Everyone is valuable. We can all thrive.
As the Kingdom Democracy Project, this is how we think about government:
God is love. What that means for us as human beings is shown in Jesus, who is God, and who lived a fully human life and died a fully human death. Jesus rose from the dead—and this, too, tells us something important about who we are.
As human beings, we are both image-bearers of God and stewards of the world. We are infinitely valuable, and possess a distinctive power to care for, or harm, one another.
As Christians, we believe that because Jesus rose again, these facts persist past all attempts to devalue human beings, or the world. Christians believe that love has the final say.
This has important implications for how we understand government.
The Kingdom vision
Jesus spoke a lot about “the Kingdom of Heaven”, drawing on a deep tradition—thousands of years of writing and thinking about how to be people, together, in large groups, over time. The Bible is, amongst many other things, a book about good governance (and how, as humans, we usually fail at it).
Jesus said that we can live together in a way that is characterised by peace and justice—by everyone acting, and being treated, as if everyone is infinitely valuable.
This vision—the Kingdom—can be the defining characteristic of the way that we govern and allow ourselves to be governed, here and now.
Nice dream?
Politics is an often brutal matter. In any polity, the executive—the power to decide what should happen, and to ensure that it does—must be placed somewhere. In democracies, we place it in people who are elected.
Public politics, because it is close to the honeypot of executive power, is a place of breathtaking cynicism, marked by exploitation, dishonesty, compromised motives, self-interest, and an apparent absence of peace or justice.
This arises from a hopeless logic that says: in a finite world, the only way I thrive is if you fail.
But this can change. There is another logic available to us. By acting in an awareness of our astonishing identity as human beings, and the astonishing implication of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we don’t need to be afraid, and can make decisions as though the good we do will outlast us.
This does not deny the reality of cynical and exploitative politics. It simply says there is a choice: we can act in the light of a better world for everyone.
Heaven, together
Making this choice is something that everyone is part of, regardless of the level at which we are politically active.
In a democracy, “high” politics are not the only politics. Each individual—by how we vote, and how we talk, and how we act towards those around us—is part of creating the “deep” realities in our society. Over time, the high reflects what’s going on in the deep.
This means, soberingly, that we get the politics we make.
Our democracies are made up of people making decisions and living their lives, and those decisions, over centuries, become large, complex systems in which we live, where act and consequence and complicity and harm and good and repair all happen around each other, all the time.
In a system as complex as a state, however it’s governed, there are countless ways in which an individual’s actions can either reflect, or deny, the Kingdom, at all levels.
It’s normal to talk of politicians as “other people”, and to look at even the communities we are part of and think they’re beyond us somehow. They aren’t.
Christian tradition gives us a practice to help us care for—and think about—the people and decisions that make up the world around us, from the high to the deep. That practice is prayer.
Pray for each other
Prayer is an act of democratic engagement.
Just as we pray for people—who are all affected by the complexities of government—we can pray for those who work in those systems, who are responsible for making them work well for everyone.
This is more foundational than praying for particular outcomes; more than one party over another, or one position in a culture war over another.
Our vision for the places we live and the governments we have must be about more than who wins—because we already know that love does. The life of Jesus shows us what that victory looks like: self-sacrifice, humility, and care for others, often at breathtaking cost.
In fact, it looks like what we know we need from our representatives. But no human can fulfil what the role requires of them—none of us are good at being self-sacrificing, humble, or other-centred all the time, by ourselves. We need each other.
The prayer we need to pray for our representatives is that we would be well-led, by people who themselves know that they are infinitely valuable to God, and who therefore govern like everyone else is too.
As well as practical help for those around us, prayer helps us—and our representatives—to do what we are here to do.
Why we exist
Human beings are infinitely valuable. We have the power, and the responsibility, to make the world a peaceful and just place. Government is complicated, and politics can be brutal, but they are part of how we do that, at every level of our societies.
We can enable our representatives to make a peaceful and just world, despite the pressures they face, by praying for them.
The Kingdom Democracy Project exists to make it easier for everyone, under every government, to pray for their representatives.