Toward Cleaner Elections: A Theological Perspective
Walter Wink

Introduction from the Public Policy Commission of the New York State Council of Churches

        Of all the justice issues which have become prominent in the past several decades, none is more extensive than cleaner elections. When public policy is under debate, the answers to two questions matters greatly:

• Who has the ear of the elected representative?

• What secondary issues “color” a representative’s assessment of an issue’s merits?

        In a civics class “textbook” democracy, the answers are so simple we may take them for granted. The representative opens his or her ear to constituents first, then to the full spectrum of citizens concerned about the issue at hand. Secondary issues may indeed color the representative’s judgment — a farmer may see the world from an agricultural point of view while an urban police officer may see the world in terms of populated neighborhoods — but we rely upon open debate within the diversity of a representative body to clarify merits from the welter of parochial, partial visions.

        Although cynics might find talk of textbook democracy quaint and naive, we people of faith insist that fairness, not corruption, should be the norm. As Dr. Wink describes, fairness no longer is necessarily what we can expect. We should care

• when environmental policy is written by polluters
• when tyrannical brutality is ignored when the tyrants are “trading partners"
• when the poor receive greater burdens and fewer of the benefits of society, as the wealthy have their burdens lightened and receive greater government largesse.

        With these concerns in mind, we invited Dr. Walter Wink to compose a paper which would give theological depth to our witness as we promoted campaign reform in New York State. We wanted to emphasize the fact that cleaner elections are not merely a political issue. We believe cleaner elections to be a moral and spiritual issue. Dr. Wink has, in our opinion, made this case elegantly, insightfully, and concisely.  Thus we invited Dr. Wink to lead a public seminar introducing is work on cleaner election on May 19th, 1998, in Albany. Dr. Wink’s presentation, and the news conference which preceded it, commenced our own campaign to transform the public debate into one of morality and spirit.

        We offer this Study Edition of “Toward Cleaner Elections” as our invitation to you to become a part of this transformation. If groups of adults and youth meet to discuss cleaner elections, the discussion already transforms itself. We hope than many of you will find yourselves energized so that you will want to raise your moral and spiritual concerns about our democracy with our Governor and your State Senator and Assemblymember.

        Following Dr. Wink’s paper is a Study Guide for youth and/or adult use.  We have formatted it for three sessions. Feel free to reproduce this Study Edition for study purposes only.

        We acknowledge that in all things, study is but a first step. You may want to follow up by becoming involved in advocating campaign reform. We believe that, until a sea change takes place in Washington, reform will have to move State by State.  The Public Policy Commission of the New York State Council of Churches is coordinating efforts, and we invite you to contact us. Thank you for your interest.

Ms. Mary Lu Bowen, Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches
The Rev. Daniel B. Hahn, Director, Lutheran Statewide Advocacy
Ms. Damaris McGuire, Director, New York State Episcopal Public Policy Network

Toward Cleaner Elections:  A Theological Perspective

Walter Wink

        The largest corporate entity with which most of us are concerned is the national government.  So low has it sunk in the estimation of many citizens that some have armed themselves with weapons against it, while others simply complain vociferously —  about everything from taxes, to bureaucratic over-regulation, to the ocean of paperwork required to comply with government directives.  

The Scandal of Campaign Spending

        For informed citizens, however, one of the sorest spots is the very process by which our politicians are elected.  Never has so much money been funneled to so many candidates for office by so many special interests.  And while it is probably true that many a legislator would have voted no differently had he or she not received a gargantuan heap of money from a private donor or a PAC (Political Action Committee), the fact is that the whole process becomes tainted when contributions and voting records correlate to such an astounding degree.  For an example on the federal level, the 213 members of Congress who voted to spend an additional $493 million on Northrop Grumman's B-2 stealth bombers received an average of $2,100 from the contractor; the 210 who voted against only got $100 on average.  Examples could be multiplied.  At least those who bestow such financial largesse seem to believe that their money makes a difference.  

