The Yes and the No of the Church’s Political Witness

This past summer I helped lead a civil rights pilgrimage in Alabama for a group of students from Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. As part of our journey we visited Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where on Sept. 15, 1963, four Black girls were killed by a bomb planted by KKK members. One response to the horror of that day came from a Welsh stained glass maker, who heard of the bombing and wanted to express his solidarity. With the support and donations of people across Wales, he began a project to gift Sixteenth Street Baptist with a stained glass window commemorating this tragedy and the ongoing struggle for justice.^[1]

Respecting the dignity of our interlocutors requires that we listen in order to understand, not just in order to respond or refute. It requires that we be willing to state the opinions of others in the best terms possible rather than creating straw arguments that are easily blown over.

Within two years the window was made, shipped, and installed at the church, and now it provides a striking image of the civil rights struggle. A Black Jesus twists on a cross with one hand raised in a gesture of resistance and the other open in a gesture of acceptance. The horizontal beam of the cross was crafted to represent jets of water from the hoses used by police forces to attack Black bodies in the South. “You do it to me” is printed at the bottom of the window.

God’s Ultimate Yes and Amen

The depiction of Jesus’ large hands raised in twin gestures of resistance and acceptance has stuck with me. They capture the No and the Yes of God expressed so vividly on the cross—God’s negation of humanity’s negation of God, in service of God’s fundamental affirmation of the creation. As Paul tells the Corinthians, God’s word to us in Jesus is not Yes and No, but is finally, ultimately, Yes and Amen (2 Cor 1:20). 

As witnesses of God’s joyful, hope-filled Yes, how do we politically enact the twin movements of resistance and acceptance, rejection and affirmation that together constitute the one Yes of God? Specifically, how do we find the right ways to say No to both polarization and exclusion in order to say Yes to shared humanity and beloved community?

Knocking Down Two Distinct Walls

Ephesians 2:14 offers the image of Christ breaking down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles, making one people from two, ending the hostility, making one household as a dwelling place for God. It is, I think, a helpful image for the political calling of the church in this moment when we face two distinct walls—the wall of polarization and the wall of exclusion.

The first wall, that of political and ideological division, has grown higher and stronger over the years, such that many people can no longer imagine having friendships that cross political parties. In this moment, the church is called to bear witness to the possibility of generous conversations across difference that do not begin with the assumption that the other side is crazy, ignorant, or evil. In this wall-breaking witness the church says Yes to the other even when it is necessary to say No to their beliefs or ideologies.

As Christians we see the image of God in all others, despite the fact that we may find their behaviors or ideas reprehensible. When Jesus called us to love our enemies he did not ask us to always love their actions or endorse their views. He asked us to do something like what the Episcopal Church articulates in its Baptismal Covenant: to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

Respecting the dignity of our interlocutors requires that we listen in order to understand, not just in order to respond or refute. It requires that we be willing to state the opinions of others in the best terms possible rather than creating straw arguments that are easily blown over. It requires that we listen for the positive moral foundations others are appealing to rather than just judging them according to the moral foundations that matter most to us.

The Dubious, Fictive Middle

This work is hard and requires both courage and humility. At the same time, there is a danger that in order to break down the wall of hostility that is political polarization, we will take refuge in a “fictive middle”—a space that claims neutrality and the moral high ground while refusing to take sides. The literary critic Roland Barthes articulated the dangers of the fictive middle as a space in which the powerful can be seen as morally neutral while keeping the status quo in place.^[2]

Taking this idea in a theological direction, YDS Prof. Willie James Jennings notes that those who want to take refuge in the fictive middle often see Jesus as an ally, as one walking the via media “between the Roman state and the revolutionaries of Israel, and between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Jesus was crucified, in this way of thinking, precisely because he occupied the middle.” In contrast, Jennings argues that Jesus “could never have occupied the fictive middle because it is fundamentally opposed to the prophetic. The words Jesus recited and made his own—‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free’—these words announce divine desire (Luke 4: 18). They expose a God willing to struggle with the creature to make things right.”^[3] The God who struggles with the creature is the God who takes sides. But this side-taking needs to be understood clearly in the context of God’s Yes to all creation. 

Does God Choose Sides?

We recently lost a giant among theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez, who taught us not to take refuge in a fictive middle but take the side of the poor and the oppressed. He was known for his affirmation of the “preferential option for the poor”—a phrase that routinely led to the question, “How can God have preferences? Doesn’t God love everyone equally?” This question is not unlike those who react to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” In an interview, Gutiérrez explained, “God’s love excludes no one. Nevertheless God demonstrates a special predilection toward those who have been excluded from the banquet of life.”^[4]

This leads us to the second kind of wall-breaking. The church is called to break down walls of exclusion, to bear witness to a polity in which none are denied access to the opportunities and material goods necessary for human flourishing. In this wall-breaking witness the church says No to the barriers that keep some people marginalized and powerless while saying Yes to a shared humanity that knows our happiness depends on the well-being of all.

