NewsSteven R. Harmon | March 19, 2025
Two months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, not a day has passed without news headlines of multiple controversial efforts of his administration to reshape the institutions of American government.
Team members of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency seem guided by Facebook (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg’s internal motto: “Move fast and break things.” DOGE is indeed moving fast, and things are getting broken.
Steven Harmon
When the deep polarizations of the American public over whether these developments are helpful or harmful run right through the American church, the temptation of the church is to avoid addressing such divisive matters at all costs. But as a Christian theologian, I believe these debates about American government are in fact matters of urgently important concern for theology and the church.
Two different visions of the role of government are under contestation. One is a minimalist vision of government doing as little as possible as cheaply as possible. DOGE exemplifies this vision, but it has antecedents (but not full-blown precedents) in the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the more recent “Tea Party” Republicans.
“These debates about American government are in fact matters of urgently important concern for theology and the church.”
Another vision is government understood as how we necessarily attend to the well-being of community writ large (the common good). In this vision, government is a provider of services, programs, institutional structures and initiatives that foster a just, healthy and securely cared-for society.
Scandinavian countries have done this successfully of late, but there’s a trajectory within the American tradition of governance with such goals that runs from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (continued and expanded in significant ways by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower) through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. I’m personally in favor of this latter vision.
My maternal grandfather worked for a time for one of the institutional expressions of this vision of American government, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and my father’s career from college graduation through retirement was in the service of another, the Soil Conservation Service — now Natural Resources Conservation Service — of the United States Department of Agriculture. When our son was a toddler and we read cereal boxes and other food packaging to him during meals, we would point to the USDA seal and mention that his grandfather worked for an agency of the USDA. Whenever he saw the USDA seal, our son would point to it and exclaim, “The Grandpa symbol!”
Why are such “political” things matters of theological and ecclesial concern? In brief, I offer these three reasons:
First, the prophet Jeremiah’s message from God to the Jewish people of God living in exile in the civil order of Babylon is instructive for American Christians in thinking about our relationship to the American civil order: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).
The American civil order is not the ultimate citizenship of the people of God who live in exile within in it, but its welfare is the concern of the people of God.
The vision of American government as a provider of services, programs, institutional structures and initiatives that foster a just, healthy and securely cared-for society is one for which Christians should contend as an expression of seeking the welfare of this city where we live in exile.
Second, when I was serving a church as pastor during my seminary studies, I preached a sermon series on the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. I found Presbyterian theologian Frederick Dale Bruner’s theological commentary on the Gospel of Matthew a most helpful resource for that series. I’ve thought much recently about his observations regarding the inescapably political nature of the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, the one for “daily bread,” which I found meaningfully relevant enough to quote in that sermon three decades ago.
Bruner warned against the temptation to spiritualize this petition by writing, “The prayer for bread in the fourth petition should be allowed to remain a prayer for bread.”
“Jesus teaches us to pray for the economic order and for everything that goes into the just production, distribution and purchase of bread and rice.”
Then he wrote: “Bread costs money, money requires work, work requires good government, good business, and good labor. Thus, when we pray for bread we are praying at the same time for money, jobs, government, business, labor, good crops, good weather, roads, justice and for everything economic, political and social. The fourth petition is the political-economic petition. Here Jesus teaches us to pray for the economic order and for everything that goes into the just production, distribution and purchase of bread and rice.”
The vision of American government as a provider of services, programs, institutional structures and initiatives that foster a just, healthy and securely cared-for society is one for which Christians should contend as an expression of our praying of the “political-economic petition” of the Lord’s Prayer, in “putting feet to our prayers.”
Third, the mission of the church is to join God in what God is doing to make the reign of God more fully present in the world as God moves the world toward the full realization of the reign of God, the fulfilment of God’s goals for all creation. While the American civil order is not the reign of God, the fuller realization of the reign of God involves the fuller realization of God’s goals for human society, and thus the American civil order has a participation in the reign of God.
And while the reign of God cannot be reduced to the flourishing of life, the God who has a reign is in the furthering of the flourishing of life business. The mission of the church involves joining God in the divine work of furthering the flourishing of life.
The vision of American government as a provider of services, programs, institutional structures and initiatives that foster a just, healthy and securely cared-for society is one for which Christians should contend as an expression of our participation in the divine work of furthering the flourishing of life.
These are some of the reasons I am publicly concerned as a Christian theologian about the current assault on the vision of American government as a provider of services, programs, institutional structures and initiatives that foster a just, healthy and securely cared-for society. I’m also concerned as a Christian theologian because a great many American Christians have supported this assault and have believed themselves to be acting on the basis of Christian convictions in doing so.
I hope readers of Baptist News Global share my concerns, too, for the sake of the welfare of the American city, its contribution to the provision of daily bread and the furthering of the flourishing of life.
Steven R. Harmon serves as professor of historical theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. His most recent books are Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church: Partners in the Pilgrimage to Unity and Seeds of the Church: Towards an Ecumenical Baptist Ecclesiology (co-edited with Teun van der Leer, Henk Bakker, and Elizabeth Newman).
Related articles:
This is not Christianity | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Theologians push back on JD Vance’s view of ‘ordered love’
The kingdom of God is not about efficiency | Opinion by David Weatherspoon
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