        Campaign contributions smell strikingly like "legal bribes."  What we now have, in place of a well-functioning democracy, is a system in which laws are written by the very corporations and other interests they are intended to check.  Rather than one person, one vote, we have an electoral process that is increasingly meaningless, in which only .0025% of the electorate make contributions over $200, yet account for 80% of all political moneys raised.  The residents of one New York City zip code give more to congressional candidates than the residents of each of 24 states.  Money reigns: in the congressional campaigns of 1996 the bigger spender won House races 90% of the time, and Senate races 80% of the time.

        The problem is not PACs as such.  Democracy requires that whoever wishes to be heard should be able to lobby those in power.  Nor is the issue money alone; the electorate does not so much disapprove of how much money is spent, so much as how it is spent (on negative ads, image making, the avoidance of real substantive discussion of political issues).  The problem is the misuse of power.  

        What the misuse of power means in the electoral process is spelled out by Citizen Action of New York:

• large contributions hinder equal and meaningful participation in the democratic process;
• the free-speech rights of non-wealthy voters and candidates are drowned out by those who can afford to monopolize paid political ads;
• the First Amendment rights of voters to be heard in the political process, question candidates, and engage in debate is denied to the vast majority of citizens;
• big money fuels the public perception that government and  its leaders are corrupt, an impression that is sometimes correct;
• elected officials are required to spend a disproportionate  amount of time raising money, which diminishes their presence and accountability to their constituency;
• qualified candidates without personal fortunes or access  to large contributors have scant chance to mount competitive campaigns;
• challengers are disadvantaged, because large campaign  contributors tend to give their money to incumbents;
• there are too many loopholes in existing law that big  money can slip through;
• the rich have greater representation than the rest of us because political power is allocated according to economic status.

        In the 1995-96 election, business interests outspent labor by 12-1.  Individuals and PACs representing the natural resource industries (such as gas and oil companies) outspent environmental interests by an estimated 27-1.  In the elections from 1988-92, the oil and gas industry alone gave a total of $17.2 million to congressional campaigns.  Is anyone surprised that industrial pollution is growing worse instead of better?  As Amitai Etzioni commented, "If the founding fathers had wanted American democracy to use dollar bills as ballots, they would have placed cash registers where ballot boxes now stand."

        A variety of solutions has been proposed for campaign finance reform.   The task here is to develop the theological framework for the struggle to make democracy more representative, honest, and fair.  The framework I have found most practical is the  biblical understanding of the "principalities and powers"--what I will simply call "the Powers That Be."     

The Powers That Be

        All of us deal with the Powers That Be.  They staff our hospitals, run City Hall, sit around tables in corporate board rooms, collect our taxes, and head our families.  But the Powers That Be are more than just the powerful people who run things.  They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships.  These Powers surround us on every side.  They are necessary.  We could do nothing without them.  They are useful.  Who wants to do without timely mail delivery or well-maintained roads?  But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils.

        Latin American liberation theology made one of the first efforts to reinterpret the "principalities and powers," not as disembodied spirits inhabiting the air, but as institutions, structures, and systems.  But the Powers are not just physical.  The Bible insists that they are more than that (Eph. 3:10; 6:12); and this "more" holds the clue to their profundity.  In the biblical view the Powers are at one and the same time visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional (Col. 1:15-20).  Powers such as a lumberyard or a city government possess an outer, physical manifestation (buildings, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner spirituality, corporate culture, or collective personality.  The Powers are simultaneously an outer, visible structure, and an inner, spiritual reality.  Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Congress, or the Chrysler Corporation, or the Mafia as having a spirituality, but they do.  The New Testament uses the language of power to refer at one point to the outer aspect, at another to the inner aspect, and yet again to both together.  What people in the world of the Bible experienced as and called "principalities and powers" was in fact the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day.  And in their time, as in ours, these Powers were very often malignant in their effects on the lives of common people.

