Andrew Sullivan’s Essay, “My Problem with Christianism”
May 15th, 2006,Andrew Sullivan’s essay, “My Problem with Christianism: A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda” (published in Time, May 15, p. 74), is already much discussed. I read it after a fellow member of a Bible study group at my Methodist church mentioned it.
The essay begins with a question that hits home for me and many other Christians: “Are you a Christian who doesn’t feel represented by the religious right?” Here is a key passage:
…let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
Sullivan’s essay may popularize a change in terminology that has already been underway. Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker has been using the term “Christianist” for at least a few months now. I immediately understood the word in the way that Sullivan does - as being a counterpart to the word “Islamist,” or one who, in Sullivan’s words, wants to “conflate state and mosque,” even create a theocracy. Similarly, a Christianist would ignore or minimize distinctions between church and state.
Sullivan expands on his essay in a blog entry, explaining the problems of a politics based entirely on religious belief:
The difference between a world-view, based on empirical evidence or reason or personal experience and open to debate, and a religion, based on an inerrant text or revelation or church authority and closed to doubt, is that the religion demands to be taken much more seriously. It insists on its own divine authority - as it must - and that authority cannot be held hostage to the results of a political conversation or debate or election. It rests on God Almighty. By definition, therefore, the conflation of our politics with the will of God makes political discourse largely impossible, because we don’t all believe in the same God or even in God at all. And so the introduction of religious authority into politics makes all our political dealings inseparable from profound differences over the deepest things - the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of God, and so on.
Politics, as we have come to understand it in the West, cannot operate on those grounds. It did once. And Europe was filled with the smoke from the burning flesh of heretics. The decision to remove such profound issues from politics was definitive of the West’s emergence from the dark ages, and it is integral to any understanding of the American experiment in limited government and individual liberty. The absolute demands of fundamentalist faith make the West’s tradition of civil compromise impossible; and they constantly push the boundaries of what is acceptable to God, as religious purists outdo each other in proving their righteousness - whether it be keeping comatose patients alive for decades or defining a zygote as a full human person. Hence our politics has degenerated into a “culture war.” Wars are what happens when politics become impossible. And that is the corrosive effect of Christianism; and why it must be resisted - for the sake of American discourse and for the sake of a vibrant, humble apolitical Christianity.
Well said, though I’m not whether a truly “apolitical” belief system is possible. However, I do believe a more humble Christianity is possible. Now I’m wondering what will happen if this change in the language, this distinction between “Christian” and “Christianist,” becomes widespread.