#301 | When Politics Becomes an Idol: David Koyzis on Faithful Christian Citizenship

Today's episode is brought to you by the Kachigian family.

May the Lord sanctify you and bless you, and go Bears!

Progressing and conserving should be complementary, you know.

They shouldn't be isolated into separate corners.

Because we live in a dynamic world, the world is constantly changing.

There are many things that are worth keeping, but there are also many new things that we ought to entertain the possibility of adopting.

We need spiritual discernment to decide.

What should we dispense with, what should we keep, what should we progress to, and what should we be aware of?

What does it mean to be a faithful Christian in an increasingly divided political world?

For many Christians, politics has become a source of anxiety, frustration, and even misplaced hope.

We've been led to believe that the future of our nation, and perhaps even the church, hinges on the outcome of the next election.

But what if we've been asking the wrong questions?

What if faithful Christian citizenship involves far more than simply how we vote?

Welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming, and.

This is the podcast from Apollos Watered,.

Where we go beneath the surface to explore the ideas shaping the church, ministry and culture today.

And today, I'm joined by political scientist and author David Koizas.

David taught undergraduate political science for 30 years and is affiliated with Global Scholars Canada.

He's the author of several books including Political Visions and Illusions and Citizenship Without Illusions.

And Today we're exploring the competing political ideologies shaping our world and what it means to live as citizens of God's kingdom while participating faithfully in the communities where God has placed us.

And this is precisely the kind of conversation we believe the church needs to be having.

Because engaging the culture faithfully today requires more than reacting to the latest headlines or adopting political positions of those around us.

No, it requires a deeply rooted biblical worldview, theological discernment, and an understanding of the times in which we live.

That's also part of the vision behind Apollos Academy, our newest initiative to train ministry leaders to advance the gospel and engage the culture in an ever changing world.

So pay attention to that upcoming initiative to be launching in the new year.

But how do we engage politics without making an idol of it?

How do we avoid withdrawing from public life altogether?

And how might recovering a distinctly Christian understanding of citizenship change the way we live, love our neighbors and participate in society?

That's where we're going today on Ministry Deep dive.

Happy listening.

Dr. David Koizas, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

It's a delight to have you.

Thank you.

I'm pleased to be here.

All right, let's jump into this before we actually get into politics.

And I don't know if too many.

People know this about you, but I followed you a little bit online.

But you're a musician.

Is that true?

Yes, it is.

Amateur musician, yes.

Yeah.

But weren't you training to be a musician before.

Before you went into political theory and political science?

I did, yes.

My first year at university, I went to a place that's now called Bethel University in Minnesota.

Those are my passions when I was younger.

But then I switched to political science my second year.

Well, those go together.

Not they don't.

But let me ask you this, though.

You've kept up the music, and if I'm.

Maybe I'm wrong in my research, but have you actually set all 150 Psalms to music?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I'm guilty as charged.

So is that public yet?

Is that published anywhere?

Is that out there?

Not yet.

It's.

It's complete.

So this is by far the longest project that I ever worked on.

It's 36 years it took me to finish it.

I got two grants from something called the Stanford Reed Trust here in Canada, and then two grants from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to complete this.

And so I'm just looking for somebody to publish it now.

Wow.

Well, this wasn't about that music piece, but, I mean, I'm a singer.

My wife and I are both trained musicians.

We love the Psalms.

And I love the idea of being able to sing the Psalms.

I have no idea about that.

But I am a little bit curious.

But I want to know, though, like, a little bit of your story.

Because in reading your book Citizenship Without Illusions, that's your most recent book, I was really struck, not only because the fact I knew you're a musician, I've seen you play online, but to hear a bit of your story that you came, your father or grandfather came to the United States, your Cypriot heritage.

Can you give us just A little bit of your story so our audience might know more who you are and what you.

What prompted the interest in political science?

Yes.

Yes.

Cyprus at that time was a crown colony of the United Kingdom at the time.

But he wasn't doing that for very long because it ended up being a very dangerous assignment.

He was only 20 years old at the time.

So he ended up going to Nigeria, working for a Greek entrepreneur.

I think he was running a soap factory in Kano, Nigeria, in the north of the country.

