DGQ: Citizen of Nowhere?

I am officially done with one semester of grad school. I have conquored: Greek 101, Hebrew 101, Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament, and Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds of the Old Testament. Next semester has a great line up. More Greek, Hebrew, and three theology classes: New Testament Theology, Reformation Theology, and Contemporary Theology. I just ordered my books, and I am pumped. But, that is school, and right now it is Christmas break. So on to other things…

I am going to be adding a new “feature” or “category” to my blog. It is a little something I like to call, “Darn Good Questions” or “DGQ” for short. The idea of DGQs originates from my undergrad days, when I first got to college. I was so in over my head with all the things I didn’t know, that I needed some way to keep track of the things I wanted to learn about . So, I would carry around a small notepad in my back pocket and write down anything that sounded interesting that I did not understand. It evolved into a list of books, topics, and questions that I would periodically go back and investigate. I have learned a lot by doing this. These days, I use my Treo to write down my questions. In college, my friends got really into giving me questions that they wanted to know about. Our favorite question was, “Do penguins have knees?” Questions like these come up all the time for me, and so I am going to share them with you.

All I am going to to do is post the question here on the blog in the category “Darn Good Questions” and if any of you can find out the answer, leave it in the comments section. I’ll look things up sometimes, but I often don’t have time to keep up with my questions. That is why I want to share them with you. One of you might have a spare 10 minutes to go read something on the internet about the origin of “nook and cranny” or whether or not Mongolians really eat stir fry or whatever it is I want to know. So here is the first DGQ:

Can you opt out of citizenship? I was born in the United States, so I am, by no choice of my own, a citizen of it. However, I could choose to become a citizen of another country. If I did so, I would, most likely, loose my citizenship in the U. S. But, what if I just didn’t want to be a citizen of any country? I’m not thinking of doing this or anything, but I am really curious if citizenship is forced upon all people. Is there a way to choose to be a citizen of no nation? Or do you have to be a citizen of a country?

What if the Only Options were Pro-Choice?

Let me start with a couple of preliminaries.

First, I find politics distasteful, but necessary. Politics is necessary is because politics is theology. Your politics is an expression of your theology. Your politics are an expression of your beliefs about humanity, what is wrong with the world, what is good, and how it ought to be obtained. Those are theological questions. Plus, as followers of Jesus, we bear a distinctly political message: Jesus is King. I think we reduce that to a mere image sometimes, but the truth is, at the heart of what Christians declare is a message that has political implications. So, while I wish I could avoid politics, as one concerned with theology, I must think about it.

Second, I don’t really identify with any political party, and I don’t think Christianity can or should be identified with a political party. I think that the major political parties (and, in fact, the entire American political system) are built off of assumptions that, as a Christian, I don’t hold. We are in a system based off on radical individualism and a secularism in which faith is a privatized matter that should not impact public life (or at best, simply act as an endorser of the state by creating good, decent citizens). So, as a Christian, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse any political party. Any endorsement I could give would come with heavy disclaimers and caveats.

So, with being said, I ask the question (that I am sure many people are asking): What will Evangelicals do if Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination? Giuliani is both pro-choice and a supporter of homosexual rights, which are clearly the big issues for most Evangelical voters. For most Evangelicals those are make it or break it issues. The majority of people in my church would never vote for someone who supported abortion or gay marriage. So what happens if it is Guiliani vs. any pro-choice Democrat? What do the Evangelical morality voters do?

It is an interesting question. Most Evangelicals, I’m sure, are hoping they don’t have to try and answer it. But, as a pro-life Evangelical, I am wondering if it might not be good for us if it did. (Of course, it is easier for me to say this because I’m not confident that a pro-life President is really going to make that much difference on the abortion issue, anyway.) I wonder if it would force Evangelicals rethink their political alliances. That vast majority of Evangelicals that identify with the Republican party because it is the “pro-life” and “pro-family” party will have ask the question, “What else has been bundled in here? As a Christian, am I behind the rest of the Republican package?” Is the Republican stance on war, economics, the Environment, the scope of government involvement, etc. really the stance that a Christian ought to take? Is there more flexibility here? What does a Christian approach look like for these issues? Maybe if we didn’t have the overpowering moral outrage about abortion to make our choices for us, maybe we’d disembed ourselves from the right-wing political machine a bit and become more like the Church. It might be an unexpected blessing for the American church.

In some ways, I’m not sure what to think about this, but I would be very interested to see what would happen if this was the scenario.