Partisanship and confession
Part Il: Partisan confessions
Politics Is For Power, How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change
By Eitan Hersh
Scribner, 2020
288 pages
In the first part of this essay, I articulated why good partisanship is an important ethic missing from our Pietist political imagination, which has historically been non-partisan or even, at times, anti-partisan. I then explored how some of the hang-ups we have with partisanship are similar to or shaped by the same hang-ups we have with confession. Now, I sketch out a framework of “partisan confession” to help cultivate an ethic of good partisanship that remains rooted in our tradition.
Partisan confession, as I envision it, is a means of identifying with and contributing to a political party with a humble spirit. This has better spiritual outcomes than blind partisan loyalty and better political outcomes than a disengaged independence.
It is worth saying that a partisan confession is decidedly not a “confessional party,” the sort of project seen throughout modern history that attempts to harness the power of politics to advance an interpretation of the faith. C.S. Lewis railed against instantiations of a so-called “Christian Party” in his “Meditation on the Third Commandment”:
Whatever it calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity; it will have no more power than the political skill of its members gives it to control the behaviour of its unbelieving allies. But there will be a real, and most disastrous novelty. It will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole.
Today in the United States, Christian Nationalism would be considered a 21st-century manifestation of the confessional party impulse. There isn’t a Christian Nationalism party per se, but rather there is a Christian Nationalism faction that resides in coalition with other groups that make up the Republican Party.
Partisan confession is not about judging the moral goodness nor tactical fit of any specific party — be it the Republicans, Democrats, or something else — but rather the practice of discerning how we engage with and contribute to party structures. There’s also a gentle nudge to take on with grace the moral ambiguities of partisanship, rather than be self-satisfied with the moral aloofness of political independence.
Partisanship understood as a confession goes something like this: I am declaring that I am a part of our common world in a part-icular way that means I bring certain values, convictions, entanglements, desires, needs, and tactics to the democratic process. Reflecting back on the ancient Hebrew idiom from earlier in this essay, partisan confession is the act of vulnerably reaching out my hand to join with fellow partisans in order to properly live out my own political beliefs, knowing that doing so may offend or alienate those I disagree with (including fellow Christians!), or may embarrass me when my fellow partisans pursue something that at the very least makes me cringe or even find to be outright unconscionable.
Such an approach hits both sides of confession’s double valence. Similar to how confessions-of-faith define belief within the boundaries of a denomination or other faith community, partisan confessions humbly declare that “I am a part of something” rather than “I am apart from something.” Sometimes there is a prophetic value in taking the outsider stance, but even the prophet Jeremiah encouraged the Judeans to seek the welfare of the city they had been exiled to and were now a part of (29:7).
A partisan confession of sin, on the other hand, is a sober acknowledgement that partisanship involves power, and the myriad temptations that come with power. Confessing our partisan feelings and activities — for example, naming the slightest urge we may have to hate someone who is carrying the other ticket — invites the sort of accountability that reminds us that we and all of our strivings are ultimately only a small part of God’s entire creation. As Paul wrote to the factitious church in Corinth: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
In pursuing partisanship, confession no longer has two seemingly separate meanings, but rather it now has two complementary emphases. Instead of being “a part claiming to be the whole” we are humbly claiming to be only a part of something, but nevertheless understanding ourselves, our allies, and our so-called foes in the light of the whole.
Partisan confession is not only consistent with the Pietist ethos, but in practice looks like good partisanship.
First, partisan confession provides an outlet for effective civic engagement. It relaxes the tension between the reality that while no party is perfect, neither is sitting on the sidelines as an independent necessarily an appropriate response for the political moment we find ourselves in.
In the book “Politics is for Power,” the political scientist Eitan Hersh articulates a compelling vision of “the redemption of politics as a service to others, a form of politics where participants get power to improve their communities.” Hersh’s foil is a phenomenon called “political hobbyism” — a disposition to treat national politics like entertainment, rooting for your political party like it is a favorite sports team, and believing that merely watching hours of cable news is somehow a heroic feat of citizenship. Instead, Hersh explores stories of embracing power, especially at the local level. One story is of a New Testament professor who follows the lead of a sophomore student organizing a local party precinct. The professor volunteered as precinct accountant and learned the tax code (perhaps the one thing more complex than Ancient Greek!) so that he and his student-turned-precinct-captain could hire their own organizer. As the professor tells Hersh, “these groups come in with their data and their people, and then they’re gone… We need a persistent organization on the ground between elections.”
Second, by making ourselves vulnerable to critique, partisan confession shows that we have skin in the game. When we have the courage to take a stand, it is by definition possible that we will be embarrassed later. Arguably it is more compelling when we say what we believe despite the risk of being proven wrong, rather than waiting until we are certain we are right.
