Is Your Church Liturgy Political? Worship as Politics

Editor’s note: The articles in our political theology series are the opinions of the authors, not those of Logos. We are publishing a breadth of voices to reflect varying perspectives within the church.

G. K. Chesterton claimed he never discussed anything except politics and religion. “There is nothing else to discuss.”¹ By this, Chesterton meant these two topics compass the whole of human activity and thought: “Nothing of importance can be separated entirely from its social effect, which is politics, or from its ultimate value, which is religion.”²

Previously, I would have said I am not like Chesterton—nor do I want to be. Chesterton is just “being Chesterton” here, I would have said. I believed that valuing religion and politics with equal fervor, as Chesterton expresses, is precisely what’s wrong with so much of our approach to religion and politics.

But I have changed.

The social imaginary I inherited early on in my Christian formation involved a certain way of relating values, institutions, laws, and symbols. Holding my political cards close while being bold with my theological convictions struck me as the right way—the only way—to preserve the gospel from being reduced to something utilitarian.

But then I encountered another social imaginary.

Following the footsteps of Cornelius Van Til, my theology professor John Frame helped me see that neutrality does not—indeed, cannot—exist in the public square, including in Christian engagement with that public life. I began to apply Jesus’s teaching that “no one can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24) to my political theology. A new social imaginary was invading my safe world.

As Radical Orthodoxy thinker John Milbank says, “Once there was no secular.”³ Christ desires the marriage of our liturgical life and political life, and what God has united man shall not pull asunder. You can only serve one master.

Our fraught political context

Many increasingly sense our society has entered something of a new “world.” Aaron Renn has proposed that, whereas American society once held Christianity in high cultural esteem (what he calls a “positive” world), and later saw it as something to be reasonably tolerated (“neutral” world), we now inhabit a “negative” world in which American culture is openly hostile to Christian faith. Christians mindful of these developments wonder how to respond.

Whatever one ultimately thinks of Renn’s proposal, its current narrative power owes itself to the fact that it highlights shifts in our culture that many feel. These shifts explain why narratives of decline resonate with so many, and why conceding a narrative of hope feels like admitting defeat to a secular narrative. We are witnessing the fracturing of a society that Christians helped build.

On top of this, Christians do not always share the same political theology. This eclectic mix spans everything from the dying religious right of the Reagan era; to various iterations of Protestant thought like Neo-Calvinism and faithful presence; to the fringe yet resurrected school of Theonomy in places like Idaho; to Niebuhr-esque realism and sensitivity; to the Benedict Option popularized by the Orthodox writer, Rod Dreher; to Catholics that seek to revive the integralist proposal. Human rights and human freedom are not just contested realities between the church and culture, but within the church. The same goes for our views of the state, family, the individual, and now even corporations.

In short, the reason politics is so fraught today is that its foundations are so deeply contested—not only in secular society, but also in the church. No wonder we feel such intense polarization in our current cultural moment!

Reimagining our political activity

What is the Christian’s primary political responsibility in a context like this? Most of us imagine our political duty as what we do “out there.” It’s voting. It’s coalitions. It’s conventions. It’s community involvement. It’s online influencing.

However, as I suggested at a recent Theology on Tap event, what we do as the church is political and what we do in the world is liturgical. That is, the church’s work of being the church—its worship—is political, even as something like marching in Washington, DC, is liturgical. In short, liturgy is political and politics is liturgical.

While this likely inverts how many of us view the relationship between politics and religion, Scripture’s witness and the church’s Great Tradition would be far more comfortable with this inversion than we are today.

The church’s witness to the kingdom in its gathered worship, prior to its witness in the public square, is to be our first and primary political responsibility.

