Season 6, Episode 6
This week, Nikki talks with Rick Barry, Executive Director of the Center for Christian Civics. Rick helps Christians think about what it looks like for their communities to show up in the public square, and in this episode he helps us to wrap our minds around what civic discipleship looks like and helps break down the variety of ways people understand “politics” today.
You can follow @therickbarry and @christiancivics on Instagram.
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action.
Host and Producer: Nikki Toyama-Szeto
Co-producer and Editor: David de Leon
Music: Andre Henry
Transcript
[00:00:00] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hello, this is Nikki Toyama-Szeto. I’m the executive director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today’s episode of 20 Minute Takes. Today, we talk with Rick Barry. He’s the executive director of the Center for Christian Civics based here in Washington, DC, and he talks to us about the different ways that people understand politics and cultivating a posture towards Christian faithfulness in the public sphere.
Join us for today’s episode of 20 Minute Takes.
Rick Berry, thank you so much for joining us here on 20 Minute Takes.
[00:00:52] Rick Barry: Thank you for having me, Nikki. I’m very excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Well, I have to say that as I have learned more about both you and the Center for Christian Civics, I have been so grateful for the way that the center shows up in the world, for the posture it’s trying to cultivate, I think particularly as Christians are having a tough time trying to navigate, you know, what does Christian faithfulness look like in the public sphere, especially as it intersects with politics.
Can you say a little bit of what was it that was the spark that caused you to think, oh, we need the Center for Christian Civics?
[00:01:32] Rick Barry: The genesis of our organization comes from my co-founder and me, who both have ministry backgrounds and professional political backgrounds on opposite sides of the aisle, both being fairly distressed, and this was, you know, 15 years ago… particularly distressed by the way we saw Christians on our side of the aisle acting more like their partisan allies than their spiritual brethren.
There was nothing really separating the way I was seeing Christians on the left think, speak, and act from the way non-Christians on the left thought, spoke, and acted. And my co-founder had the same to say about the Christians he was working with in the Republican Party. Our organization started to try to promote a healthier kind of civic discipleship, to try to promote a spiritual formation that encouraged Christians to think, speak, and act differently from the people who agreed with them about everything except Jesus.
[00:02:30] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm. I know that you all have this agitating and this vision over so many years. What do you think is happening right now, in this moment, in this year, in this particular season, that is making it particularly difficult for Christians, particularly when it comes to Christian civics?
[00:02:52] Rick Barry: What we’re seeing this year is really the fruit of several decades of unintentional spiritual malpractice. We have had this, and it’s cliche at this point to talk about how not talking about religion or politics has led us to not know how to have hard conversations or think in complex ways about important topics.
But it really does mean that for most of the last few decades, if a Christian wanted to think about or hear about or learn about the way their faith should shape their politics, the primary way they were learning about that was from political professionals who were trying to secure their vote and secure their support.
Most of our what I would call civic discipleship or political discipleship was coming from political outlets, not primarily spiritual outlets. Most seminaries until fairly recently didn’t have robust political theology programs. If they did, they were kind of a one or two course electives. Most pastors tried to stay apolitical by not talking about the way personal transformation might lead to changes in our civic posture, and that was just for fear of not wanting to seem partisan, but in that process, they left us unable to let our faith refine, challenge, change, or redeem our partisan impulses.
[00:04:24] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm hmm. Mm. Now that’s super helpful. We sort of talked about this phrase, civic discipleship. For Christians, civic discipleship, what in the world does that mean?
[00:04:36] Rick Barry: It means what does the gospel mean? How does the gospel shape us and reshape us in an environment where just by existing here we are implicated in civic authority?
We’re not subjects in a monarchy in the U. S. We are members of what I like to call a 330-million-person pharaoh committee. So, civic discipleship is: What does it mean to live out the gospel’s redeeming challenge toward the way we approach power?
