Left, Right & Christ: A Q and A with Harper and Innes

Innes: My approach to all these positions proceeds from a few fundamental truths. (1) God rules the universe and establishes government. (2) Human beings are sinful. (3) Christ is redeeming us, but what predominates in the world is sin and restraining grace. (4) God gives us government for two purposes (insofar as we are fallen creatures): to punish evil-doing and to praise well-doing [Rom. 13:1-7; I Peter 2:14]. (5) As he gave government for a specific purpose, he gave it for a limited purpose. So from those premises, one's positions on these various issues take shape.

1. Poverty & Health Care: Caring for the poor and securing health care services are the business of individuals, churches, businesses, and private associations.
2. Abortion: Government should give special attention to protecting the weakest among us. That means protecting the unborn.
3. Same-sex Marriage: One of the goods that government praises is marriage, as it is the foundation of society. A same-sex relationship cannot in principle be a marriage. It has nothing to do with producing and forming the next generation.
4. Terrorism: The world is a dangerous place, and a government that takes care of its people will take the selfishness, deceitfulness, and ambition of foreign actors seriously.
5. Immigration: People are made in the image of God and should be treated as such. But God governs by law, and so should we. Justice should be tempered with mercy.

What issues do you disagree on most strongly?

Harper: All of them, except Immigration.

Innes: We're pretty far apart on most things. The Evangelical right and left are in different moral universes. At times, it seems that only the vocabulary is the same, and at times not even that. It goes back to question 1.

Are there any issues on which your views are not quite so far apart?

Harper: Immigration.

Innes: We're very close on what to do about illegal immigration.

What surprised you about working together on this book?

Harper: Honestly, how far apart we are in our worldviews. I felt like we were living examples of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's sociological study "Divided by Faith" and the follow up work I did on that study in my first book "Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican...or Democrat."

Innes: I was surprised at how difficult it is to sustain a conversation.

Is your shared faith greater than the political issues that divide you?

Harper: One day we'll both stand before Jesus and we will give account for our lives—we will account for how we loved God and how we loved our neighbor—and how Jesus defines "neighbor" in the story of the Good Samaritan is "everyone—even our enemies." And our accounts of how we loved will not be limited to how we loved people personally. We will also have to give account for the ways we loved our families, our communities, and nation—on every level, personally, structurally, and through our votes.

Our common belief in Jesus and our personal preparation for that day binds us together.

Innes: We have not had much fellowship on that level. I can say (as a minister and politics professor) that it is not good to be too focused on politics, as it tends to draw one's hope away from Christ toward activism. We become more like Martha and less like Mary. So when I was pastoring a church, I would preach on political topics only when the occasion or the passage before me called for it, which was infrequent. I have two blogs—one is political and the other is strictly theological and philosophical. Despite the great importance of political life, there is a wide non-political dimension to the Christian life, but Lisa and I don't inhabit that space together.

Why did you agree to write this book together?

Harper: I agreed to write the book because for too long we have eaten party platform sound bites for lunch and spit them back out again in the public square, then called it faith. We have committed adultery. Our public faith has not been led by our faith. It has been led by culture and laziness. Our world cannot afford for us to remain disengaged. Our faith and our God has too much of offer our hurting world for us to follow the lead of party platforms even one more day.

I wrote this book to serve the church. The hope is that maybe through this book Jesus followers might ask the hard questions of our own beliefs; where did they come from? Are they founded in scripture or in sound bites? And the hope is that we might wrestle-really wrestle—with scripture and the facts and come to our own conclusions.