As I want to argue, the church’s witness to the kingdom in its gathered worship, prior to its witness in the public square, is to be our first and primary political responsibility. To state this more provocatively, we are doing politics in gathered worship.⁴

Political liturgies and liturgical politics

For some time now, evangelical churches have experienced a revived interest in liturgical worship.⁵ Historically, though, liturgy functioned as a civic word before it was a churchy word. As Nicholas Wolterstorff points out,

In classical Greek the word was used to refer to a service performed by an individual for the benefit of the public, usually at his own expense. For example, if a warship had to be outfitted, sometimes, instead of taxing the citizenry as a whole, the officials invited a wealthy individual to do the outfitting as a personal contribution to the public. Such a public service was a liturgy, and the person performing it, a liturgete (leitourgos). Etymologically the word leitourgia comes from two Greek words, leitos and ergon, meaning, respectively, “of the people” and “action.”⁶

From the combination of these two words, we get what we today call “liturgy.”⁷ Yet as Wolterstorff argues, what the church originally took up as its “liturgy” is not what we would imagine today as “liturgy.” Rather, the church’s liturgy grew out of a political soil that we should be comfortable digging our hands into. The church and its worship are political.

The politics of God’s kingdom

Jesus and the apostles talked about politics a lot, and not in the way we often do, where we point to some Bible verses to inform how we vote. A more foundational reality bears repeating—Jesus used political kingdom language as his primary metaphor for the gospel: “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). As the works of N. T. Wright and Peter Leithart have shown, the whole mission of Jesus to Israel and the world was political through and through.

Jesus picked twelve disciples from different political camps within Israel and organized them around himself (Luke 6:12–15). Twelve represents the twelve tribes of Israel, symbolizing that Jesus was rebuilding a political community around himself called the ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—the church.

Εκκλησία, like liturgy, is also a civic word. It means the “gathering of those summoned.” In ancient Greece, the citizens in a city–state, when summoned, would assemble together in an open space called the agora. We first find this in Homer’s Odyssey where the word connotes both the assembly of the people as well as the physical setting. What we call the church, in other words, is a corporate body summoned by a political leader—the Lord Jesus.

The church is its own politic and its churchly activities are its political program.

Jesus’s followers call him Lord (κύριος) close to two hundred times in the New Testament—a profoundly politically charged word in the first century, as it suggests that if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not (Mark 12:17). What this means is that the church is its own politic and its churchly activities are its political program.

Use Logos’s Search tool to find all the locations in the New Testament where κύριος is used to address Jesus.

The church as politic

We confess that the church is the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), the bride of Christ (Eph 5:22–33), and the family of the living God (Eph 2:19). But the church is also the center of God’s purposes and program in history (Eph 3:10). Christ founded the church to be the sacrament of the kingdom (Matt 16:18–19): the former is a visible sign pointing to the invisible reality of the latter. This means that your local church is a visible manifestation of that universal, eternal reality.

We are mistaken, then, to treat the purpose and mission of the church—worship, evangelism, mercy ministries—as if they are something less than the central political program that we Christians pursue. The mission of the church is our politics. We don’t have a politic “out there.” We are a politic, because our first loyalty is to the one who has ascended a throne and is called the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16).

What this means is that our fraught context (see above) does not require a new way of engaging the world, but simply a thickening and deepening of our corporate identity as the church-as-politic. How we respond to political challenges, whether in this age or any age, remains the same.

As my clergy friend, Ken Robertson, has noted, we need a framework for political discipleship as much as we need a framework for sexual and vocational discipleship. If we are not being formed by Christ in the area of politics, we are leaving a vacuum in this one area of Christ’s Lordship, which often gets filled with partisanship or privatization. The danger of partisanship and privatization is that our faith becomes a servant of some other agenda, and Jesus becomes an accessory for a lesser goal.

If we are not being formed by Christ in the area of politics, we are leaving a vacuum in this one area of Christ’s Lordship.

Political discipleship will mean that the church and its members pursue worship as passionately as they do voting. And consequently it means the church’s ministries will necessarily reflect kingdom priorities regardless of the partisan echo they may create.

