James K.A. Smith (via Alan Jacobs):
When I suggest we need more Christian politics rather than less, I can imagine my secular progressive neighbor getting anxious, as if theocracy is around the corner. But in fact, the opposite is true. All should hope for a more Christian politics. What currently passes for Christian politics is a sub-Christian syncretism that prays to a vaguely moralistic god who plays favorites, a deity of our making whom we trot out to license nationalism and self-interest. This politics shows no signs of being disturbed by the cross, the ascension, or the eschaton. It is concerned only with winning, revenge, and resentment. In other words, our so-called Christian politics have been captivated by the liturgies of the earthly city rather than the city of God.
A more robust Christian political witness would be a gift to a pluralist society, even if it is also a prophetic challenge. Christian citizens will bring a life-giving imagination to our public life when they are nourished by Christian formation in the polis that is the church. Christians, of all people, should be the least inclined to treat temporal political allegiances as ultimate—which is precisely why we should resist demonizing our political adversaries. As O’Donovan provocatively puts it, “the most truly Christian state understands itself most thoroughly as ‘secular’”—not a godless, atheistic state but a politics that understands when we are, in the meantime of the saeculum.
This sort of eschatological orientation to time changes our expectations, not our goals. The work of public life—building institutions to organize and administer our shared life, collaborating to maintain libraries and economies—all of this is part of our creaturely calling to unpack and unfurl the possibilities of creation itself. That creaturely calling is renewed and directed by the cross and resurrection, and the biblical images of the kingdom of God in the prophetic texts are sketches of what flourishing looks like revealed by the One who made us.
Etymologies 