In the way we handle our civic power? How does the way we think about the issues that we are most concerned about or the people we are most concerned about when we start to think about how we use our vote change because we are Christians? How does the way we talk about people who disagree with us or even relate to people who disagree with us change?
Because we are Christians. And what does civic authority, what does representative democracy and our current partisan landscape mean for witness and evangelism? How can we be discipled in such a way that we can act differently and tell the gospel story in our actions when we relate to the public square?
And how do we form evangelical relationships or missiological relationships or mutually formative discipleship relationships across the kinds of cultural divides that the world around us would say are uncrossable? How do we have, kind of, There is no Jew, Greek, man, woman, free, slave, northerner, southerner, blue state, red state, urban, rural—all are one in Christ Jesus?
[00:06:17] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow. I mean, as you’re talking about it, I’m getting what you’re saying about how our language sometimes within the church has really been imported by political operatives who’ve kind of looked at us as more of a voting bloc. Because I mostly would have thought of it as, “Oh, this is how you think Christianly about this issue.”
And I hear you really expanding that. I’ve heard you talk a bit about five definitions of politics, and that just really helped reorient me. Can you talk to us a bit about the five definitions of politics?
[00:06:54] Rick Barry: Sure. And this is actually what we lead with in our online course, Christian Civics Foundations, which covers what we consider to be the 10 most important topics in civic discipleship. And the pre-reading on it is exactly what we’re about to talk about. But I think at least in my background, I became a Christian in the early aughts’ evangelical movement on college campuses, and it was very common to talk about the four loves, I think, based on the C. S. Lewis book, and the four different Greek concepts that we all call love in English.
And unintentionally, we do kind of the same thing with the word politics in the U.S. We use one word to describe at least five different concepts. And the broadest one is the public square, the whole set of norms and traditions and institutions that we use to give order to our relationship to more people than we have the capacity to ever meet personally. And then we can also use the word politics to mean government, a specific institution in the public square that is one of the institutions God says is okay for humans to create and use in Scripture.
We use the word politics to mean the discussion of policy development, and policy development is the rules that governments create and implement. We can use it to mean power dynamics, which exist anywhere two or more people try to make a decision together, and we can use it specifically to describe partisan competition, which is a specific kind of power dynamics in American government and in the American public square.
[00:08:40] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Oh, that’s so helpful, because I think my shorthand is generally that fifth definition, like, “Oh, this is politics,” and I think about the competition and how different sides are lining up, and then the fourth definition, as you mentioned, I was like, oh, yes, yes, yes, I do think about politics as it relates to power and that sort of thing in any kind of human community, I guess.
[00:09:06] Rick Barry: Yeah, when people talk about office politics, they’re talking about that fourth definition. And when they say that I don’t like politics, they’re usually talking about the fifth, but you have to be thinking about five when they’re also thinking about one, two, or three, it’s very hard for people in the contemporary U.S. To get that you can think about government, or you can think about policies, or you can even think about the public square without thinking about a zero-sum competition between competing interest groups..
[00:09:36] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: We could have that kind of an imagination, right, Rick? Ha ha
[00:09:39] Rick Barry: But the gospel frees us up to do that. It teaches us that we should not think only of ourselves but actually consider others to be more important than ourselves. It teaches us that the end of history is going to be us being okay. So we don’t have to think that any flourishing other people experience now has to come at our expense.
We don’t have to think that addressing an injustice that doesn’t affect us takes away from our potential well being.
[00:10:08] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: When you think about the church, what role do you think the church should be playing with regard to, and this is where I’m not really fluent, the definitions of politics, and what role do you think the church should be playing either in the public square or maybe as it relates to the competitive version of electoral politics that we’re in right now?
[00:10:35] Rick Barry: The church I primarily view as a gathering place for individuals who have been saved and redeemed where together they become the expression of Jesus’ body in this world. He said, “I am present where two or more are gathered.” We are still, when we come together, collections of limited, imperfect people.
