A recent study showed that people believe Jesus aligns with their own political leanings.

This is both alarming and unsurprising. We see it—recognizing that this is happening around us—and also find it freaks us out a little.

How could Jesus look so liberal to liberals and so conservative to conservatives? It sounds like we need to recognize Jesus is far more moderate than that. Which is exactly what moderates say, seeing how Jesus must align with their beliefs, too.

It isn’t that simple.

I think we get caught into a correlation/causation trap. That people think Jesus aligns with their political beliefs is not the same thing as thinking he conforms to our political beliefs.

The fact that everybody, left, right, and center, think Jesus reflects these different ideological frameworks is treated like a problem. Or more specifically, the part of this that is a problem.

But what if this is the glass half-empty view?

The half-glass problem.

The problem isn’t that some see the glass as half-empty and that others see the glass as half-full. It’s that few people recognize the relative relationship of full and empty. That empty can’t be isolated from full (and vice versa).

The reason people think Jesus aligns to their politics is not that people force Jesus into their politics or that they have adopted politics that reflect Jesus. It is that following Jesus is necessarily political.

Jesus was a politician.

He was also a political organizer, a teacher, a healer, and a general of a peace army in addition to being both Son of God and Son of Humanity.

There is virtue in being a lot of things to a lot of different people, to wear many different hats, and to have an impact on so many different people.

He also made a priority of fighting for the outcast and a more just government.

Every act of Jesus’s is political. Every teaching invites us to be political. Because politics is the method by which a people order their world.

One cannot exist without politics. We can’t go through our lives without being political. In fact, the very idea that we try to do so is, itself, a political act. The most indelible truth about the late-modern world is its political attempt to force an apolitical neutrality upon existence.

So we try to make news as neutral as possible. We decry politics invading our religion. This is a virtuous ideology, of course. But it is an ideology nonetheless. And it requires political persuasion to make it happen, to order it, and even to condemn it.

In short, trying to separate politics from our common life is the most insidious from of politics there is. Because we don’t even recognize it is even there.

Now, don’t move the goalposts.

Isolating parts of life from politics has a way of misrepresenting all parts of life to us.

So we come to see politics only as the working of people in a thing we call “politics”. Which becomes a euphemism for Washington DC and state capitals. In this way, politics becomes a synonym for partisanship.

We also come to see politics as areas of cultural competition (the mythic culture war) between two parties vying for supremacy.

And let us not forget how we (erroneously) believe that divisions and current cultural values have always been that way.

These confused (and totally relatable) visions of politics reflect a world that is both fungible and permanent; which is always at war but also not really; but one that is about stuff other people do.

What all of these visions for politics have in common (and many of us adopt all three of them at the same time or interchangeably, depending on the situation) is that they seek to minimize the thing they are narrowly defining as political. They often see the act of organizing our world distasteful and negative. And even the possibility of adapting to a changing world as existentially threatening.

In short, we are seeking to govern without governance, shape without shaping, order without ordering, and therefore, love without loving, grow without growing, and live without living.

What we’re afraid to say

Our ideologies aren’t monoliths. And neither is Jesus.

Many of the people who were against racial integration in the 1950s, for example, forgot they were against it in the decades that followed. Because they grew. And their new self couldn’t even picture ever being different.

Liberal isn’t always liberal. Conservative isn’t always conservative.

When God gave the commandment of an eye for an eye to the Hebrew people, they did that to limit people’s response. It was a political statement that intended to change behavior.

Why? Because people usually responded with escalation. Just go to a bar and insult someone to see what happens.

Codifying an eye for an eye changed things, however. People came to see that as the necessary response. If I lost an eye, I must take someone else’s.

In the narrow vision of politics, we’d say nothing changed. But we also know that in that, everything changed. And everything about it is political.

A church without politics is a church without love.

A church without politics is a church without justice.
Hope.
Compassion.
Generosity.
Mercy.
Trust.
Community.
Art.
Pot-lucks.
Laughter.
Life.

Because every part of this is political. Everything we’re trying to do as a people is political.

We’ve joined into a three thousand year attempt to transform the world through a peaceful love revolution. Our very purpose is political.

The very act of getting together and proclaiming the risen Christ and Jesus as Lord is political.

And when we pray as Jesus taught us:

Hallowed be God’s name. Your Kin-dom here as in heaven. Feed every person everyday. May our debts be forgiven as we forgive the debts of others. And protect us from evil.

We are praying that God order our world. That we order our world toward justice and equality.

This is political.

And yes, interpretation is political.

But so is crucifixion. And denying Jesus three times. And rising on the third day.

Grace is political.

So, for the sake of Jesus, let us be better politicians.