ROOTS OF CIVILITY IV: Stewardship of God’s Gift of Politics

By Ron Mock

All good things are from God, and we are meant to be stewards of them.

That is a pretty good summary of Christian teaching about stewardship. It insists that we recognize the source of the good in our lives: our loving God. And it instructs us on the implications of this fact.

First, these good things are not ours. It is true that God wants us to enjoy the good and beautiful gifts around us. But it is also true that anything we have in our possession is to be used as God directs. We are only trustees, agents for God in how we use resources we got from God.

So as stewards we hold all the good things in our lives, aware that even though they are in our possession now, they may be someone else’s sole access to meeting their needs. And when such a situation faces us, our duty is clear: put God’s providential provision to use in meeting the need of the one before us, whoever it is: family, friend, or foe.

In the Anglo-American legal tradition, the law describing the duties of a fiduciary hews pretty closely to the Christian understanding of stewardship. Stewards (fiduciaries) are people who possess or hold other people’s assets, or represent other people in doing business or dealing with finances. The steward is empowered and may make decisions about the beneficiary’s affairs that bind the beneficiary. The steward may buy or sell assets for the beneficiary. The steward may even use the assets – for the benefit of the beneficiary. But the steward understands that the assets are not there for her benefit. They are there for the benefit of the beneficiary. The steward cannot let her own interests interfere with the interests of the beneficiary. To do so would be a violation of the relationship, a usurpation of the property entrusted to her.

The steward also has a duty to obey the instructions that came with the trust. Sometimes the instructions are simply to make the best reasonable decisions the trustee can make. That leaves some discretion to the steward as to method, but not as to purpose. The purpose is still to benefit the beneficiary.

The steward is always to put the interests of the beneficiary over the interests of the steward – or anyone else.

Now consider how this applies to the political culture, that critical element in a culture’s ability to thrive.

First, who might have a steward’s role in the political culture? In a modern democratic republic like the U.S.A. there are many steward. Just considering the federal government, we elect 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and a President and Vice-President.

But there are many, many other actors in our system, even just considering elected public officials. There are about 87,000 elected governing bodies in America when you add state and local governments to the federal count. Over 500,000 positions in all are elected. At local levels, these officials often run unopposed, but many have multiple opponents at some point in the election process, taking primary elections into account, so 1,000,000 people running for office in any four year cycle would be a reasonable ball park estimate.

In a democracy, elections are precious. They are the main link between the people and the conduct of their government. If government is to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, elections have to give the voters the information they need to make knowledgeable choices among candidates, and to hold them accountable when they are up for re-election.

The candidates have the duty to make sure this happens. But it’s hard to expect them to see this and act upon it. Good candidates, who are awake to those around them, recognize that their supporters -- donors, volunteers, and staff – are devoting big chunks of their lives to the candidate’s cause. These better-than-average candidates understand they have to give their best to make sure all that effort isn’t wasted. This is why you often hear winning (and losing) candidates spend precious air time thanking their supporters. In a sense, supporters own the campaign as much as the candidate does. So of course good candidates acknowledge that help, and refer to their campaigns and outcomes as “ours” (the candidates’ and their supporters’).

These candidates recognize they have a stewardly duty to make all that money, time, and energy as effective as possible.

Unfortunately there may be more candidates who fail to reach this level of awareness (by considering their candidacies to belong to themselves solely) than there are who surpass this level. But there is a higher way to think about one’s own political candidacy.

For whom does a democratic republic exist? We believers might say “God’, on the grounds that all human institutions should be doing God’s will. And we wouldn’t be wrong.

But a more widely recognized answer would be “the people”— and since God intended for political structures to benefit the people, this is also a good answer.

When you run for city council in 2022, whose election is it? It’s not yours. It’s not your volunteers’ or your donors’. It’s not even the people who vote for you – not even all the voters.

The election belongs to all the people in your city, including the children, the adults who didn’t vote, and even the residents ineligible to vote. All of these are human beings with a right to fair treatment, and to have access to the benefits of God’s providence (including a just and effective government) upon which they depend to have means to meet their needs.

The most fundamental duty of a candidate for office runs to all the people in the jurisdiction that office represents. The candidate is a trustee for them all. Candidate cannot focus on or favor their campaign supporters, their party, or their families. They cannot even focus on or favor the people who voted for them. They are not representing just their fans. They represent every person in their district at least. (There are times when elected officials need to represent all the people in their state, or their nation, even those outside their home districts.)

This duty is, in part, to deliberate with others to make the best possible decisions for the people. Short-circuiting deliberations by working only with one’s own party is throwing away gifts of disagreement. The best decisions, the ones most likely to preserve everyone’s access to means to meet their needs, require elected officials to take their political enemies’ needs into account.

Candidates are only going to see it this way if they start with a clear grasp of their stewardship duties to the entire population.

But candidates have another duty, generally even more important than outcomes on particular issues: candidates must conduct themselves to protect and enhance the political culture. It will do no good, on the whole, if candidates succeed in getting the perfect law passed on one issue, no matter how crucial, if in the process they destroy the politicians’ ability to deliberate together on other issues. No matter the benefits of getting that one issue right, they will disappear if the entire government collapses, or sinks into a condition in which nothing further can be done democratically on any issue.

Inspired by both the secular law of fiduciary duties, and Biblical examples of stewardship, here are some glimpses of how candidates would conduct themselves if they took seriously their trustee duties to all the people.

1. They would remember that all the candidates’ campaign-relevant information belongs to the people, not to the candidates, no matter how inconvenient to them.

Thus, any time a candidate lies, no matter how noble the goal, it’s a wrong, for three reasons:

1. it corrodes the information upon which voters depend to make responsible choices, which, in turn

a.) leads voters to make less effective choices than they would have with more accurate information, and

b.) incentivizes opponents to also lie, leading to a vicious cycle of ever-increasing disinformation;

2. it undermines trust in the system, which in turn

a.) makes it hard or even impossible to communicate with the public in times of crises, and

b.) lends energy to conspiracy theories that can move millions of voters entirely outside the realm of reality in their perceptions of their government.

3. it leads people to cynicism that saps their willingness to contribute constructively to politics.

In fact, if lying is wrong, then so is

· Spinning;

· Exaggerating;

· Shading the truth;

· Saying false things about your opponent before, during, or after an election;

· Imputing to people intentions they do not have;

· Generalizing from a few bad examples to slander entire political parties, ethnic groups, races, or populations;

· Suppressing material information, even when it reflects badly on oneself;

· Building a candidacy, or a case for a policy, by erecting straw man versions of your opponents’ objections and then knocking them down.

Each of these in varying degrees corrodes information, trust, and the system’s ability to deliberate together toward decisions. Each of them incapacitates the political culture. Each of them grabs God’s providential gift out from under the tree and destroys it.

If a steward did any of these things in communicating with her beneficiary, she’d be liable for all the damage she caused. The same should be true if a politician does these things in communicating with the voters.

Look at the list again. When was the last time we held a national election without all these things going on behalf of all the major candidates for both parties?

If all these things are wrong for candidates, what is right?

Honesty is right. It’s not the only thing that is right, but it’s as good a place as any to start the list.

So here, finally, at long last, we take our first step toward building a definition of civility.

Civility is honest because civility respects the right of people to effective self-government, and recognizes that falsehood and error corrode the people’s ability to effectively self-govern, which in turn corrodes God’s providential provision that ensures everyone has means to meet their needs.