A Double Witness

We must acknowledge the deep tension between breaking down walls of polarization, which requires humanizing our opponents and seeing the best in those we disagree with, and breaking down walls of exclusion, which requires taking sides in order to make material change for those who have been excluded from the banquet. Too often we choose one or the other—yet both must be done. The challenge for the church is to live into the Yes and the No of Jesus’ witness, which are both, finally, in service to the great Yes and Amen that God speaks to creation in Christ.

Today that tension hovers at a critical threshold. As we encounter walls of exclusion that are more and more violent and hate-filled, for example, in certain forms of Christian nationalism and in speech that demonizes immigrant communities, the church has to ask whether we are at a moment in which a powerful No is called for—even if this seems to put at risk our work to overcome polarization.

The Barmen Moment

In 1934, the Confessing Church movement in Germany led by theologian Karl Barth, produced the Barmen Declaration as a clear No to the accommodation of the German Christians to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Let me note that I am aware of all the reasons not to use Hitler, Nazis, and the Holocaust as examples in a moral argument—because comparing someone to Hitler is the ultimate show of disdain for your interlocutor and often an attempt to win an argument through name-calling, because the Nazis serve culturally as a personification of evil that inevitably turns the comparison into caricature, and because the Holocaust has a kind of singularity that makes it dangerous to use it as an analogy for other kinds of political atrocity. That said, the Barmen moment is too instructive to ignore. It was an event in which Christians took a courageous political stand that could easily have looked “partisan” and could easily have looked like the church was “becoming political” in ways that did not fit its character. And yet, Barth and others were willing to take the chance that they would be seen as heightening the wall of polarization for the sake of breaking down the wall of exclusion, hate, and violence.

The question today is: How do we know when we are in a Barmen moment? When are we in a time when we have to take a clear stand against a political figure or movement, even though we believe in principle that the church should not be partisan?

One way to think about this is to ask whether we are entering a debate about means or ends. The church has certain ends that we uphold as fundamental goods—for example, that all human beings are valuable in God’s eyes, that profit should be justly distributed, that sick people should be cared for, that we have a responsibility to treat the earth as God’s creation. The means by which we get to these ends can be debated and policy compromises may be necessary. The church is not an expert on the technical means to achieve these ends, but the church does set forth a vision of flourishing that ought to guide our conversations and inform our decisions.

But there are times when the basic humanity of one group or another is denied or attacked and at that point we are no longer in the realm of legitimate disagreements about means.

Bishops Speak Out

Last January, several bishops of the Episcopal Church who serve dioceses that are at or close to the U.S.-Mexico border and who represent both conservative- and liberal-leaning Episcopalians issued a joint statement about comments Donald Trump made about immigrants.^[5] The bishops began by acknowledging that they “are not political pundits” and that they “are equally the pastors to Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and others.” Telling people how to vote is not in the purview of their office, they admit, but they can and must speak as “teachers of the faith as well shepherds of the souls of our parishioners.” 

The statement is specifically written in response to Donald Trump’s references to immigrants as “vermin” who “poison the blood of our country.” The bishops characterize these reckless remarks as racist “with a eugenic edge,” and they denounce “the idea of racial purity” as an idol and a corruption of the Christian doctrine of the human person. The bishops’ statement makes reference to Barmen and concludes with a powerful call: “we adjure our flocks to reject this false teaching. We exhort political leaders to speak up in its condemnation.”

This statement provides an example of what might be required in a Barmen-like moment, even from those who are wary of intensifying polarization and who are committed to being pastors to people of all parties. The dividing wall of ideological partisanship and the dividing wall of exclusion have to be taken down together. To seek the former without the latter is to take refuge in a fictive middle that protects power and the status quo. To seek the latter without the former is to miss the opportunity to build community with our opponents rather than simply defeat them.

At Sixteenth Street Baptist Church the hands of Jesus reach up perpetually in both resistance and acceptance, the Yes and No of God that are both in service of the fundamental Yes that God says to the creation. Even when God “struggles with the creature to make things right,” God is offering the Yes that says we all belong at the banquet of life. The challenge of Christian witness in this political moment is to lead the way in dismantling both walls, courageously and wisely, for the sake of shared flourishing in this earthly city.

Scott Bader-Saye ’91 M.Div. is the ninth dean and president of Seminary of the Southwest, which is affiliated with the Episcopal Church and located in Austin, Tex. He was appointed in 2024 after 15 years on the faculty as professor of Christian ethics and moral theology and 11 years as academic dean.  He is the author of Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear: Choosing Trust over Safety (Baker, expanded edition 2020),  Formed by Love, volume 5 in the denomination’s “Church’s Teachings for a Changing World” series (Morehouse, 2016), and other books.