Then he met American missionaries there.

He had actually been being educated by Reformed Presbyterians who ran a school called the American Academy in Lardica, Cyprus.

And the Reformed Presbyterians, they're the same people that run Geneva College just outside of Pittsburgh.

And that's where he met my mother, who was born and raised in Michigan.

And so they married, and then I was the first of their six children.

So let me ask you this, because your father is Cypriot.

I always think of some of my friends who come from that region of the world.

They're great musicians, but they're also big dancers.

Do you do the dancing at the weddings with the UPA and dance in the circle?

Do you guys do that?

There's only really one Greek dance that I can do.

It's called a kalamata, and it's set to music that has seven beats to a measure, which is highly unusual for most Westerners.

But for me, it kind of flows through the veins.

I can feel it in my bones.

Did you dance that at weddings, though?

Not at weddings, but I don't know.

On other occasions, Greek festivals and so forth, church festivals and the like.

Is your family then?

Like my big fat Greek wedding.

Was that your family?

Oh, yeah.

And as a matter of fact, there's a scene where Gus Paul Porto Carlos, who I swear was patterned after my dad, he said, you give me any word in English, I give you the Greek root.

And my father could do that very easily.

Was he also, like, the Greek culture is the center of the world?

Was he that way, too?

Oh, no, no, not like that, no.

Okay.

Well, then tell me as a Matter of fact, I mean, some.

The ethnic nationalism in Cyprus.

You know, he was born in the Greek Orthodox community, although I was raised Presbyterian and then later Baptist in high school.

But, you know, the ethnic nationalism in Cyprus.

Many Greek Cypriots wanted to unite the island with Greece, which I think would have been a disaster.

You know, it didn't happen, but partly because about 20% of the island is made up of Turkish Cypriots.

And I discovered when I had my DNA analyzed a few years ago that Greek and Turkish Cypriots are a single gene pool, and we have virtually nothing in common genetically with people from Greece.

Weird.

That's always fascinating when you get all those things.

I had my own done.

And what weirds me out, though, is that I always get a new email that says, we have new updates on who you are.

I know.

Yeah, that's right.

It's like, oh, thank you.

We're waiting to find out who we are.

What's going on with that.

So, I mean, so really, because of your family's kind of history, I mean, you were really kind of baptized into a. I mean, politics is.

You had war going on when you were a kid.

There were conflicts, right?

That's right, yeah.

Vietnam, obviously.

You know, I was only.

I was only five years old at the time, but my parents took me to hear Vice President Nixon speak at the local.

The local college.

I was in grade three at the time.

You know, and it's something that everybody in my generation knows what they were doing at the time that they heard about that.

And, you know, it was very difficult to not to pay attention to politics at that time because there were events that were going on that affected us and affected our families.

One of these was the Watergate scandal, which eventually brought down Richard Nixon's presidency.

They had to leave their homes in the northern part of Cyprus and start life over again in the southern part of Cyprus.

That's what really pushed me.

You know, those two events Watergate and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus pushed me not exactly away from music, you know, because I still, you know, I still love music.

I'm an amateur composer and I play guitar and so forth.

But it really pushed me towards the focused study of politics and that's what I've carried through.

So my PhD is in government and International studies from, from the University of Notre Dame.

And then I taught for 30 years Political science at the undergraduate level here in southern Ontario and Canada.

It is, it's so interesting to be having this conversation, especially knowing a little bit more of your background.

Politics is one of those things that you can't, you can't ignore.

I come from a tribe where many are, I mean, it had two different sides of the equation.

Some people, I had some people and I've had pastors.

Me, this politics is a creation of man.

I don't want anything to do with.

It has nothing to do with the gospel.

And then there's the other side which is passing out all the voter guides and they're extremely politically involved.

But of course, the thing that you hear, we've always heard, what are the two things you don't talk about in public conversation?

Religion and politics.

And we're going to be talking about both because you can't avoid it.

It's to your detriment as a pastor and a ministry leader out there to do this.

You just need to know how to do it deftly because I, if you say something, you're stepping on a landmine in your own church to blow up.

So let's really kind of delve into this.

What really is politics actually for?

Well, politics.

