.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Christian-Ethics-and-the-Ethics-of-Virtue.pdf

Every politic is qualified; that is, it operates within a community or people with a particular history or story. In a modern/premodern nominalist world, individualism and power are the story that grounds the goals of politics. Too often, churches infected with nominalism either reject the traditional conception of politics, and so cry, "the church should stay out of politics!" or else churches embrace the modern conception, and become tribalistic, hateful and aggressive.

Insofar as the church involves people, it will be political. The question is, which story/gospel will we embrace? What politic will we embody?