The church’s witness in the public square. And when I say the Church, I’m, talking, right now, in this part of the conversation, any local congregation. Any local congregation only represents Jesus fully and accurately in the kind of collective mosaic of the way he is changing, redeeming, and motivating the individuals who are there. And that sounds nice and abstract, to put it more concretely, the Bible says God cares about a lot of stuff.
The Bible says God cares about a lot more things than I know I am capable of caring about, let alone capable of doing anything about. If a local congregation is monolithic, if it only cares about one issue in one particular way, if it says that if you are a Christian, then the way you use your ability to effect change in your community has to be geared toward this issue and these few organizations working on it, that is giving a stunted view to our neighbors and our visitors of who Jesus is and what he cares about.
Any local congregation’s witness is more effective if people can show up to that local congregation and see that it is a collection of people who care about all sorts of expressions of sin and brokenness, mental health, domestic abuse, poverty, underemployment, education, job training—the list goes on and on of ways sin manifests in our individual lives and in our collective life. And so any local congregation, if it really wants to represent Jesus effectively, has to be made up of people who are experiencing and seeing and experiencing a call to address all of these different aspects and manifestations of the way sin is plaguing our neighbors.
Now, the church writ large, its job, I think, is to collect people from every tribe and tongue and put them into community together so that they can get a fuller understanding of who Jesus is and what his kingdom is going to be like when it comes in full through their relationship with each other.
The Bible ends with people from every community sitting around a table together and singing in concert in distinct languages.
And the church’s job, I think, in the U.S. is to find the kinds of people who are likely to be Republican, the kinds of people who are likely to be Democrat, and the kinds of people who are likely to not feel like they fit into either one, or feel like that entire arena is irrelevant to them or outside of them or beyond their grasp, and put us into community together.
[00:13:41] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yeah.
[00:13:42] Rick Barry: For some people, becoming a Christian might mean you end up changing your political affiliation or your political posture, because the things you care about have been so radically changed.
For some people, becoming a Christian might mean you don’t change your political orientation, but you change your approach to it, because the quality and the nature of your concern about these issues has been so radically changed and deepened. My friend and one of my board members says that it might not call Democrats to stop being Democrats, it might call some Democrats to become different kinds of Democrats, and similarly for Republicans.
[00:14:20] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow, that’s really helpful. I mean, oh, I think one of the things that I’ve really appreciated is that the course that you’re talking about, which I recommend to everybody, and the different resources and trainings that I’ve seen you do, it cultivates a posture that I think is really helpful.
Because one of the things that I’m frustrated with, with the different ways that so many folks are telling Christians what to do, especially with regards to politics, is they always stress test it against the global church, you know? And people in the global church can’t follow those things because they’re in a different system.
Then are they any less Christian, you know? But I’ve appreciated that you take us really down to the foundational things and then you help us apply it here in this American context. What advice do you have either for pastors or for individuals with regard to posture as we go through seasons of pretty intense campaigning, seasons of pretty intense messaging. What posture do you think that Christians should be cultivating as they navigate through the season?
[00:15:29] Rick Barry: Let me start by sharing just a quick story. Two hours ago I was on the phone with a pastor in the Southwest who was telling me about some of his congregants who gave him a flyer and an invitation to what they were calling a revival that was being hosted by a political activist organization.
It was a partisan group, not a church, not a parachurch ministry, but they were calling it a revival. And he showed up and there was a worship band playing worship music. And then the head of the activist organization gave a really theologically dicey and unfounded sermon connecting, not even really connecting, just quoting the Bible and talking about how it is their duty as Christians to pursue these particular partisan policies and saying that, you know, God has made you Christians so that you can, I, I want to try to keep it vague, but …
[00:16:35] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: yeah…
[00:16:36] Rick Barry: …these were not biblical issues. My advice to pastors is that if you are not addressing the effects that political messaging is having on your congregants’ moral formation, if you are not equipping your congregants to engage with political rhetoric in ways that make them as wise as serpents and try to preserve their moral status as being as innocent as doves, political operatives are. You are seeding that spiritual formation to people who get to talk to your congregants way more frequently than you do.