I'm going to go back to a British political scientist by the name of Sir Bernard Crick.

And Crick argued, and I think not so much an argument as an observation, that politics is simply a way of conciliating diversity in a peaceful manner within a particular unit of rule.

Is the way that he puts it, the politics is not going to, to bring in the kingdom of God.

You know, the social gospelers of a century ago believed that they were going to do that.

I think the Christian nationalists nowadays follow a similar line of thought, but it's not going to do that.

So politics is made for the here and now between the two comings of Christ.

It's simply a way, a non utopian way for people to get along amidst their differences.

And you know, it's not.

It is not going to create a perfect society.

I tend to shy away from those people who argue that we are here to try to build a just society.

I would argue that we are indeed responsible for doing justice.

But doing justice has to do with principles which govern our activity from the beginning, rather than setting the goals and for some kind of a.

Like a quasi utopian society for the future.

So justice is something for the here and now.

It's something that we've been commanded to do in every area of life.

But in public life, there's something unique.

It's called public justice.

I'm on the board of an organization called the center for Public Justice.

We just had our semiannual board meeting a couple of weekends ago just outside of Washington, D.C. see?

And so I would argue that politics is about doing justice and about doing justice in a way that allows people to live together despite their differences, which.

Isn't easy to do because we have competing ideas of justice and what exactly is deserved.

How do you navigate that?

You talk about in the book several different things.

You introduced the concept of nations.

It's this imagined community of what life should look like.

You talk about progressives and conservatives, but you bring it out in a way that I hadn't read before.

So when we're talking about justice, everyone would agree, like, no one is going to be like, oh, we want an injustice society.

The problem is, when those justice claims compete, how do we navigate those minefields.

With fear and trembling?

There are no easy answers to that.

And in a democratic political system, we have to listen to each other, and we have to.

And I think we have to start by listening.

You know, we listen to each other, but then we're also ready to speak to each other as well, but speak in a humble way, recognizing that we do not have all the answers.

So in many respects, doing justice is a matter of feeling our way as we are balancing different interests.

You know, we are weighing different interests in the balance.

And, you know, and there is an ancient tradition which identifies justice with almost a kind of substantial entity, you know, that's either present or it's absent.

You know, that goes back to Plato to some degree, to Aristotle as well.

But what I would argue is that justice is simply an aspect of life.

It has to do with balancing different interests.

So, you know, justice is never completely absent from a political community because the balancing element is always going to be there.

But it's possible that we can get the balance egregiously wrong.

But in every case, political orders, political leaders, political communities are balancing different interests and trying to decide who gets what, when and how.

There are so many different questions that I have coming from that and the fact that you even bring up other governments, for a lot of Americans especially, I mean, obviously you're in Canada now, you've been there for almost 40 years.

You're born in the United States, but you come from a Cypriot family.

Your perspective is so much more.

I don't want to say you've been in it, and yet you know what life is like outside of it.

And you can see then how these political ideologies can really, actually disciple people more than the gospel itself as followers of Christ.

And in looking at your book, Politics Without Illusion, what do you mean by illusion?

Because we need to make sure that we're being discipled by truth and not with every political voice that comes catering and promising us the world that they're going to do exactly what we want.

As Christians, what are the illusions you're referring to?

Is that some of the things that we're going to create this kind of society?

Yeah.

The title of the book is actually Citizenship Without Illusions.

That's right.

Citizenship Without Illusions.

There we go.

That's it.

There we go.

And the illusions in the title is actually an allusion to the title of my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, which in the first edition was published back in.

It was endorsed by Tim Keller the following year, and it's sold quite well since then.

I hope this most recent book will sell as well as that first book.

But the illusions that I'm referring to in that first book are the various political ideologies that have influenced the Western world, and not just the Western world, but the entire globe now, because the west, the influence of the west, has been global over the last two centuries.

And these political ideologies are the standard ones that we probably have heard of in some fashion.

Liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, what I want would call democratism, others might call it populism, if you will, socialism.

Those are the sort of standard brand political ideologies that have been in the part of the political landscape for the last maybe about 250 years.

And so I undertook to try to analyze those ideologies in that first book because I was struck by the fact that Many Christians.

