I first began writing this essay series way back in July of 2022, with the goal of unpacking a new vision of what a politics for the church can look like, in the wake of the destruction wrought by the Christian left and Christian right. We come, finally, to the final essay, in which, following Stanley Hauerwas one more time in his essay “The Politics of Charity”, we examine three ways the church can shape itself as a social ethic for a more just and charitable world.
As we noted at the end of the previous essay, a more just world is also a world where that justice is paired with virtues like friendship, loyalty, truthfulness, and fairness, all of it leavened by a strong commitment to Aquinas’ greatest virtue: charity, which is the love of God and love of humanity. That all sounds good, but none of this is easy. What does it actually mean for Christians to practice a charity that is less concerned with being effective and quantifiable and just, and more concerned with just embodying that love in the world, consequences (and bottom lines) be damned? There is no coherent vision or complete political program presented by Hauerwas to answer this question, nor should there be; the nature of the charitable mindset he is commending to us precludes those kinds of totalizing systems, ideologies and answers. Instead, we are told that the church, in answer to the questions of justice and charity presented by the world, has the duty to be a paradigmatic community. In other words, when presented with examples and instances of the world’s brokenness, the Church’s answer is to act in the way that the Church should- as guided by the example of Christ as encountered in God’s revelation – in order for the world to see what it means to be a person. This is the crux of that earlier exhortation we explored, that “the first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.”
However, we aren’t left to our own devices completely at the end. Instead, Hauerwas presents three questions the Church should be asking itself about who it is. These three questions aren’t the only ones churches should be asking themselves. But they are a good starting point.
The first question is a reminder to be aware: that “the economic life of the church is…not irrelevant to how the church acts as a social ethic in the societies in which she exists.” The Church lives in a world largely defined by the economic realities of modern capitalism; everything has been given a economic value, all utility is understood in terms of dollars and cents, and we are all always evaluating decisions not in terms of virtues and values but via cost-benefit analyses, because that is the way we have been shaped by the world. Mammon is the almighty of the world, but the Church knows that Mammon’s power ends, and God’s doesn’t. Christ showed us that three days after the Cross. Thus, the Church must commit itself to evaluating value and worth in a different way, and must demand of its people that their economic lives mirror their Christian values. “This not only involves how Christians learn to use their possessions,” writes Hauerwas, “but also what kinds of economic life professions the community thinks it appropriate for Christian to participate in.” This is a key factor in being a paradigmatic community for the world to see. How we use our dollars matters, but just as important is how we acquire those dollars, because the instrumentalization required of monetary exchange doesn’t only operate in consumption; it also plays a key role in value-creation via the work we choose to do. This tells us, then, that contrary to much of the ethos of the modern church, there are definite professions and vocations that are out-of-bounds for Christians, and those are not just related to sexual expression. Should a Christian be a soldier? Should a Christian be a police officer? Should a Christian be a politician? These are all questions the Church has long contemplated. But what about these: should a Christian be a banker? Should a Christian be a venture capitalist? Should a Christian be working on fossil fuels? These are questions the Church must address with its members, and it should not be afraid to take a stand and say what is and isn’t off limits for someone who claims to be committed to being a part of this paradigmatic community representing Christ in the world.
The second question Hauerwas suggests concerns ecclesiology: “the question of how the church governs herself is crucial to what kind of social ethic she is.” This question of church governance is necessarily tied up in a question of politics. What is the politics that governs the church? How will the church make decisions and arrive at consensus together? This is a vitally important question that must be answered; to not answer what governing ethic the church engages is still to answer the question, because at the point that the answer is not thoughtfully considered, the worst habits of human organization rear their heads. “The crucial question,” Hauerwas askes, “is whether we are a determinative enough community that our politics can provide a basis for authority rather than a politics of fear?”
Finally, the third question is about care for strangers, because “how Christians care for the stranger is an essential mark of what it means to be the church.” This third question swings us back around to that question of effectiveness that we started this series with. What does stranger care mean for a church that isn’t bound by questions of statistics and sociology? What does it mean to care for our neighbors, to be a Good Samaritan, as an institution that understands itself as the hands and feet of Christ in the world?
Historically, Hauerwas reminds us, this has been practiced simply as caring for those who need it. “[I]t was no accident that Christians have been among the first to set up hospitals.” Simply providing a place to heal is a good start. This approach certainly comes with its fair share of critics who are still on the effectiveness and policy tracks; he notes that a common critique of this practice has been that these are merely practices of charity, “not dealing with the systematic forms of poverty and ill health”, but as we’ve been discussing here over the course of eight essays, for the church, there is no such thing as “merely” charity. Charity is our calling, because “the first object of the Christian social ethic is the kind and form of care it provides for those who have no other means to defend themselves.”
I want to end this first series of essays by focusing on that phrase “Christian social ethic.” That is what we’ve been thinking about throughout these essays: what is the Christian social ethic? This essay series has ranged far and wide, probably too much so at times to claim any real sense of coherence, but this is really the question at the heart of things in Hauerwas’ original essay, and in the reflection I have tried to do. What first grabbed me so strongly when I read “The Politics of Charity” three summers ago was Hauerwas’ biting critique of effectiveness as anything the church should ever be concerned about. I wanted that to be the central theme of this series, but again, I fear that at times I have strayed too far from that original animating impulse.
But, again, I want to use the idea of a social ethic to draw together the threads of this series and bring it to a close. Hauerwas brings his essay to close with this statement: “the church does not have a social ethic, but rather is a social ethic.” This statement is close to one I use often, which is that the church is not a social service organization. The church is the church, and when we say that, we say what it is for the world and for the hurting. It is the church. That means it is a people shaped not by social sciences or policy white papers or political platforms, but by the example and words of Christ as revealed on the Cross and in Scripture. It is “an institution that has learned to embody the form of truth that is charity revealed in the person and the work of Christ.” There is no thought given to effectiveness; as we saw in the story of the Good Samaritan, in fact, the social ethic that is the church often works counter to what the world would define as effective in the face of difficult situations. “Love God.” “Love your neighbor.” “Love your enemy.” These are the things commended to us. Love is not quantifiable, it is not measurable, it certainly doesn’t always make sense. The world would tell us that loving God is a fool’s errand, that loving your neighbor is dangerous, that loving your enemy is nonsensical. And maybe they are right about that. Let’s do it anyway.
Justin DaMetz 