        Christian faith has all too often been treated as purely an individual matter, involving only the soul and God.  That has provided the Powers That Be with license to exploit, oppress, swindle, buy out, undercut, and destroy whomever or whatever stands in their path.  From the Roman Empire to the modern nation state, from the Roman economy to free market capitalism, the Powers have ruled with little interference except from other Powers intent on the same prize.  Once we have become aware of the systemic nature of these Powers, and of the spirituality at their core, it is hard not to wonder if such massive institutions can be transformed.  If evil is so profoundly systemic, so deeply institutionalized in corporations, universities, and governments, what chance do we have of bringing them into line with God's purposes for them?  

        The answer to that question hinges on how we conceive of institutional evil.  Are the Powers intrinsically evil?  Or are some good?  Or are they scattered all along the spectrum from good to evil?  The answer seems to be: none of the above.  Rather, they are at once good and evil, though to varying degrees, and they are capable of improvement.

        Put in stark simplicity:

        The Powers are good.

        The Powers are fallen.

        The Powers must be redeemed.

These three statements must be held together, for each, by itself, is not only untrue but downright mischievous.  We cannot affirm governments or universities or businesses as good unless at the same time we recognize that they are fallen.  We cannot face their oppressiveness unless we remember that they are also a part of God's good creation.  And reflection on their creation and fall will seem to legitimate these Powers and blast any hope for change unless we assert, at the same time, that these Powers can and must be redeemed.  But focus on their redemption will lead to utopian disillusionment unless we recognize that their transformation takes place within the limits of the fall.

        This theological framework is of utmost importance for understanding the nature of the Powers.  They are good, by virtue of their creation to serve the humanizing purposes of God.  They are all fallen, without exception, because they put their own interests above the interests of the whole.  And they can be redeemed, because what fell in time can be redeemed in time.  We must view this schema as both temporal and simultaneous, in sequence and all at once.  Temporally: the Powers were created, they are fallen, and they shall be redeemed.  This can be asserted as belief in the final triumph of God over the forces of evil.  But this schema is also simultaneous: God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of fully human life; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order.  Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. Christian theology holds all three  together.

        An institution may place its own good above the general welfare.  A corporation may cut corners on costs by producing highly inflammable infant sleepwear that endangers children's lives.  Union leadership may become more preoccupied with expanding its own powers and prerogatives than fighting for better working conditions for the rank and file.  The point is not that anything goes, but that no matter how greedy or idolatrous an institution becomes, it cannot escape the encompassing care and judgment of the One in and through and for whom it was created (Col. 1:16).  In that One "all things hold together"

(Col. 1:17--literally, "receive their systemic place"--sunistemi is the Greek source of our word system).  The Powers are inextricably locked into God's system, whose human face, we believe,  is revealed by Jesus.  They are answerable to God.  And that means that every subsystem in the world is, in principle, redeemable.  Nothing is outside the redemptive care and transforming love of God.  The Powers are not intrinsically evil; they are only fallen.  Fallen does not mean depraved, as some Calvinists alleged.  It simply refers to the fact that our existence is not our essence: we are, none of us, what we are meant to be.  We are alienated from God, each other, nature, and our own souls, and cannot find the way back by ourselves.  But the situation is not without hope, for what sinks can be made to rise again.

        By acknowledging that the Powers are good, bad, and salvageable -- all at once -- we are freed from the temptation to demonize those who do evil.  We can love our enemies or nation or church or school, not blindly, but critically, calling them back time and again to their own highest self-professed ideals and identities.  We can challenge institutions to live up to the vocation that is theirs from the moment they were created.  We can oppose their actions while honoring their necessity.

        We must be careful here.  To assert with Colossians 1:15-20 that God created the Powers does not imply that God endorses any particular Power at any given time.  God did not create capitalism or socialism, but human life requires some kind of economic system.  Some institutions and ideologies such as Nazism or sexism can only be transformed by being abandoned or destroyed, and replaced by forms of governance or gender relations that are more true to God's intent.  But the necessary social function which they have idolatrously perverted will abide.  After the Nazis, Germany still needed a government; after patriarchy, men and women will still need ways to relate.