Christians will say, well, you know, I believe that we should ought to be liberals because the Bible says such and such, or we ought to be socialists because the Bible says such and such.

So, you know, what tends to happen is that people form their political viewpoints first, and then they try to go to the Scriptures and try to find support for their political viewpoints.

And I would argue that that's putting the.

Now I'm going to coin a very clever, clever expression, putting the cart before the horse.

So.

Having taught this for as long as you have, and again, coming from your background, have you noticed any shifts in how people are conceiving and understanding of politics, especially within the church today?

Yes, I think nationalism is far more attractive to people than it used to be.

But I think that's a global phenomenon.

So it's kind of ironic because nationalism started out as a way to try to knit diverse peoples together into a national unit.

France, for example, multiple languages were spoken in the territory of what's now France.

In the south of France, there was a language called Occitan, which is closely related to Italian and to Catalan.

In northern Spain, you know, in the far west, there was the Breton language, a Celtic language that's related to Welsh and Irish and Scots and so forth.

But over the course of many centuries, France has basically enforced the French language on all of those peoples and created a nation out of this diverse group of people that lives in France.

And that's taken place in, especially Western Europe, far less successful in Eastern Europe and Central Europe.

So nationalism has come back, but now it's a way of trying to draw back from globalism, the globalist influences that have been knitting people together around the globe.

I've been somewhat surprised to.

To see socialism making a comeback in the United States because during the years that I lived in the United States, I grew up there.

Anything about socialism, it would be the kiss of death within politics.

That's no longer the case.

Today you have people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the American Congress.

And it seems like people since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the death of the old socialist east in Europe, socialism has lost its capacity to strike fear in the hearts of Americans.

That's been a bit of a surprise because, yeah, I honestly hadn't seen that coming.

So, you know, there are now responsible, respectable people in the United States, including the mayor of New York City now who calls himself a Socialist.

I'm amazed, just as you are that I've seen it have this resurgence even among teenagers.

That's where I find it.

I've got teenagers and we're in.

I would say that we're in a more affluent area.

And I'm amazed at.

My son's friends are talking about socialism, and these are high school juniors and seniors.

Why do you think that it's become so attractive to so many young people in the church today?

And the older generation is just mystified.

How can this possibly be?

What's the attraction?

Well, I think there's an obvious attraction that socialism has championed the disadvantaged, the oppressed, people who have been squeezed out of life, marginalized for various reasons, you know, and socialism for the last, you know, maybe two and a half centuries has offered a way out of that in some fashion.

You know, the allure of economic equality to make sure that everybody has enough to be able to live a good life and that.

That's very attractive, you know, and if you, if.

When you see rule by billionaires, you know, when you.

When you see the power of global corporations over smaller nations and socialists are at the forefront of championing the rights of the disadvantaged.

You know, we do have socialist party here in Canada.

It's called the New Democratic Party.

It's never formed the government on the federal level in Ottawa, but it has propped up minority governments at various times here on the federal level.

So, you know, we do have a socialist.

We do have a socialist or social democratic party here in Canada.

The United States does not have such a party, but maybe there's part of the Democratic Party that might lean in a socialist direction.

Maybe.

I'll say that when I was about 20 years old, I called myself a socialist.

Oh, yeah, maybe for about six months.

How do you then respond?

I just find your story so fascinating.

Just because having grown up from a Cypriot family, refugee family, and then to live in the United States and then go to school in the United States and then now to live in Canada.

I mean, what are the biggest differences that you see, not only in the political process, but how the citizens actually go about their politics?

The differences between the two countries, you mean?

Yeah, I mean, from your own viewpoint, like, have you seen shifts Canadians in the United States?

I just wonder, what can we learn from one another in this regard?

In our Attitudes toward politics, or are you seeing that nationalistic fervor in Canada just as much as we're seeing in the United States?

Yeah, not, not quite to the same degree.

I know there is a separatist movement in Quebec.

There's this Quebec nationalism.

You know, they just had an election in Quebec and the Quebecois is going to form a minority government with less than 30% of the vote.

You know, so there are real issues with our political system here, especially our electoral system.

