The Politics of Barack Obama and the Calvinist Response

Everything is political in the sense that politics simply refers to the discipline or science of the polis, the city. Everything pertaining to how to govern and how laws come to pass, how systems and ideas are enforced in the life of society is part of the political project.

When Obama diverts the attention of the nation with his 132 million followers on Twitter by focusing our gaze on the two-year-old memory of the murder of George Floyd, he is making it political, but it is the worst of politics. He is changing our sight from the profane and putrid act of an 18-year-old, Salvador Ramos, to an icon of his cause. Obama is reading the world symbolically through a political viewpoint that he fears will be taken away if our focus changes. In this sense, Obama is a masterful typologist. He sees Floyd, a unanimously vile human being who suffered a unanimously violent death, to be the central figure of his cause, a martyr of martyrs.

It’s not that Obama intellectually refuses to believe what happened in Uvalde, TX, but he is protruding an ideology about his worldview. Floyd is a symbol of his political agenda, and everything else becomes subservient to that cause.

This entire soliloquy serves to make the point that consequences have ideas, and the opposite is true also, but the former is closer to the truth. Actions stem from foundational principles of the polis. Sometimes ideas don’t lead to consequences, but consequences always is a fruit of ideas.

When two-kingdom, anabaptist devotees from a certain school in California argue that the church ought to remain neutral concerning the polis, because the church is only interested in a heavenly polis, these advocates are juggling a series of contradictions all at once. It is an impressive act but in the long-term undoable. You can’t remain in the monastery because eventually, the polis police will confiscate your raw milk and take away your homemade yogurt. You must fight for the polis to preserve the polity of any exclusionary private society.

Michael Horton can write a massively–even fruitful–systematic theology, but if he fails the “how shall we then live?” test, he has left the hymn without its closing verse, which is incidentally the best verse.

Let’s take the violence of Uvalde as a test case for this principle. We can opine about the end result of this whole endeavor, who to blame, and who to prosecute but we cannot overlook the more insidious fact that we have created a violent nation replete with fatherless men, ignorant men, intellectually castrated men, and evangelically coward men, and therefore such results are the fruits of a society trained in the piety of politics rather than the discernment necessary in politics.

Political piety offers some general analysis of the event rooted in the emotions of the event, but it fails to offer guidance on how to prevent the cumulative cases of such catastrophes, which is how discernment politics should work.

Christians have this divine rootedness in creational patterns that should provide us with kingly wisdom. While we react and select our favorite narrative of the event, we are stuck with a conundrum: do we return to our apolitical notions of the world when this all becomes old news, or do we finally embrace once and for all the zeal for political engagement with all its woes and foes?

I happen to be one of those bold Kuyperians that uses Kuyper’s words without too many caveats. And I happen to think that only Calvinism and its overarching political project can shape a society accordingly. As Kuyper exclaimed: “Calvinism has a theory of ontology, of ethics, of social happiness, and of human liberty, all derived from God.”

In the Calvinistic system, politics functions as a proper tool to Christianize society; to shape spheres with an ethic of justice and equity. In Calvinism, everything is political because we are people of the polis and therefore, we should desire a well-ordered city (Jer. 29).

When you worship this Sunday, take away the sentimentalism behind things, and look to the fundamental structures you are destroying with every word, act, and song. The political implication of worship is meant to inculcate the inescapable reality that God shapes and heavenizes the world through political acts like kneeling.