Government: What is it good for?

I have been fascinated by government and politics since I was a very little girl. My parents often tell people that I had the ambition of being prime minister before most kids even knew that such a position existed! So I didn’t need a philosophy of politics or government to convince me that they were good things.

In the past two years since I came to CPJ, I’ve done a fair amount of reading that has demonstrated this is not a universal view among Christians. Most recently, I read Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, which I reviewed on this blog. In that blog post, I promised to do a follow-up post on the public justice view of government. I may have stretched the definition of “soon” just a little bit, but I am finally making good on my promise.

Like many CPJ supporters, I wasn’t very aware of “public justice” until I came to CPJ. I went to a Christian highschool that came from a Reformed perspective, so I learned about “sphere sovereignty” during my school days, but I only vaguely knew what that meant beyond “God is sovereign in all parts of life.” I considered myself a strong advocate for justice, which I most often termed “social justice,” but I had never given any deep thought to a principled argument for justice or any clear distinction of what I meant by justice.

Once I started learning about public justice though, I found that it really resonated with what I already believed and practiced. Public justice gave words and a framework for thinking what I already felt intuitively. To me, this is one of the strengths of public justice – it makes sense of both the world and my Christian faith together.

Perhaps to define public justice, we need to start by defining justice. I tend to use the very quick definition of “right relations” – justice means that everything exists in right relationships, between people, between people and creation, and between people and God. Using the Shalom Seekers kit with my small group from church reminded me that power is often an important part of understanding justice. This might broaden our definition to a situation in which right relationships are characterized by power being used to protect the powerless and the dispossessed.

Within this sphere of right relationships, we can think of many kinds of justice. Social justice tends to focus on interpersonal relationships, whether in the capacity of immediate relationships such as race relations or gender relations, or mediated relationships such as economic relationships. Distributive justice pays attention to who has what, or how things are shared. Ecological justice considers care for creation. Restorative justice is about responding to crime and hurtful behaviours in a way that restores individuals and communities.

Public justice is related to these other kinds of justice, although it is not entirely the same. There are certainly overlaps between the different forms of justice and public justice. But public justice refers to a more precise vision – justice in the way that we live and organize ourselves as a community. Public justice focuses on the shared spaces and institutions of our collective life. For this reason, public justice is particularly the responsibility of governments and citizens.

Public justice begins with a recognition that God is in charge. It is a perspective that strives to remain faithful to God’s will for our lives and for creation. But it recognizes that the Bible doesn’t provide a textbook or an economics handbook that tells us precisely which policies and practices to adopt in a twenty-first century democracy. Instead, public justice is based on an understanding of Biblical principles, such as “love your neighbour as yourself,” and “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” Public justice seeks to enact policies and practices that are true to these Biblical principles.

Because God created human kind in the image of God, public justice recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of every individual, including the right of every individual to live in dignity and have access to the resources that are necessary to live out God’s calling in their lives. This right is accompanied by responsibilities: the responsibility to promote the rights of others by acting justly, and the duty to care for creation.

It is not just individuals who have rights and responsibilities related to God’s calling, however. God created people to live in community, and our social relationships and institutions also have obligations of justice and creation care. In fact, social “actors” or “institutions” such as families, schools, businesses, labour unions, community groups, churches and other religious organizations, and governments all have their own vocation, or calling from God, to fulfill certain social roles and needs.

From a public justice perspective, then, government does not have the right to do whatever it wants however it wants. Government falls under the power and authority of God; its own power and authority are not unlimited. And government has specific obligations that it was created to fulfill: namely, the fostering and pursuit of public justice. The role of government is to promote just relations between people within God’s creation. This includes both adopting policies and practices that foster the common good, and correcting injustices in a way that restores right relationships.

Emphasizing government’s role allows us to distinguish between good government and bad government. Not all governments are good. But not all governments are bad either. Government, like all of creation, is fallen but not irredeemable.

Government is not the only social actor with a responsibility to promote justice; individuals and social institutions have their own responsibility to do justice. However, government still has a unique role to play. Government has the power to create and reform systems – social, economic, environmental, and military. This includes creating policies to eliminate poverty, welcome the stranger, provide justice to First Nations, care for the environment and promote a culture of peace. It can also include encouraging other institutions to meet their obligations, for instance by regulating a living wage or creating labour safety standards.

Government can also do justice by enabling other institutions to fulfill their roles. This can take various forms, such as fostering a vibrant civil society, providing funding for other organizations to ensure they have sufficient capacity, or simply abstaining from reaching into an area where social organizations are meeting their obligations.

Of course, governments don’t accomplish public justice in a vacuum. They are elected by citizens, accountable to citizens, and (at least some of the time!) make policy choices according to the will of citizens. Citizens therefore have a crucial task in calling the government to do public justice. This involves voting, but also active citizenship between elections, naming injustices, calling for policies and practices that do justice, and encouraging leaders when they do promote justice.

This public justice view of governments and citizenship therefore avoids the folly of civil religion that so many Christians who oppose government rightly decry. Our task is not to make a god out of the state, or to expect god-like powers from governments. Nor should we focus on governments as the solution to every problem and our only hope for change. Governments can play a role in seeking a just society, however, and to ignore this vocation for governments is to impoverish our communities and the common good.