Dear Friends in Christ Jesus,

Etymological roots of both religion and politics share in common the notion of “binding.”

In the “polis,” the city, citizens are bound to one another to promote the common good for what is in the best interest of everyone.

In “religare” persons are bound one to another and to the transcendent Great Mystery we call God.

Hymnody reflects this meaning as in “Bless be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love” and St. Patrick’s Breastplate, “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me.” How could such comprehensive binding exclude the polis where we actually live?

Partisan endorsements are not appropriate, yet many churches have tilted in that direction. Christian commitment requires not partisanship, but concern for justice, community flourishing, and the common good that flows inevitably from being bound together in Christ.

Politics addresses how we order our common life; partisanship addresses which team controls that ordering. A preacher naming child separation as evil isn’t partisan—it’s political in the deepest sense because it concerns how we treat the vulnerable in our midst, the “least of these.” On record is the example in this calendar year of a one-year-old separated from her breastfeeding mother and flown to Cuba without her child for two days.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians that we “wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

If systems of darkness cannot be named, how can they be healed?

If degradation, debasement, cruelty and violence cannot be openly discussed, how can they be transformed?

These are not primarily personal sins. They are systemic with far-reaching effects upon many individuals.

In 1930’s Germany, pastors who said nothing were not neutral—they allowed the violence against Jews to fester and then morph into deadly Nazism. Southern preachers in this country who avoided racism were not apolitical—they sustained the status quo.

Silence always serves the existing power structure. To refuse to speak is itself a political choice, a binding of oneself to things as they are.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violates due process, when legal systems favor wealth, when cultural narratives baptize inequality—these are the rulers of darkness Paul describes. The spiritual and systemic are not separate realms; they are the same reality. When Christianity is overly spiritualized while ignoring systemic manifestations in our midst, Paul is entirely misunderstood.

When we pray “thy kingdom come,” this is not escapist piety but a petition for God’s ordering to replace Caesar’s, for God’s economics to replace Rome’s, for God’s justice to overturn empire’s cruelty. To pray this prayer authentically is to commit oneself to resisting any earthly power that contradicts God’s reign.

When the early Christian movement proclaimed Jesus as Lord, they were making a political statement in a world where the imperial cult demanded “Caesar is Lord.” Our faith began as a political challenge to the empire.

We bind ourselves to Christ, which binds us to one another. The tie that binds is both devotional and political because God’s kingdom recognizes no such division.

Your fellow traveler,

—Richard