You may have heard of the recent IRS ruling that clergy can now endorse political candidates without it threatening their church’s tax-exempt status. The change is the result of a lawsuit by some conservative churches claiming it was a limitation of their right to free speech. Hailed by some evangelical denominations and organizations, most mainline churches, however, said they still believed their clergy should remain mute when it came to endorsing political candidates from the pulpit.

So it was a surprise that the first instance of a clergy endorsement getting public attention involved, not a conservative pastor, but a very liberal one. Rev. Jonathan Barker, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, announced that at his next worship service he would endorse New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president in 2028, saying she would be a “what-would-Jesus-do candidate.” (Ocasio-Cortez has not said she has any plans to run for president.)

Learning of his intentions, the bishop of Barker’s ELCA Greater Milwaukee Synod, Rev. Paul Erickson, contacted Barker and urged him not to do it. In response, Barker resigned both as the congregation’s pastor and as a clergy member of the ELCA. That Sunday, he still gave his sermon but to a congregation of less than a dozen in a borrowed event space. (More of the story can be found in a New York Times article, “He Tried to Endorse From the Pulpit. He Wound Up Without a Church.”)

There is, of course, a back story to all this. Barker, 41, has been socially and politically active throughout his ministry. He had been pastor of Grace for the past nine years, trying to revive the shrinking congregation with a focus on social and political issues and causes. Like so many churches, Grace had once flourished, with over a thousand worshipers in the 1950s. Now it struggled to remain open, with typically only two or three dozen in attendance. The congregation had, in fact, just voted to begin steps leading to its closure.

His congregation’s impending demise may have given Barker an attitude of “there’s nothing to lose.” It does seem that he hoped the publicity surrounding his action would attract other like-minded people to the church. Bishop Erickson pushed back saying that the ELCA had just addressed this topic at its national convention by adopting a new statement on “Faith and Civic Life.” Here is a relevant portion of that statement (emphasis added.)

In rostered ministry, deacons, pastors, and bishops are expected to connect the Christian faith with contemporary issues, and theology with life. The ELCA’s model constitution for congregations states that they are “to speak publicly to the world in solidarity with the poor and oppressed, advocating dignity, justice, and equity for all people.”

They, therefore, have the responsibility to represent a church community’s life experiences and perspectives, woven together with their leadership experiences and training. This makes their work political, as was true of Jesus. It does not license partisanship, for example, in telling members which candidates or political parties to vote for or belong to.

Christians generally, and Lutherans in particular, have long struggled to know how to relate to civil authorities and the political process. Martin Luther is now generally condemned for the support he gave the nobility in their violent suppression of the 1524 German Peasants’ Revolt (sparked in part by Luther’s own preaching and resulting in 100,000 peasant deaths). More recently, both German Lutheran and Catholic churches have engaged in endless soul-searching over their passiveness towards, and sometimes support of, Hitler and the Nazis.

Given the horrific Nazi experience, one could easily say the new ELCA statement has fallen short. Would a German Lutheran pastor have been wrong in telling his parishioners to not vote for the Nazis in 1933? Today many would say they were at fault for not doing so. Or should Southern church goers been told from the pulpit to vote against politicians supporting Jim Crow?  How, then, does one know when a candidate or party has crossed the line to deserve such judgement?

For me, such questions point to a conundrum the church has always been in, especially since the 4^th century when it became the religion of the Roman Empire. As an organization, the church will inevitably be impacted by the culture and society in which it exists. How shall it respond? The usual response has been that it should follow the teachings of the Bible. But as we all know, the Bible is often ambiguous or even contradictory and not easily applied to specific real-life questions or problems.

The church’s difficulty, however, is even more complicated than that. The main issue is that the church as we know it can’t be found in the Bible. The Old Testament is primarily concerned with the chosen people of God, known as Israel. While there are similarities, Israel and the church are really very different entities, with very different agendas.

In the New Testament, the idea of church does appear but in a very early and rudimentary form. This is the beginning stage of an institution that would embody the religion centered on Jesus. Most scholars today, however, would say the idea of church did not come from Jesus. The church is mentioned in the gospels but such passages reflect the experiences of the gospel writers decades after Jesus. There is no solid evidence that Jesus had any concrete plans for continuing his ministry into the future.

