Open almost any news source—or social media, if there’s a difference—and you won’t have to look very far before you start seeing quotes about people claiming that someone is “imposing his religious beliefs” on other people. Based on the posts of my more progressive friends, you’d think “religious belief” was the sole motivation behind everything done by those on the political “right.” In the health insurance coverage debates over the last several decades, we’ve seen arguments about employers who are supposedly “imposing religious beliefs” by insisting that they cannot in good conscience fund certain things like the murder of children.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that this “imposition” is impossible—indeed, I do think it would be problematic if the owner of the local Wendy’s demanded that I pray five times a day facing Mecca. But that’s not usually what we’re talking about.
The theme running through a lot of these conversations is that “religion” is something that only other people do. Those people. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that their own beliefs might be considered “religious,” or that they might be imposing their beliefs on someone else. Calling something “religious” in that context is a way to separate ourselves from other people, a way to excuse ourselves form the responsibility of conversation.
Religion, in modern America, is a meaningless concept. In effect, it suggests whatever it is that we don’t want to talk about. It is whatever area of life we think cannot be usefully discussed or regulated by the state—whatever part of life we think is off limits for a teacher or a parent or a policeman. So if we don’t want to talk about sexual morality, that must be “religious.” If we don’t want to talk about the nature of what it means to be human, that must be “religious.” If we don’t want to talk about the meaning of life, and why we should choose to live one way over another, that must be “religious.”
That’s exactly what the Pharisees are doing in Matthew. They come to him with a trick question: If God is as you say, is it right to pay taxes to Caesar? They’re saying to Jesus, in a way that we might imagine somebody doing today: “Are you saying something religious? Are you trying to impose your religion on someone else? Because the emperor might have a problem with that. You should keep your opinions to yourself. Don’t impose them on the rest of us.”
But Jesus refuses to accept this way of thinking. He doesn’t accept the nature of the question. The Pharisees aren’t interested in a conversation; they’re not interested in a debate. They just want to get Jesus into trouble.
Then we hear the response, which is pretty famous: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
It’s likely that a lot of us, hearing that, fit it neatly into that whole idea of “religion” that I’ve been going on about. We can read this as a justification of separating our lives into neat little categories: so here we have politics, over here we have cooking, and over here we have “religion,” AKA things having to do with God. And if we do that, there’s no conflict between God and politics, or God and science, or God and money, because God keeps to himself over here in the corner with things about God.
And that’s nice if you worship Zeus, or if you worship some little local river deity. But I don’t worship Zeus. I don’t worship the lord of the Schuylkill. I worship the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, who does not make a habit of keeping to himself. He is not some local river god, or the spirit of the mountain, or the father of dryads who only shows up when we start cutting down his special magic trees.
“I form light and create darkness / I make weal and create woe.” Just one verse after today’s reading from Isaiah, we hear this astounding reminder of God’s transcendence. This is not some God with an equal and opposite force opposing him. He’s not one of a large pantheon of powers. He rules all things. He makes all things. Without him was not anything made that was made. In this case, in Isaiah 45, even the movement of heathen monarchs is subject to his larger will. King Cyrus works for God’s purposes even when he has no knowledge of God. This God has no equal. “I am the Lord and there is no other; there is no God beside me.”
Here’s where we find what it is that Jesus is getting at with the Pharisees. They want him to say, “God is more important than the emperor; religion is more important than the empire.” They want him to put them in competition with one another and declare a winner so that the other side can get mad. But for Jesus, God and the emperor are so far apart that this competition is meaningless. It would be like an ant wondering whether the sun cares that he collects food for his colony. Obviously, the sun is more significant, more powerful, more everything than the ant colony. We can render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s—not because God has nothing to do with them, but because God’s authority has no need of emperors to work.
We can carry this logic through to our other supposed areas of separation. The reason that Christians, historically, have valued and respected the work of science, the work of history, the work of economics, and on down the line is not that each area has its own autonomy, and God keeps to himself. That’s Deism, not Christianity. It is because all of those things operate under the gracious will and power of God’s provision. We can talk about nature because God made it, and it exists. There’s no competition. When we try to figure out what happens when you subtract two from three, or calculate the force required to move a rock up a hill, the fact that we can talk about these things without reference to God does not mean they have nothing to do with God or are outside his sphere of influence—it means, rather, that God is not so needy as to be threatened when he allows his creation to operate with its own integrity
Why does any of this matter? It matters because human beings are good at dividing things up. This is not an inherently bad thing. The world would be a much less interesting place if we were all exactly the same. But we are also good at using these divisions just to get what we want, to trip one another up, to put others down. We’re good at using these divisions when we want to avoid criticism or avoid having to look seriously at our own beliefs. We love making excuses to avoid the hard work of being human.
This applies even within ourselves, which is maybe the harder part for some of us. We draw these neat little lines in our heads dividing the different parts of our life: family, work, relationships, Instagram, physics, golf, poetry, music, gardening. Those lines are necessary, because when you’re out there fixing somebody’s car, you’re not going to do it very well if you’re having a romantic conversation on Snapchat at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that the parts of your life don’t fit together into a whole, or that sometimes maybe physics does have something to do with the way you pray, or the way you throw a ball, or that maybe how you do the dishes in the sacristy might teach you something about your family.
Politics, like so many other parts of life, is unavoidable. But we can avoid the temptation represented by the Pharisees’ question—which is on the one hand acting as if the normal rules of human life don’t apply to us, or on the other acting as if they tell us everything there is to know. Following Jesus doesn’t mean submitting to Caesar, nor does it mean trying to overthrow him. Our job isn’t to manage the outcome of history—that is in God’s hands. Still, we do have to be disciples in history and not somewhere else. The only way we can balance the dual convictions that what we do matters and that we are not ultimately in control is by reference to God.
After all, whose image is on this coin? The coin that is you and me and all human nature? We are made in the image of God. We have many functions, many uses, many avenues of growth, but none of these accounts for much if we forget whose we are and why we exist. We are God’s, and we were made to love him and to worship him.
True religion has been imposed on us, whether we like it or not, by virtue of our existence. That identity and that vocation remain the same, no matter who is in charge of the country, whose face is on the money, or how much the culture supports what is right and good. If we can accept that vocation, following the complete and integral humanity of Jesus, we will become the saints that God intends for us to be.