October 12, 2005 7:30 PM
What Is Effective Faith-Based Political Engagement?
“Political ethics? Is there such a thing?” is what President Bush said jocularly to Jean Bethke Elshtain when she told him that was her field. It’s a punch line this self-defined “militant moderate” ethics professor has fielded many times before.
When it comes to the role of religion in politics, how do we steer an ethical course and thus avoid collapsing our faith into politics, so that it gets co-opted, or hesitating to bring our religious conviction into public life, so that it gets silenced?
Consider why neither of these approaches has worked politically or socially throughout our country’s history. “And even if they did,” Elshtain says, “they’re not the way to go.”
She offers instead two other approaches that she believes have stood the test of time. One she calls “prophetic witness,” reserved in her view for “momentous situations” and exemplified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The other is “contextual engagement,” in which citizens consider bringing their religious views into public life but first assess what is at stake for the common good.
In this lecture, Elshtain addressed the question, “How can I be faithful to my beliefs and engage the public in a faithful way?”