Evaluating our State Legislators - Part II

A reader's comment earlier today provides the perfect segway to this week's posting:

"I agree--we do have a duty to evaluate our leaders and ensure they are accountable.… With the increasing complexity of lawmaking and politics, finding time to do a thorough evaluation that gains a fair understanding of what is really going on is next to impossible."

You're right, Brian, it can be a daunting task, which is why so few people even start or, if they do, they rely on sound bites and dubious cheat sheets (political parties or PACs being the most dubious). So let's take this one step at a time. As I said last post, we are not in this process alone.

No one evaluates legislative decisions with a blank slate. To make any assessment, you have to have some a priori foundation or point of view from which you begin. For example, a state-level advocacy organization such as the Oregon Center for Christian Values (OCCV) has already narrowed its task considerably to only legislation at the state and local level in Oregon.

Furthermore, OCCV is a Christian organization. Whatever does that mean? (I say that emphatically because Christian as a defining term these days defines very little.) But at least it serves as a starting point.

The challenge before us is to make certain we choose the right reference points to help us. Some people rely on particular columnists or TV personalities or even religious publications to do the work for them, but while we can rely somewhat on others, we have to know where they are coming from. Proven Christian scholars (whether biblical, ethical, or public policy experts) can be helpful. Determining where these reference points line up on the usual left-right political spectrum is not the way to start, however, for the political spectrum itself has to be evaluated and it is an unreliable reference when it comes to Christian concerns.

For all of these references and experts, the questions that must be asked (always) are: 1) What are the criteria by which they make their assessments? And, How do their criteria line up with what I believe is right?

As an ethicist I like to say that "Ethics is living out what you believe." The writer of James puts it this way: "I will show you my faith by what I do." (James 2:18) In other words, how we live and act springs from what we hold to be true in life. We cannot really live differently than we believe. We may say we believe something, but if we act differently, we don't really believe it.

So ethics, whether personal in action or public in policy, has to be grounded in a belief system. For me as a Christian, that belief system has a triple foundation: the Christian Scriptures (the Bible), the Community of Faith (the Church), and the Holy Spirit – all (hopefully) working in tandem. I doubt the Holy Spirit can make a mistake, though I can misunderstand what the Spirit is saying to me. And the same is true for the Bible, which I take (by faith) to be a reliable authority as long as I interpret it correctly (2 Timothy 2:15). The Community of Faith, well, that is trickier, but I do believe that at some level the Spirit speaks through God's people, and I consider OCCV in that category (meaning "community of faith" and "God's people").

All this is very basic, no doubt too basic for you, Brian, but as I have a mixed audience, I want to make sure everyone stays on the same page. So, to use a phrase from the OCCV's vision statement, we will work on these state and local issues as "Christian citizens" who are "rooted in the word". I'll capitalize Word, if you don't mind, so that our readers know we are talking about the specific written Word of God, as opposed to scriptures or texts from other religious or non-religious traditions.

But what does what the Bible say about issues from thousands of years ago have to do with whether Oregon bans plastic bags in grocery stores or provides health care for foster kids who age out of the system at 18 but are in legal limbo until they are 21? In The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (2008), Ron Sider states, "Every political decision should be grounded in fundamental beliefs about morality and the nature of persons."
Every political decision, which certainly includes decisions about shopping bags and health care for aging-out foster kids.

He adds, on the same page (41), that Christians "derive their normative vision from biblical revelation." We're not talking about proof-texting here or relying only on key justice or pro-life passages. For Sider, a biblical view of the world as a whole and persons specifically comes from the whole biblical story. He talks about "Biblical Paradigms", which are "comprehensive summaries of biblical teaching related to many concrete issues." And we apply these biblical paradigms and use particular Scriptural cases to illustrate a general principle, basically the same process a good sermon uses.

Now, fortunately, we don't have to go through this every time a legislative bill comes up as these paradigms apply to a broad range of issues. But we do want to start with these paradigms, making sure that we actually do base our actions and decisions on the Bible.

We'll pick this up again next week...