Isaac S. Villegas
Pastor at Chapel Hill Mennonite Church
August 22nd, 2008
Jesus For President: An Ecumenical Campaign
The Jesus for President campaign came to Raleigh, N.C. on July 22nd. Chris Haw, Shane Claiborne, and their crew took the stage at 7pm. People started filling the seats at 6:30, anticipating the acclaimed campaign. For two and a half hours, Shane and Chris spoke about Jesus and politics to an attentive crowd. Although our Mennonite district took the lead role in bringing them to town, we were a marginal presence. With no money spent on advertising, we drew around 650 people to a midweek event. Duane Beck, pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church, had the idea of inviting the Jesus for President tour to make a stop in our area.
The district pastors (including myself) enthusiastically approved. With the support of our Eastern Carolina District of the Mennonite Church, we explored our ecumenical networks to form a coalition of sponsors. Pastor Spencer Bradford of Durham Mennonite Church approached the North Carolina Council of Churches, which gladly agreed to help sponsor the event. Since our Mennonite churches have small worship spaces, Duane Beck found a partnership with First Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh that agreed to host the campaign. Though the Mennonites did most of the legwork, various churches came together to bring the Jesus for President crew to town.
People of different Christian traditions came to hear Chris Haw and Shane Claiborne preach the gospel of Christ’s peace. In many respects, the evening felt like an evangelistic crusade. One member of my congregation even said that it reminded her of the Campus Crusade rallies she attended as a youth. People from all generations filled the chairs, then overflowed into every available space on the floor and along the walls: white haired folks with canes, young people with pierced noses and tattoos, and toddlers crawling around all of them... a chaos of peoples.
If Chris and Shane are radicals, apparently being radical is no longer reserved for naive and utopian youth. Apparently the wise and mature still have an anti-establishmentarian streak. Although our host church was a black Baptist congregation, the sea of faces was predominately white. But who can blame our African-American sisters and brothers for not showing up? The black church in the South has it's own sense of radical politics and creative political witness.
Chris and Shane described their presentation as an attempt to exercise our political imaginations. They retold the story of Scripture showing how God is at work creating a new people who don't easily fit into the established categories of American politics--neither Democrat nor Republican. Although Jim Wallis uses this same point to justify evangelicals who want to vote for Democrats, Chris and Shane take a more radical route.
For them the focus of our political arguments and discussions doesn't pay off in the voting booth on November 4th. In fact, they went so far as to say that our cultural obsession with voting dulls our imagination when it comes to political activity. As Prof. Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, "National politics is like the Roman circus in the first century. It's entertainment to keep us distracted from the real issues."
Chris and Shane make the same point this way: "How we live on November 3rd and November 5th is just as important to our political involvement." Chris and Shane tried to liberate our imaginations from what some theorists call "politics as statecraft," where the masses become political only when elections come around, or when we try to influence our representatives to fight for 'moral' legislation. But the contemporary practice of representative politics has convinced us that we are always one step removed from the so-called "political sphere."
Instead of believing this establishmentarian abstraction, Chris and Shane wanted us to pay attention to our everyday politics. After all, we are servants of God's kingdom all the time--and the kingdom gives us our political identity and fuels our imaginative work of redemption. That's why Chris and Shane asked the crowd to consider all our ordinary political decisions: for example, where we choose to live and worship, and with whom we eat and where we spend our money.
Every swipe of our credit card is our political participation. It's no mistake, Chris and Shane reminded us, that President Bush encouraged America to go shopping after 9/11. None of this struck the Mennonites I talked to as original. We've heard this message before. But Chris and Shane didn't assume what they had to say was new, especially for Mennonites. As Chris Haw said in an interview with Laura Graber Nickel, "Some people have called our book ‘John Howard Yoder illustrated.'... That’s a great compliment, because Yoder’s definitely in the mix of how we’ve interpreted Jesus” (See Nickel's article, "Mennonites want Jesus for President," The Mennonite, 8/19/2008).
In many respects, Chris and Shane have simply repacked a familiar message and put it on stage for a different audience. For example, they've taken bits and pieces from the work of Ched Myers, an important teacher and model practitioner of radical discipleship. And they are indebted to James Douglass, an extremely significant Catholic peace activist and theologian.
They also use the historical scholarship of Richard Horsley, and the theological contributions of Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder. But Chris and Shane also have their own stories to tell from their journeys of discipleship in urban slums and friendships with the poor. Although their publishing company and the media have done some work in selling Chris and Shane's project to the evangelicals, I found the event in Raleigh to be quite ecumenical. Chris and Shane wove together strands from a variety of Christian traditions.
They put Catholics, Mennonites, Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, and Lutherans in conversation. Stories and ideas echoed across these traditions, creating an imaginative resource for peaceable Christian witness. They assembled a political theology by telling stories about Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and others. They assembled a patchwork of lived theology that may fuel a coalition of agents of Christ’s peace. Some may dismiss Shane and Chris’ work since we’ve heard their message before.
Yet we must remember that no one holds the copyright on Jesus’ teachings. Instead, we should humbly welcome every new witness of God’s kingdom of peace. "The harvest is plenty but the workers are few," so we need all the help we can get. We also need to hear how the good news echoes back to us from new places, like the urban landscape of Camden (NJ) and Philadelphia (PA) where Chris and Shane live and work and pray.
Scripture teaches us that we are forgetful people, always in need of hearing the story of God all over again. "All we can do is repeat ourselves," said Karl Barth. But the new accents help us reconsider what we may no longer think important or relevant. From the wealth of Christian traditions, Chris Haw and Shane Claiborne offered a re-articulation of our political witness that reminded us how Mennonites of the past tended to cultivate a healthy suspicion of the government’s promises.
Hopefully, along with this suspicion may come a rediscovery of the Spirit's power in leading our churches into creative demonstrations of hope while living amidst the rubble of our leaders' failed projects and the skeletons of our government’s fragmentary attempts at the kingdom.