Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship

By Diana Butler Bass, Robert W. Lee and Jim Wallis

America’s unique and often fractious relationship between church and state is, if anything, more relevant to who we are as a nation than when Diana Butler Bass’ examination of it in Broken We Kneel was first published 16 years ago. This second edition contains a new foreword and introduction, as well as a new conclusion outlining her vision for the future.

Born in the tumultuous aftermath of 9/11 and now a spiritual classic, the book draws on both her personal experience and her knowledge of religious history. Bass looks at Christian identity, patriotism, citizenship, and congregational life in an attempt to answer the central question that so many are struggling with today: “To whom do Christians owe deepest allegiance? God or country?” In writing both impassioned and historically informed, Bass reflects on current events, personal experiences, and political questions that have sharpened the tensions between serious faith and national imperatives. The book incorporates the author’s own experience of faith, as writer, teacher, wife, mother, and churchgoer into a larger conversation about Christian practice and contemporary political issues. Broken We Kneel is a call to remember that the core of Christian identity is not always compatible with national political policies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: Oct 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640651029

Diana Butler Bass

Diana Butler Bass (Ph.D., Duke) is an award-winning author of eleven books, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America's most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality, especially where faith intersects with politics and culture. Her bylines include The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Atlantic.com, USA Today, Huffington Post, Christian Century, and Sojourners. She has commented in the media widely including on CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, CBC, FOX, Sirius XM, TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and in multiple global news outlets. Her website is dianabutlerbass.com and she can be followed on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. She writes a twice-weekly newsletter - The Cottage - which can be found on Substack. 

Book preview

Introduction to the

2019 Edition

Amonth in advance of speaking in a church, I opened an email from the pastor and read these words:

One of the core values of our church is being intentionally non-partisan. We are a politically divided congregation. Your book refers to the president. While I personally agree with your views, it may be best to steer clear of the political piece.*

I sighed: One more for the ‘Don’t mention politics in the church’ file.

In the years since Broken We Kneel first appeared, I have received scores of such directives not to talk about politics in sermons or lectures. Most are from pastors who worried about conflict and the impact that political divisions have on faith community. However, there are also a good number of letters from parishioners as well objecting to something I said that upset them when at their church. Those notes are typically couched as advice from a person concerned that it is inappropriate to speak of religion and politics and seeking to correct what they believe to be a faulty upbringing.

While Broken We Kneel is the only book I’ve written that focuses solely on religion and politics, much of my public writing—chapters in other books, articles and columns, tweets and social media, and even poetry—speak to political issues. It seems I am fundamentally unable to quit engaging religion and politics, even when criticized for bad manners by angry church ladies or faced with the occasional death threat from someone claiming to know the will of God. Maybe I’m a rude person or a glutton for punishment, or perhaps something altogether different is spiritually afoot.

Not surprisingly, I lean toward the third option. As long as I can remember, I was fascinated by politics. Blame my late mother. Not for teaching me bad manners, but for taking me with her when she passed out campaign literature for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960. She swore that Ken-dee was one of the first words in my baby vocabulary—apparently Jesus came along somewhat later. In our family, the Democrats made their presence felt before the Son of God.

But Jesus came along, as Jesus does for those baptized in his name and community. And with Jesus came questions about politics, for faith always invokes political concerns. We sang songs about how Jesus loved all the children of the world, and seared into my memory is a picture of little ones of every color holding hands in a circle of peace. Every year, we collected money for both the Methodist churchwomen and the United Nations. There was a photo of Jackie Kennedy in a mourning veil in the Sunday school classroom, and somehow, in that foggy world of childhood, I thought it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. As the 1960s—the first decade of my life—unfolded, we heard sermons about civil rights and Vietnam. The ministers talked about these things in the same serious tones as Walter Cronkite did on the television. I may have trusted these grown-ups to teach me about the world, but I overheard parishioners fighting about faith and politics and witnessed more than one pastor being shown the door before his ministry term was scheduled to expire. Although I was little, I watched and listened, fascinated by the stories told, the power of the Bible, and the passions stirred. In the midst, my mother did her conventional duty and reminded her children that in polite company one should never speak of either religion or politics, much less the two intertwined.

