The starting point for understanding how religion relates to politics is to determine how God functions in the world. Like many of you, I attribute the word God to experiences of beauty, love, and goodness that have no logical explanation. These encounters have depth. The reality of the experience is so much greater than the parts making it up.

I have friends who have told me that music brings joy and a sense of peace into their lives, that it often takes them to another place. I also have friends who find a depth of meaning in church liturgy. During my tennis teaching days, I befriended a gifted artist. I taught his kids. At one of our many conversations together, he talked about the process of painting. He told me he often has no idea where he is. Time stands still. Images appear on the canvas from a place he sometimes can’t explain. The point of these examples is that they all suggest a sense of something more.

Abraham Heschel and Matthew Fox have created theologies centered around mystical encounters with nature. For Heschel experiencing nature in a deep way creates a sense of awe and wonder. This sense points to the beyond. Both Heschel and Fox call on us to reflect on the meaning of the cosmos.

Some thirteen billion years ago the Big Bang explosion took place. After the initial explosion the universe expanded and cooled down for several hundred thousand years. Then in the blink of an eye, everything changed with the formation of hydrogen and helium atoms. Nothing from the initial explosion suggested such a change
.
Clouds of hydrogen and helium eventually enabled galaxies to form—one hundred billion of them, each one like our Milky Way having billions of stars. Five billion years ago our Sun exploded onto the scene with nine planets orbiting around it. Each planet began with the same chemical elements. Because of its position in the solar system, the matter on earth formed into solids, liquids, and gasses. In a gigantic creative leap, from the chemical mix of these elements, the first living cell was formed with a memory allowing for its self-replication.

The story of the unfolding universe is one of awesome beauty, creativity, symmetry, and destruction. So many amazing events had to occur at just the right time and in just the right way. Even the smallest variation would have made life on earth impossible. Many scientists posit that there was something behind this process. The chances of this happening by random processes alone are virtually negligible.

Forty-two years ago our daughter Molly exploded onto the scene. I was there. The experience of witnessing her birth shook me to the core. It all started nine months before when sperm met egg which generated billions of cells that knew just where to go. She came with ten fingers and ten toes, and a brain with billions of nerve cells with the capability of making 10,000 connections a second. I left the hospital a believer.

Finally, when I look at my adult life over the last fifty years, there is a direction to it. My path hasn’t been perfectly straight, but there are times when I sense I am being directed by a wisdom greater than my own.

According to Alfred North Whitehead, none of my experiences described above, the experiences of others I report, the story of the universe, or the birth of Molly prove the existence of God, but these experiences allow the possibility of God to make sense. Whitehead was very humble concerning his ideas. There is no dogmatic certainty regarding the existence of God, but it makes good sense to think of God playing a role in creating and sustaining the universe as well as being behind our encounters of love and goodness.

In a recent article in Progressive Christianity (September 30, 2017), I summarized some of the highlights of Whitehead’s philosophy. What is important here is Whitehead’s argument that humans make decisions based upon different messages that float through their awareness. There are messages from the past—memories, emotions, goals, hopes. There are messages from our biological need to survive—fear, greed, lust are among them. There are also messages from God—a sense of beauty, goodness, love, creativity, justice, and harmony, a sense that mirrors the personal experiences I describe above.

Humans are free agents. We can decide based on a past influence, our needs relating to survival, or we can decide for God. This stark choice is present in every situation. Evil results from decisions that ignore God’s vision. When we choose for God, however, we join with her in helping to make the world a better place.

If that’s how God works in the world, how do we as Christians respond politically. The answer is quite simple. Study the issue in question, look at it from all sides, and apply the vision of God to the problem. If the position you end up with is different from the general consensus in the society at large, trust your new position. The inspiration for your position comes from God.

There is one important advantage to understanding the relationship between religion and politics in this way. It avoids needless controversy over the interpretation of scripture.

The documents in the New Testament were written by human beings two thousand years ago. The authors of these documents understood the world differently than we do. The earth was flat with heaven as a physical place. God was a transcendent person who sat in heaven on a throne and held the universe together by his actions to send rain, calm storms, cause crops to grow, etc. These ancient writers had no understanding about laws of nature governing the universe. They also believed disease was caused by evil forces invading the body. As a result, they had no understanding of the biological causes of disease. This ancient worldview contributes little to the understanding of contemporary societal problems.

There is also the problem of historical setting. Jesus thought God would intervene to establish his kingdom within the generation of his followers. With such an expectation of an imminent intervention by God, it made some sense to surrender all of your wealth and follow Jesus. For people living in the twenty-first century and hoping to retire at age sixty-five with the expectation of a long retirement, it doesn’t make much sense to surrender your wealth when you become a Christian.

The teachings on nonviolence have similar problems. Jesus knew the history of peasant rebellions against Rome. These rebellions were brutally repressed with huge loss of life and economic disruption. Jesus expected God to intervene to deal with the Roman problem. It was part of God’s covenant promise to protect Israel from foreign enemies. He would repeat the Moses miracle when the people of Israel escaped from Egypt 1,000 years before. Because God was going to intervene, the best strategy for the interim was nonviolence, the creation of loving communities which would allow their members to ignore Rome.

Very few people today expect God to intervene to establish a utopian kingdom on earth. There are evil forces in the world bent on harming their neighbors. Every human has a right to self-defense. Applying the teachings of Jesus on nonviolence in a literal way to deal with contemporary world problems makes little sense.

A related problem is the simple society in which Jesus lived. In living out the second commandment to love your neighbor, it was not hard to decide who your neighbor was. You knew everyone in your village. Defining the current problem of climate change in terms of neighbor need is a little more difficult because the neighbors who will be most affected by global warming have yet to be born. While Jesus’s teachings inspire us to live our lives differently, there are no direct parallels between these teachings and modern societal problems.

Understanding the relationship between religion and politics in terms of Whitehead’s philosophy avoids these problems. All that is required is to apply God’s vision of love, justice, and harmony to the political problem under consideration. There is no debate regarding this vision. It also becomes easier to partner with other religious traditions and nonbelievers because they believe in goodness and love too.

Read Part 2 Here