The church, then, was the response to the lack of a plan for life after Jesus. With that uncertainty, it’s not surprising that in the first centuries the church took many different, and often competing, forms. But in the 4^th century, the Council of Nicaea and the meetings that followed basically gave the church two tasks: to administer the sacraments, through which people received salvation, and to formulate and enforce church doctrine. At the same time, Emperor Constantine also made Christianity the new Roman state religion, conferring on the church the state’s protection, as well as significant material blessings.

Given Jesus’ silence on the matter, and the hand-in-glove relationship of the church and empire in its early centuries, it’s no surprise that the church has never figured out its relationship to government powers or its role in political affairs. But this is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: the church has never really figured out what is its actual purpose.

Today, people tend to take for granted the separation of church and state. Most don’t realize what an historically anomalous relationship this is. In the ancient world, temple and palace were usually side-by-side. In medieval Christendom, monarchs and the church were closely and complexly intertwined, and not infrequently at each other’s throats.

With the Reformation and the gradual rise of democracy, the relationship between government and religion became even more confusing and tense. Republican France is probably the best (or worst) case, where church and state are still trying to figure out their relationship. (Did you know that Notre Dame in Paris, while a cathedral of the Catholic Church, is nonetheless owned by the French government, which was therefore on the hook for its recent post-fire repairs?)

The rise of the nation state, in whatever its form, has resulted in the loss of church influence over rulers and the political process. The most famous summary of this was made by, of all people, Joseph Stalin, who is alleged to have sarcastically asked Winston Churchill, “How many divisions does the pope have?”

To cover that embarrassing reality, in modern times religious leaders have rushed to find opportunities to somehow interject themselves into government and politics. This can be as mundane as saying an opening prayer at a city council meeting to direct involvement by serving in government office. For me, the most incoherent example of this is watching grainy films from 1914 of troop trains heading to the front. Whether from Anglican Britain, agnostic France, Lutheran Germany, Catholic Austria, Orthodox Russia, in each case clergy are at the station platforms blessing the soldiers and assuring them God is on their side, as they head off to slaughter each other.

All of this simply reiterates the question I have long struggled with: whether institutional religion serves any helpful purpose now. Neither of the great religious figures of history, Buddha and Jesus, had much interest in religious institutions, or had much good to say about them. In this, Jesus was actually faithful to the Hebrew Bible’s ambivalence, and often hostility, towards religious institutions and authorities.

The popular reaction to their pronouncements most feared by Pastor Barker and many like him is, “Who cares? Why is you opinion more important than anyone else’s?” The church’s crumbling edifice as “salvation dispenser” has led many to find new relevance in politics and social movements. Sometimes the cause is noble and important, but whether it is or not the question remains: What does this have to do with Jesus?

Liberal clergy often talk of Jesus as a social reformer, or even political revolutionary, while conservatives portray Jesus as a Rambo-like crusader who will soon swoop down to establish God’s rule over the planet. For biblical scholars, however, such views mostly arise from preachers’ fevered imaginations and have little textual support. I have written many times before about the difficulty in getting a clear understanding of what Jesus was about. But you will struggle to find a Jesus who wanted to directly engage with the political forces of his time, or expected his followers to do so. To quote just one famous verse from the gospels (John 18), Jesus reassures Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.”

Of course, Jesus did talk a great deal about the kingdom of God. It did not seem to be a kingdom with any conventional political content, however. Yet Jesus made it seem that this kingdom was of utmost importance here and now. Unfortunately, most of his followers and most of the leaders of the church that came afterwards didn’t get his point.

For Jesus, God’s kingdom was not a reality to be built or imposed. Rather, it was something to be discovered and then entered. And the amazing thing, according to Jesus, is that it is already here, within us and around us, but we don’t have the eyes to see or the motivation to move. Making the blind to see and the lame to walk were some of Jesus’ most well-known miracles and they are what we need more than ever today. Showing the way to such a kingdom matters far more than joining in the jousting matches of today’s political circuses.

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