I observed it all with childhood curiosity, especially when my liberal Democratic parents grew more conservative and then even reactionary after the race riots in the late 1960s. My mother’s brothers brought pamphlets and books to family events, things published by something called the John Birch Society, all of which quoted Jesus and the Bible to uphold ideas that I would later learn to be patriarchy and white supremacy. To my shame, I began to reflect these attitudes (especially in middle school), partly from a desire to please the adults around me and partly because I felt afraid. Fear was endemic in those days, so much violence and so much rapid change. Other than the fired Methodist pastors, no one in my world quoted Jesus on the side of the poor or the oppressed. He was only rallied in the cause of law and order, and some of my relatives sneered at Methodists whom they believed influenced by communism through a frightening entity called the World Council of Churches.

By the time we moved to Arizona when I was thirteen, I had thrown my lot with Jesus and the GOP. Through my teenage years, I consistently disobeyed my mother’s dictum to avoid both religion and politics. Young Life and the Young Republicans anchored my high school years. I was good at both. My youth group pastor (I had moved by then to a nondenominational evangelical congregation, leaving the Methodists behind) told me that I was theologically bright and it was too bad that I was a girl because I otherwise I could go to seminary. The Young Republicans proved more open to women than the church. I was elected their statewide president and was, in 1976, named Teen-Age Republican of the Year. Barry Goldwater himself congratulated me on the honor.

When I departed home for an evangelical college in California, my plan was to major in political science, return to Arizona, and somehow get myself elected as the first female senator from the state. Oddly enough, Jesus disrupted the plan. The late 1970s were the last days of a now-lost form of radical evangelicalism, a kind of California hybrid of the hippie movement and Jesus. Not one of my classmates thought you could be a Republican and a Christian at the same time. They were all Democrats or further left—including those who called themselves socialists and one who subscribed to a Cuban newspaper. It was through the Bible and chapel and mission trips that I was reintroduced to Jesus, a Jesus unrecognizable to Senator Goldwater, and found myself with new heroes like Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day and William Sloan Coffin. And there were evangelicals, too: Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Letha Scanzoni, and Tony Campolo. We talked about feminism and racism, what we then called ecology, peacemaking, homosexuality and faith, poverty, social justice, liberation theology, simple living, and the nuclear freeze. I turned into a campus activist. And I’m fairly certain that if I am remembered as a student at all, it would be for the day that I won a debate about pacifism by punching my opponent. Let’s just say I had a lot to learn.

During my senior year at college, a pastor named Jerry Falwell from a town no one in California had ever heard of founded the Moral Majority. We alternated between shock and hilarity at his message, believing that no one in the late twentieth century could possibly embrace the sort of conservative fundamentalist politics he promoted. But somehow, his movement helped elect Ronald Reagan, and everything about religion and politics rocked our world as if the San Andreas Fault had cracked open and swallowed up everything we knew.

In some ways, 1980 would prove the seminal year in my own life. Although I never embraced Falwell’s views of faith and politics, the conservative revolution he ushered in would influence my next fifteen years. After college, I would move a bit further left, then right, then further right, then back toward the middle, and then left again, all in conversation with larger political concerns and my own personal experiences. My closest friends and family demonstrated unique patience with my Hegelian-like political journey, a fact for which I am most grateful. And, through it all, I developed a deep understanding of the appeals and the temptations of both sides of the theological–political fence.