And it’s happening in their email box, in their podcast feed, on their TikTok algorithm, far more frequently than it’s happening in the pews on Sunday.
So you have to get comfortable addressing this. To individuals, I would say to be skeptical of any messaging that oversimplifies what I would call the moral anthropology of humanity. Anything that tells you that you or people like you are uniquely good in a way that people unlike you are uniquely bad is spiritually dicey. Evil in most historic Christian theology is not a kind of either/or dichotomy. It’s not some people in this world are unfallen and purely good, and it’s our mission to do battle against the people who are uniquely and unequivocally and irredeemably depraved. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All people reflect God’s image and distort it at the same time.
And if someone is speaking to you and trying to get you to view the world and view your political opponents as being uniquely broken in a way that you are exempt from ever being or immune from, that’s not reliable discipleship. That’s not a biblically accurate view of humanity. They are trying to manipulate you.
[00:18:48] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-Hmm.
[00:18:48] Rick Barry: And you should probably start to be skeptical of the rest of what they are trying to get you to think, say, or do.
[00:18:56] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Well, Rick, I, I tell you, you know, sometimes as I’m thinking about, engaging with politics, right? They say the two hardest topics, the things you should never talk about, are religion and politics. I am glad that you are there in the mix and in the crux of these things. Rick, one of the things that I’ve appreciated is that you’re not just teaching and training folks, but you are also gathering folks twice a month to pray, to pray for this political moment, to pray for Christian faithfulness and fruitfulness in this moment.
And I have found those prayers to be so powerful. Would you mind closing this episode by leading us through one of the prayers?
[00:19:33] Rick Barry: God, you are our great and glorious King. And you have seen fit to place us in a country where we share the responsibility that a king had in the Old Testament.
And we share those responsibilities with 300 million other people, all from different people groups, different political tribes, different cultural tongues. Thank you for trusting us enough to put us in a place where we have these unique privileges, these unique opportunities, these unique responsibilities.
We confess that we have not always taken these responsibilities seriously, and that we have often taken these privileges and these opportunities for granted. We have seen our citizenship, our relationship to the public square, either as something extraneous that we don’t want to be burdened with, or as something selfish, something to be used for our own good, instead of for the sake of others; we have not looked at how we can use them for the good of our neighbors. Jesus didn’t act that way when you sent him here. He didn’t give in to the temptation to use his power for his own sake, and he did not give in to the temptation to withdraw from it and live a comfortable private life. He didn’t resent the mission field you gave him. Instead, he endured it, even when enduring it was overwhelming and frustrating. Even when enduring it led him to sweat blood and go to the cross. We ask you to help us grow in patience, grow in endurance, grow in generosity, and grow in courage in the face of the daunting challenges and responsibilities of being part of the American public square. Let the way your people approach the public square serve as a signpost to the people around us who share our country, but not our faith.
Help the way that we engage with politics, with government, with partisanship, and with civic life to actually demonstrate the character of Christ to the people who might agree with us about politics, but don’t yet agree with us about Jesus. Help us think, speak, and act differently because of who Jesus is, what he has done for us, and what he has promised to us.
We pray these things in his name so that when his kingdom comes, more of the people around us can look at it and say that they already recognized it because of the way they saw your people engaging with American politics now. Amen.
[00:22:01] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Amen.
Rick, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.
[00:22:05] Rick Barry: Thank you for having me.
[00:22:07] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: If you’d like to hear more about the work of the Center for Christian Civics, to access the free foundations class, or if you’re interested in the prayers that we discussed, please check out the website.
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. We’re edited by David de Leon; I’m your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and the music is done by Andre Henry. You can find us on the web at christiansforsocialaction.org. Give us five stars, write a review, and share about the podcast with your friends.
