This response to Kuo’s Tempting Faith sounds a theme that occurred to me as well as I read it and noticed the conspicuous absence of church life as an informer of what true politics is; or from what life it springs. He barely mentions church, and only then as a place to meet friends.
The Ekklesia Project is dedicated to helping the church recover its identity as church, forged in liturgy and sharpened in opposition to the world’s ways of violence. This way of being church ought to be sufficiently adventurous that one of our number—such as Kuo—needn’t travel to Washington or write speeches for politicians to feel he’s helping usher in the Kingdom. He need only attend the liturgy, learn the habits of speech and quite bodily moves there that enable a different sort of engagement with the world in light of Christ’s Lordship. It is little wonder Kuo was personally seduced by W., by the plush carpets and important-seeming people in the White House. All his childhood Methodist church gave him to go on was felt cut-out Old Testament figures and vague generalities about how nice Jesus is. What if we taught him of Jesus’ politics, marked by non-violence, willing to help Babylon by planting vineyards and building dwellings, but not by taking up the sword? We could have produced in him a different sort of desire. We can’t guarantee he’d have avoided the disappointment he found in politics, to be sure. We’re as human as those building other sorts of kingdoms. But we have resources for when we let each other down (confession, repentance, amendment of life), rather than the endless litany of political gotcha that even this book continues to reproduce.
Source: The Ekklesia Project – Tempting Kuo? (Jason Byassee )
It truly is a failure of the church, as far as Kuo lets us see, that the church stands on the sidelines and cheers or jeers politics as usual; as constituted by the American system of liberal democracy; that the church is just a place for opining on “what’s happening”; and Kuo was on the inside, where “things get done”.
It is a point also made by Byassee that it is sad to see so little coverage of the church in Kuo’s assessment of “Faith and Politics”:
The church enters Kuo’s reflection as an afterthought to a Christian faith developed through individual friendships. These individuals would gather occasionally at their megachurch campuses for events, but those gatherings were only meant to enable the individual friendships. It is through those friendships that Kuo networked, learned who his living and dead heroes should be (Chuck Colson, and through him William Wilberforce), and found his way in his personal and professional life. What those individuals did during that Sunday gathering is barely worth his time here.
