In the United States we have two politics.

Competitive Politics

The first, I’ll call “Competitive Politics,” is the two-party system of pugilism, evidenced by our incessant competitive metaphors.  We talk about horse races, boxing matches, and football.  So outdated is this vision of politics, that we even use war metaphors as evidence of only two sides—despite all of the evidence for war being a complex arrangement with many “sides”.  Most often when we talk about something being “political,” this is what we think of.

 Pure Politics

The other politics (let’s call it “Pure Politics”) is the world bound by the great –isms: racism, sexism, etc.  The world in which the person is political.  This is where ideas andactions are political.  Where the color of one’s skin makes their every move political.  Where the very conversation of her body is a political statement.  Where a person’s genetic mapping and brain chemistry makes them perpetually political.  This is politics as it has always been known.  This politics gets turned into the first politics, or mangled, mashed, and minced so as to fit into the first.

Evidence for the Two Politics

The traditional understanding of racism and the politics of race is that the powerful group, known as the majority, systemically oppresses a minority group.  This happens in a variety of ways and tends to happen on both the small individual scale (e.g. discrimination in hiring) and the large scale (e.g. overrepresentation of African Americans in prison).  In both cases, the racism is made evident by the systemic persecution and deprived liberty of the minority.

Our common understanding, however, makes racism about competitive politics, in which certain individuals are racists.  They do this because they don’t want to see racism as systemic but the content of an individual’s heart.  Many then argue that since that content cannot be known, we cannot call anyone a racist.  Many also try to see racism as something that can be reversed and applied to “the other” [ironic usage intended].  Notice how the subtle implication is not only to muddy the waters, but to delineate only two options: a systemic racism of Anglo discrimination toward many minority groups in many different ways is transformed into a literal “black and white” discussion with two parties that are able to “oppress” each other.  See how easy this understanding fits right into our dualistic system?  See also how far removed it is from the original issue of systemic oppression of minorities?

The Church is Political

The church is political.  Christians are political.  Our very nature is political.  When proto-Christians met in secret because otherwise they may be killed, that’s political.  When Christians stood up for Civil Rights in the U.S. and to end Apartheid in South Africa, that’s political.  Come on, we wear crosses, for Christ’s sake!  Crosses!  How political can that be?  Ask a minority about one using a sign of one’s oppression as a badge.

At the same time, we aren’t really political in the competitive politics sense, or at least most of us aren’t.  Not because Christian involvement in political parties is wrong, far from it.  It is because that vision of politics doesn’t actually exist.  There are always more than two ways of seeing things and two ways of getting out of a situation.  There arealways more than two.  The system that engenders only two parties as diametrically opposed poles is a fiction resident in the American psyche.  We seem bound to this dualistic thinking.  Well, we were; postmoderns aren’t.

So if we can see past the ruse of competitive politics toward pure politics, what do you think we’ll find?

How does this inform the politics driving our churches?

How might this help clarify the politics of our international economic crisis?