September 2016
Truth has been one of the most contested concepts of the 2016 presidential election. Information and disinformation constantly flow into our minds from media of all sorts, and we can be overwhelmed with the task of discerning truth.
How do we as Christians engage this volatile political reality efficiently without compromising principles, simultaneously innocent as doves while crafty as serpents? How can we realistically act as responsible citizens in an election cycle where so much is unknown and the truth is hard to discern? Stephanie Summers says the following:
“We see what the political landscape presents to us each day, and we consider whether any effort we expend can possibly yield a good harvest. More often than not, we see only the potential for further withering, death, and decay. This election season has indeed painfully exposed the shallowness of most modern political engagement. We don’t have to look far to see that the most common responses to the upcoming elections are fear, apathy, withdrawal, and despair. But these are all shallow responses. The answer to the gross deficiencies of our political life is not more shallow politics but rooted citizenship.”1
It is important in this time of uncertainty to turn to Scripture in order to learn how to best be “rooted citizens.” We can profitably follow Stephanie Summer’s framework of citizenship within the creation, fall, redemption narrative in order to best present a clear picture of responsible citizenship.2
Being a responsible citizen involves critically looking at the world around us and evaluating the deluge of competing messages we are bombarded with...
We know that God created the world, and all He created was good. While the garden was void of a political system as we understand it today, Summers tells us that the mandate given to humans “to cultivate culture means that the genesis of political communities is found” in the garden. She continues, “God’s authority over creation remains ultimate, yet God gives humans some responsibility over what has been made.” Corwin Smidt further illustrates this responsibility in his understanding of traffic lights, “Even in the sinless garden, there may well be a need for some kind of state authority that would, for example, make decisions as to where to install traffic lights and determine how those at such intersections should proceed. It would not be wise to allow traffic lights to be put up by anyone who wished to do so. Such actions may not be morally wrong (sinful) per se, but the ability of individuals to install random traffic lights could well result in confusion, frustration, and possibly chaos.”3 This call to bring order is a call to develop governmental systems.
These governmental systems, and by extension our citizenship within these systems, are not free from the influence of sin. Summers shares that “while God chooses to give the goodness of the created order and enables all humans to participate in further developing all that God created, the potential of government authority was distorted as a direct result of human rebellion.” The permeation of sin does not eliminate the responsibility to establish and participate in political institutions, but these institutions are now tainted by imperfection. This often manifests itself in human misuse of power and control.
We know, however, that this is not the end of the story. God is working to redeem all things that have been tainted by sin, including political institutions. We, as his people, are called to join Him in this mission of restoration, working to bring his creation back to its original goodness. Concerning political institutions, our roles as agents of renewal propel us to engage in active, faithful citizenship. This citizenship is not complacent. It is characterized by selflessness and seeks justice, mercy and humility. Faithful citizenship is engaging society around us and asking how we, as God’s redemptive workers, can make our communities, our institutions, our societies look more as God intended them to be.
So what does this have to do with fact-checking? Well, being a responsible citizen involves critically looking at the world around us and evaluating the deluge of competing messages we are bombarded with. Summers says that “Citizenship is our common calling. In calling us to citizenship, God invites us to develop our abilities to accurately discern the well-being of our political communities.” We are called to develop our abilities to discern and to engage our political process in a way that allows room for hope, remembering that God&rsuqo;s authority surpasses our own, and to be faithful, rooted citizens in today’s political world.