Wesleyans and the Public Square

Photo by Diana Vargas on Unsplash

Living in “the Beltway” is a fascinating thing. Politics is ever-present. This is, of course, our primary industry. It’s also part of everyday conversation in a way that it simply isn’t anywhere else in the US. I remember a dinner party that I attended just after I moved here in 2015. The presidential primaries were in full swing and dinner was running late, so our host asked everyone to go around the room and state our preferred candidate. I was shocked! I was raised to avoid certain topics in polite company, particularly politics at a dinner party. But here we were. Each person took their turn and announced their choice to the room. I knew that I was no longer in North Carolina. And to top it all off, I was the only member of my party at the dinner! 

This sort of direct political conversation is avoidable. But what isn’t avoidable is the fact that the Gospel has social repercussions. In Wesleyanism we could say that the changed heart may begin with the individual and his or her cooperation with the grace of God, but that changed heart lives in community, and learns to love others with the holy love of God. 

But how do we talk about this faithfully? How do we, as Wesleyans, approach the public square informed by the riches of our tradition? Given the state of current political discourse, both in Washington and around the country, how can we engage our communities with a vision steeped not in partisanship, tribalism, or superficial group-think, but steeped in the redeeming love of God found in Christ? 

This was the question put before twelve scholars and thought-leaders from the broad Wesleyan tradition in the summer of 2022. The twelve met in Washington, DC over the course of three days under the auspices of the John Wesley Institute where I serve as director. They came from Global Methodism, United Methodism, the Church of the Nazarene, and the Church of God, Cleveland; a diverse group of men and women. 

The John Wesley Institute is committed to gathering faithful Wesleyan scholars to produce accessible materials for the church. Over the past two years, the JWI has spearheaded efforts including The Next Methodism: Theological, Social, and Missional Foundations for Global Methodism and The Faith Once Delivered: A Wesleyan Witness, the work of nearly 60 Wesleyan scholars to describe the Christian faith in a way that is accessible to everyday people. But the task in the summer of 2022 was to craft a Wesleyan document on social witness. 

Talking and writing about social witness was not an easy task. Most of the scholars we gathered are not political theologians with the exception of Estrelda Alexander. I have written on the history of politics in eighteenth-century Britain, but that doesn’t always translate to an American context. One of our participants, Chappell Temple, was one of the authors of the social witness portion of the GMC Transitional Doctrines and Disciplines. Grant Miller is completing a PhD in political science. But only one participant, Jim Antle, is steeped in American political discourse, serving as the political editor of the Washington Examiner. Other scholars included: Dale Coulter, Beth Felker Jones, Joy J. Moore, Stephen Rankin, and David Watson. So our first task was to take the insights of scholars who work primarily in theological studies and find a way to translate those to the public square. We also had to deal with the Wesley brothers. 

The Wesley brothers were staunch monarchists. They were committed to the constitutional monarchy that emerged out of the “recent unpleasantness” of seventeenth-century English politics (and war), but John Wesley went so far as to say that one couldn’t be a Methodist and not be a monarchist! This didn’t go well with American Methodists during the American Revolution nor does it meet with much enthusiasm today. So there was also the work of translating Wesley and his thoughts into the current political climate where Wesleyans are found in monarchies, republics, and so much else. 

We decided as a group to mirror our work on The Faith Once Delivered document using the theme of the Imago Dei with the pattern: God/Trinity, Sin, Scripture and Tradition, Salvation, the life of the Church, and Final Things. What emerged was a 12-page document that is full of insights gleaned from Scripture and the Wesleyan tradition, but one that needed extensive editing. This task fell to me and to Grant Miller. We gave the piece more of a coherent voice and deleted anything that we felt diverted from a social witness focus. After this editing, the document was sent to political theorists, ethicists, and theologians from outside of the Wesleyan tradition. Their insights were vital. One wrote back that we had written a social witness document without ever mentioning government! So paragraphs were added to address this oversight. 