Seeing the political within the liturgical

Although forms of worship vary across churches, I would contend that all are liturgical—some liturgies are just “thicker” than others. So to close, I want to suggest church leaders approach their gatherings like political assemblies and their orders of worship like political documents.

Consider, what would it look like to “thicken” that liturgy for the sake of political discipleship? How might you connect some dots for your people? Begin to ask yourself and help your people ask themselves:

• What is the liturgy doing to us?
• What is it inviting us to live into each week?
• What is it communicating, and how does it apply politically?
• Does it reflect that a King is present and reigning?
• What does it imply about our citizenship in heaven—but also on earth “as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10)?

To illustrate, Anglican liturgical worship contains the following movements, each of which can be viewed politically:

1. Processional entrance

Anglican worship begins with a procession: an ancient liturgical practice that survives today in most wedding services, but in this case it is a procession of the cross instead of a bride. This signals Christ’s entry as the reigning King (Mark 11:1–11) and his leading of us in triumph (2 Cor 2:14). Worship begins not with a minister saying, “Hello, thanks for being here,” but with a political statement: The world’s rightful King is among us, and he has triumphed by dying on a cross for his enemies.

2. Opening acclamation

Following this, a loud acclamation declares that the kingdom is now in our midst: “Blessed be God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever.”

3. Summary of the Law

Next we recite Jesus’s summary of the law (Matt 22:37–40), thereby declaring love as a serious theological and political category.

4. Confession & Absolution of sin

God’s people confess their sins and receive fresh forgiveness each week. This historic practice forms us to see those with blood on their hands as not just “out there,” but in the gathered assembly. Speaking into our political context, this rite overturns our sense of the guilty and cultivates honesty and humility among God’s citizens.

5. Passing of the peace

Having recognized the peace that God gives to his reconciled people, we then extend that peace to each another. We have peace with one another, not on the basis on worldly allegiances, but solely on what Christ has done. This stands in sharp contrast to the divisions that so often exist in society.

Summary

Many more examples abound, from the Eucharist, to the singing, to petitioning a king. Each part of the liturgy aims to (re)calibrate the heart, mind, and body around the gospel of the kingdom, and so forms us as its citizens. The liturgy politicizes us to be mature kingdom people who interact and intersect, dialogue and disagree, anchored in these areas of ultimate concern.

To this end, we now make it our aim to “never discuss anything else except politics and religion.”⁸

Essential reading on the intersection of church, liturgy, and politics

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Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule (Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture | SCDS)

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1. G. K. Chesterton, “August 14, 1926: On Modern Controversy,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 34: The Illustrated London News 1926–1928, ed. Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 143.
2. Chesterton, “August 14, 1926: On Modern Controversy,” 145.
3. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9.
4. As to the other side of this inverted equation that says “the world and culture are liturgical,” I would point you to the works of James K. A. Smith’s cultural liturgies trilogy. Smith’s project makes use of the Augustinian anthropological insight that humans are homo liturgicus; that is, we are inherently religious—we are what we love. In other words, what we practice in our politics and culture-making reflects what we love. Politics is liturgical worship in the public square.
5. My own denomination, the Anglican Church in North America, though relatively small, has had a disproportionate influence within this revival.
6. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Reformed Liturgy,” in Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition, ed. Donald K. McKim (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 274.
7. From leitos, meaning, “of the people,” and ergon, meaning “action,” we receive the oft-suggested meaning of liturgy as “the work of the people.” But Wolterstorff continues, “In numerous books on liturgy it is said, accordingly, that the word originally meant action of the people. And often nowadays an argument for more participation of the people in the church’s liturgy is based on this claim. It is said that for something to be liturgy, it must be action of the people and not action of a few priests or pastors. But the word leitourgia never did mean action of the people. It meant action for the benefit of the people. A liturgy was a type of public service.” Wolterstorff, “Reformed Liturgy,” 274. However we parse the “of” and the “for” of “liturgy,” though, its original civic meaning remains.
8. Chesterton, “August 14, 1926: On Modern Controversy,” 143.