The pundit David Brooks recently published a piece in The Atlantic titled “Confessions of a Republican Exile.” In it, he shares how his lifelong commitment to conservative values —he says he identifies most with the now-extinct Whigs — and disenchantment with today’s Republican Party has now led him to awkwardly reside at the outermost feather of the Democratic coalition’s centrist wing. Brooks takes a stand, and unsurprisingly that stand would be subsequently criticized by both the left and right. Although I can’t imagine there are more than a few thousand “Whig Democrats” out there, for those who do exist Brooks gives them language to articulate their values; for Brooks’ other readers, the piece is a provocation to reexamine their own values and allegiances.
Third, confessing to be “a part of something” is inherently neighborly by identifying a location from which others can relate to us. We can encounter neighbors through solidarity and fighting for common convictions; yet we can also come face-to-face with neighbors on the opposite side of the issue through debate, dialogue, and our common humanity. Partisans share their political identities to other people so that they better can be received as they are, and understanding partisanship as someone’s confession makes it easier to receive them on their own terms.
A Pietist ethic of good partisanship is not about being a “proud” partisan but rather about being present within party life. On one hand, I’m taking my cue from James Davison Hunter’s call to Christians to be “faithfully present” to the institutions of the world. On the other hand, I am trying to place myself in the shoes of a local party chair: if my membership roster consisted of only proud partisans, I would dread the next uninspiring candidate or potential gossip-scandal that would dampen enthusiasm; if someone walked in the door saying they were committed to being present as a partisan as an expression of their faith, I would feel freed up from short-term deals and superficial campaigns, and instead believe I had a little more backbone to plan, organize, and dream.
When Jesus answers the question “who is my neighbor?” with the parable highlighting the mercy of an ethnoreligious outsider, there is no indication that the Good Samaritan subsequently stopped being Samaritan, stopped holding controversial Samaritan beliefs, or for that matter stopped engaging in whatever Samaritan business had him on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho to begin with. What mattered was the Samaritan’s presence in that moment. Similarly, confessing a partisan identity places our convictions on the map, and good partisanship gets us on the road from conviction to action, ready to encounter whomever we might find along the way.
The week after Midsommar in Sweden is a liminal period between the seasons of work and vacation. It also is when the island of Gotland is host to Almedalsveckan, a distinctive politics festival that attracts tens of thousands taking advantage of the reflective nature and good weather of late June to strengthen the democratic spirit. Each of Sweden’s eight political parties receive a dedicated half-day to be the center of attention, where their party leadership gives the keynote address from the main stage and their policy proposals are fleshed out through presentations, panels, and other programs. It is believed that the spontaneous encounters between members of different parties walking to and from any of the thousands of events build up social solidarity despite visible disagreements.
Non-party organizations also put on events, including Equmeniakyrkan, the Evangelical Covenant Church’s sister church in Sweden. Inside a seaside church in the city of Visby, panels bring together political representatives, church leaders, civil society professionals, journalists, academics, and more. For example, one recent program was titled “When the church, the party, or the association goes off the rails, who’s responsibility is it?” It explored the tension between a commitment to maintain the independence of voluntary associations from the state (similar to the First Amendment’s “freedom of assembly” in the United States) and the risk that these organizations may fall under authoritarian leadership that indoctrinate or otherwise create unsafe conditions for participating youth. Panelists advanced a relationship between church and party that resembled something akin to accountability partners, aware that their mutually assured freedom rests on a foundation of being able to be transparent about their own institutional faults.
The image this conjures up — of a church in the midst of a multi-partisan dialogue on the issues, secure in the understanding that no party nor church is perfect or has to be perfect in order to engage, and nevermind the warm summer breeze — is the not-so-farfetched vision of what can be secured when people of faith understand their partisanship as a form of confession.
To be sure, in the American context we don’t have an island festival to retreat to, much less a robust infrastructure of party participation (sometimes it feels like being “a Democrat” or “a Republican” is just being resigned to receive endless spam fundraising texts). Instead of islands, what we have are lifeboats in a sea of federalism: the local parties and issue advocacy groups that make up the national parties. Whereas Swedish government and other parliamentary systems function by multiple parties forming a majority coalition; we have two national parties both composed of multiple factions and both engaged in a perpetual tug-of-war with each other.
This may seem like cause to despair. But this is where I see the politics of the Kingdom of God: an immanent politics that exists perpendicular rather than parallel to our worldly politics. Instead of disregarding the differences between left and right as trivial matters, we can instead shrink the distance between hope and hopelessness as we strive to make our common home a better place.
Confession is not simply where repentance meets identity, but also where courage meets grace. If we are bold enough to attend to the work of healthy political partisanship, willing to wade in the muddle of the common good, we can enrich our tradition of prophetic voices and pastoral peacemakers with a groundedness that witnesses to a God who became flesh and lived among us. By being honest about where we stand and who are willing to take a stand with, even if such a stand feels embarrassing or divisive, we can demonstrate one more location in the world to where grace extends.