The document itself, A Wesleyan Social Witness: Holiness and the Public Square, is a call to order our social and political thinking according to scriptural Christianity. The document makes clear that at “the heart of a Wesleyan social ethic is the belief that our theological commitments must shape our social commitments, not the other way around.” (¶2) God is the focus of this document, not politics or our own interests. Arising from our commitment to be faithful in the public square, “we believe that a properly ordered society will reflect God’s will for relationships between people.” (¶3)

But this isn’t easy and the document doesn’t pretend that it is. However, it calls us to a renewed vision. While the term “social justice” has often been bandied about subjectively, the document calls us to a vision of “sanctified justice–justice as God understands it and has communicated to humankind in Christ and through Scripture.” (¶4) What this means at a basic level is that “loving God requires us to love our neighbors and to see all of creation in view of God’s great purposes.” (¶9) Even from these short quotations, it is obvious that this is a different way of approaching political questions.

One of the most important paragraphs in the document is a vision for political engagement based in the reality of that all persons are Image-bearers. This is the approach that Wesley used in his arguments for supporting the poor and fighting against the slave trade. I provide the entire paragraph to show the reader both the theological argument and its social repercussions:

The Image of God is the permanent truth about humans; it cannot be erased. It is one of the most basic truths about human beings. Human dignity is a God-given gift; we don’t earn it; it’s who we are. For this reason, Christian faith acts to protect and honor all humans, especially the most vulnerable (Proverbs 31:8-9; 1 Timothy 5). The Wesleyan tradition has shown this in various ways throughout history, including the work of abolitionists, an abiding concern for and engagement with the poor, and honoring the dignity of both men and women. To be human is to have dignity, whether we know it or act like it or not. We are meant to see the Image of God in one another. Image bearing is thus the basis of social relationships. (¶11)

One area in which the document is particularly strong is in declaring the goodness of men and women and acknowledging that this goodness is grounded in God’s creative work. The document claims that “God created us male and female; maleness is good, and femaleness is good.” It goes on to argue that this divinely gifted goodness is “a fundamental theological principle for thinking about human bodies, social ethics, and our relational lives together.” (¶14) In Wesleyan history, this can be seen in our commitment to value the voices of men and women, their experiences, and their dignity. 

However, the authors of the document were not unaware of the falleness of creation or of the continued repercussions of sin. It acknowledges that, “We live in a world that is in rebellion against its Creator. The Image of God in each of us has been marred by the impact of sin; though not erased…And this affects not only each person individually, but how we live together.” (¶19) But just as sin has social repercussions, so too does salvation. The heart changed by God’s love is loving. Or as the document states, “God’s pardoning love for us should inspire us to extend that same pardoning love to others. God’s gifts for us as individuals are meant to be expressed in the communities he has called us to be a part.” (¶31) By God’s grace, our interactions with others are also changed. Speaking to the work of Christian perfection, the document claims, “The love that is at the heart of Christian perfection is a love that overcomes boundaries of nation, language, and tribe. It is a transforming love that does not leave us stuck in sin on the individual level nor at the level of social evils. God’s love conquers all.”(¶34) Using this logic, the document names racism as sin. (¶12)

The document provides for a positive view of government “as a means by which flourishing - economic, social, religious, etc. - can take place safely.” Adding that, “Wesleyans are not anarchists…they believe that God has given us authorities for our betterment. (¶38) Only in the New Jerusalem, however, when God has made all things new will the peace and stability we desire be fully realized. And yet as Wesleyans we do not look upon a broken world from a distance. Instead, “God invites the church to cooperate in his work to heal the nations now.”  We cannot as Wesleyans argue for disengagement like some “Christians who seek to withdraw from civil society in the name of preserving and protecting the church.” (¶44) Wesleyans are an engaged people. 

And this is precisely why we wrote this document, because to engage authentically we need to do so faithfully. Hopefully, this document and the conversations that it engenders will help us as Wesleyans to do just that. It won’t tell anyone who to vote for or what political party to join or not. What it is designed to do is to help us think through these issues as followers of Jesus Christ, a work and a vision needed now more than ever.

Read A Wesleyan Social Witness: Holiness and the Public Square here.

Ryan N. Danker is director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, DC and assistant lead editor of Firebrand Magazine