I share all of this as context for Broken We Kneel. By the mid-1990s, my religious and social views were more surefooted, less buffeted by the winds howling around me. Certain themes grounded me: irony, humility, lament, pilgrimage, charity, forgiveness, generosity, pluralism, connection, hospitality, justice, and compassion. You might say that in my long struggle with Jesus and politics, Jesus had finally gotten the upper hand. Yes, I am a Democrat again, as my birthright political party, but I wear that label with a kind of theological uneasiness—not because of a single controversial issue (like, say, abortion), but because political parties are imperfect vehicles at best. Especially when we invest spiritual powers like hope and joy and salvation in them. I think being a church member actually helps me understand the imperfection of institutions, for churches and denominations are equally flawed things. Of course, churches are in the hope and joy and salvation business, and they should do better with their outcomes. But anyone who has been a long-term church member knows to expect failure and sin and hubris and lack of courage as much from the Catholics or Methodists or Baptists or Quakers or Episcopalians or what-have-you as from the Democrats (or the Republicans). We’ve become a culture of ideological purity in a universe of imperfect institutions. That makes for serious problems, not the least of which is despair.

Broken We Kneel was published in 2004 as a set of spiritual reflections, a kind of love letter/lament on 9/11. At the very beginning of the Bush presidency, before Barack Obama, long before Donald Trump, before whatever and whoever comes next. I wrote it as a favor for a small publisher that had commissioned the book. I was worried about war, what I discerned to be a thin patriotism, and my own longing for a deeper discussion of politics and theology in church. When the publisher received the manuscript, they sent me a kind note telling me that it was too radical and they could not bring it to print. Not dissuaded, I sent the book to Sheryl Fullerton at Jossey-Bass Publishers and asked if she wanted it. She loved Broken We Kneel, and it appeared during the first year of the Iraq War.

I lost friends because of the book you hold in your hands. Indeed, I am fairly certain that I lost a job because of it. That seems odd now. As I re-read it, the sense of theological idealism and even gentle realism seems so obvious to me. Compared to the thousands of books on politics and religion that would follow in the next fifteen years, mine is a quiet voice of observation, reflection, and pointing toward a different path, nearly drowned out in a sea of invective. Broken We Kneel was always meant as an invitation for Christians to think and act and embody all those beautiful words—irony, humility, lament, pilgrimage, charity, forgiveness, generosity, pluralism, connection, hospitality, justice, and compassion—in our political life before (as I worried then) things got much worse, and hatred and violence became our daily bread. More than anything else, I wanted church people to be able to talk about really important things—about religion and politics—because not talking about them would probably be the moral death of us.

I don’t know if we can talk about religion and politics now. The moment for congregations to do so productively, openly, and with grace may have passed. There is so much hatred, so much anger, and so much fear. The original edition of this book ends with Easter, with my own hope for a resurrection of idealistic and improbable dreams. This second edition ends differently—not on a spring morning, but with a reflection of the cultural fire of these days.

Am I less hopeful? Not really. More grounded, I would say. Ever quixotic though, in belief that goodness is stronger than hate; that love overcomes fear. And always pressing toward a spiritual vision that renews the world, a faith never apart from the life of the polis. Religion and politics. I invite you to join the journey.

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*This email was edited to obscure the congregation’s identity.

Introduction:

"The Almighty Has

His Own Purposes"

While having dinner recently at a new Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, my husband, Richard, and I began to cover predictable conversational ground: the war in Iraq, a story in the Washington Post about civil liberties and terrorism, the reassertion of civil religion and its effects on the presidential elections, and the book list for a course that I would be teaching in the fall on religion and politics. Faith, fundamentalism, terrorism, civil religion, violence, politics, and war. The restaurant’s menu may have been new, but the topics for discussion seemed all too familiar.

Familiar? Inwardly, I sighed. Less than three years ago, few people could imagine such a conversation taking place on an ordinary night over Thai food. These things just were not on our minds. Yet now such conversations are taking place. Not only in suburban restaurants outside of Washington, D.C., but in congregations and church buildings, colleges and seminaries, in prayer groups and at Bible studies. Although it is sometimes hard