Redeeming the Powers

        The good news is that God not only liberates us from the Powers, but liberates the Powers from their destructive behavior as well.  Their evil is not intrinsic, but the result of idolatry.  Therefore they can be redeemed.  Even when they veer off course from their created vocations, the Powers are incapable of separating themselves from the divine order.  Subsystems may violate the harmony of the whole system by elevating their own purposes above all others, but they cannot separate themselves from the larger order of things--any more than cancer can live apart from its host.  And like a cancer, the Powers are only able to do evil by means of processes imbedded in them as a result of their good creation.  Even gangs manifest the human need for security, support, and love.

        Redemption means actually being liberated from the oppression of the Powers, being forgiven both for one's own sin and for complicity with the Powers, and setting about liberating the Powers themselves from their bondage to idolatry.  The good news is nothing less than a cosmic salvation, a restitution of all things (Acts 3:21), when God will "gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:10).  This universal rectification will entail both a healing and a subordination of rebellious structures, systems, and institutions to their rightful places, in service to the One in and through and for whom they exist.  This side of God's Reign, all we get are momentary victories, temporary solutions, and flashes of the divine possibilities.  But those flashes are enough to keep us going.  The gospel,  then, is not a message about the salvation of individuals from the world, but news about a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures.

Toward Cleaner Elections

        The practical implications of this theological perspective are:

        1.  In addressing the issue of cleaner elections, we must strive not only to change the laws, but to transform the spiritual atmosphere in which politics is done.  This means recalling governments to their divine vocation, which is to serve the humanizing purposes of God.  This is perhaps the most essential task that the church can play (Eph. 3:10), for no other institution in society is so well equipped to discern the diseased spirituality that grips Washington and State Capitals today.  In all our efforts at political change, we must remember that our struggle ultimately is not against "enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12).  The issue of cleaner elections is a magnificent opportunity to address the need for cleaner 0hands and purer hearts in politics.

        2. Governments are good, fallen, and redeemable.  The system as such is not unreformable, but it is viciously corrupted, and it can be corrected so that there is less inequality, vote buying, and control by wealth.  

        3.  Whatever reform can be enacted will not be enough, however, because reform is possible only in the context of a fallen reality.  (Hence the shift from speaking of "clean elections" to "cleaner elections.")  There will always be legislators and moneyed interests seeking each other.  Even the most stringent clean election reform will not restore genuine democracy to America, for vast inequalities in wealth and power would continue unabated, and there will always be those who wish to exploit wealth to their own advantage.

        4.  But the fact that the system is fallen must not obscure the fact that it is, in principle, a good creation, created to serve the interests of all the people, not just the wealthy few.  So whatever increment of change we are able to achieve will be a genuine achievement, worth the enormous effort.  Time after time we have seen one person, or a handful, bring about significant political change.  That the change is neither lasting nor a panacea is no argument against doing good.  Short of God's Reign in all its fullness, the Powers will continue to place their own interests above that of God, the vast majority of people, and the ecosystem.  We expect that.  We are not surprised that evil is so resilient.  Our own leader was crucified by the Powers.  But death, their final sanction, could not hold him.  He continues to live in all who offer their lives, time, and money in the struggle to make and keep human life more humane.  

Walter Wink is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary, New York, NY.  He has been a Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and is author of The Powers That Be (Doubleday, 1998).

Endnotes

1. Thomas E. Mann, "A Plea for Realism," Boston Review XXII (April/May 1997), 15.

2. David Donnelly, Janice Fine, and Ellen S. Miller, "Going Public," Boston Review, 3.

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Ibid, 4

6. "A Call for Democratically Financed Elections," Working Group on Electoral Democracy, Keets Road,

     Deerfield, MA 01342