Rendering to God

 

John Singleton Copley - The Tribute Money (1782) 

A few days ago, I wrote an article about Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church. In that article, I mentioned that the Russian government and the Church were collaborating together to establish a new order in Russia. Without resurrecting that horse, I feel that it is necessary for me to talk about the Church’s involvement in political affairs.

Metropolitan Jonah, retired Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, has been giving a series of lectures at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington, DC. The lectures themselves focus on various aspects of the Orthodox faith and are very interesting. His Beatitude, however, recently talked about politics. In a discussion he delivered about Orthopraxy, he talked about the destruction of the inner city, libertarianism, and other aspects of current affairs that have no place in a discussion of Orthopraxy (practice of the Church).

Personally, I don’t mind it if bishops and priests have their own political ideas. I don’t mind if they discuss said ideas on the internet. What I mind is when politics is discussed from the pulpit and when the Church gets involved in issues that do not directly have anything to do with her.

Not so long ago, I was watching an interview with a traditionalist Roman Catholic priest out in California. His interviewer asked him if it was okay to preach about politics from the pulpit during an election season. Father X. pointed out that it was not his business to tell people who to vote for and what issues to vote on. From the pulpit, he was allowed to talk about the moral implications of said issues, but not to state outright how people should vote and what they should think.

You see, there is a massive difference between preaching about morality from the pulpit and gathering votes for your favorite candidate. A priest can talk about how immoral abortion is and what a problem it creates in terms of demography. However, he should not talk about which candidate he personally endorses for the Senate. A hieromonk can preach against homosexuality, but he has no right to tell people how to vote.

The problem I had when listening to Metropolitan Jonah’s lecture (since deleted from YouTube) was that he was telling his listeners and, by extension, the viewers what to think and how to feel. I told a friend of mine that if he endorsed monarchism as the Orthodox way of ruling, then I would shut down the thing. Mercifully, there was nothing like that.

The Church has never stated what the appropriate form of government should or should not be. Russian monarchists will tell you that monarchy works best. However, Russian history indicates that monarchy only works well when you have somebody ruling with a strong fist like Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. While those men were anointed by bishops to serve Russia as monarchs, the Church in no way has endorsed monarchy as being the right form of government.

You see, the Church is beyond politics. In the early centuries and for most of Church history, believers have tried not to stand out. If they held public office, they kept their faith personal. Only when they themselves were affected would they speak truth to power. For example, St. Demetrius was ordered by the governor of Thessalonica to persecute the Christians in the city. When he told the governor that he wouldn’t do it because it was against his religion, only then did he confess to being a Christian. Not before.

In the Gospels, Christ stated outright that we should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Caesar represents the government and the political life of the world in which we live. We are to fill out our taxes, vote, and do what is appropriate for us as citizens. However, we should not mix our spiritual life up with the political world in which we live.