And there's going to be a referendum on secession in the province of Alberta in the western part of the country as well, you know, so there we have what you might call regionalisms, you know, Canadian nationalism.

That's.

Nationalism doesn't really fit the Canadian pattern very easily as it would in the United States, for example.

And that's something that I have found profoundly disquieting.

I remember the, the presidential debates that took place that had them both sitting at the same table with a moderator between them.

And it was a very gentlemanly type of, type of a debate.

As often as not, they were agreeing on things, but disagreed on the means to get there.

But since the turn of the century, since the turn of the millennium, it seems as though things have become far more polarized with.

And Republicans and Democrats, the extremes have gone, have drifted to the top in the two political parties, and they have poisoned both of them, I think, have poisoned the political atmosphere in that country.

If there were a different kind of electoral system in that country, one based on proportional representation, such as in the Netherlands, where I just visited last month, political parties would die when they were no longer performing the function that they should, and new parties could come onto the scene.

But the electoral system in the United States artificially props up two severely dysfunctional.

Political parties and that we are very much in agreement.

I can't imagine our system changing, but there's a lot of things that I didn't imagine that we've actually gone through or things have shifted that I never thought would happen in the last 10 years, that I'm like, okay, it's not so far fetched anymore.

And yet, as pastors and ministry leaders, the real issue is not necessarily, like, I can have my political theory and my political convictions but it's helping disciple my people more than they're being discipled by their news media outlets or whatever thing that they're looking at online.

That's what I'm, I find that pastors that I'm interacting with are saying.

That's what I'm navigating.

I've got to be very careful because they, I've had pastors tell me where they say it's a landmine.

I say one thing and it's off.

And I, and the whole church, I have half my church leave just because of this one thing.

How do we help?

I don't want to say de stigmatize, but how do we help bring that into where we can actually have a conversation, an intelligent conversation about these things?

Right, right, right, yeah.

And that in my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, in the second edition I added a chapter, it's called a Concluding Ecclesiological Postscript, in which I offered advice to ministers, you know, ordained ministers, also to synodical assemblies, you know, denominational assemblies and so forth, as to how to navigate the political waters.

And I did this because I had, when I was growing up, I grew up in my first 11 years in a Presbyterian church and then when I was in high school, I was in a Baptist church.

But both of those churches had ministers who would weigh in on political issues in a way that alienated members of the congregation and which led to declines in membership in those two congregations.

And I've come to believe since then that they approached political issues in the wrong way.

And so I offered concrete advice in that chapter as to how to speak politically from the pulpit.

You know, I do not believe that denominational assemblies should weigh in on, say the $15 per hour minimum wage or a two state solution for the Israel Palestine issue.

You know, those are the kind of things that I think that churches should stay away from.

But I do believe that ministers of the Gospel and, and elders in churches and so forth have an obligation.

You know, people who are teaching catechism classes in their churches have an obligation to teach about justice to the people in their congregation.

You know, that justice and political life, doing justice within political life is not simply, you know, something that's outside the sphere of the institutional church.

Because all of the, in the Reformation confessions, each of them address the civil magistrate.

If you go to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, if you go to the Belgic confession of the 16th century, if you go to the second Helvetic confession, all of those weigh in on the civil magistrate.

So, you know, it's something within the legitimate concern of Christians.

But we need to do so in a very careful way.

You know, avoiding speaking out on concrete political issues, but at the same time talking to parishioners, teaching parishioners, preaching from the pulpit about justice because we all have an obligation to do justice.

Justice in every area of life.

Let's drill down on that just for a bit, because I know after talking with different pastors, there are competing notions of the good, because most of us only look at what is affecting our people.

To illustrate it, there was a Caucasian pastor who was talking to his African American friend.

He said, I would like you to come and march with me at this pro life rally.

And he said, I will if you march with me at my anti racism rally.

Okay.

And there were competing notions of the good where I've met pastors which were like, I don't want to do that because for them, okay, it's this issue.

They don't face that other issue for that other issue for them is controversial to their church.

Church.

They don't want to anger the members of their church and alienate them what they feel unnecessarily.

How do you then navigate something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think in the concluding ecclesiological postscript to my first book, which was added to the second edition, there are three confessional documents that I cited as being good examples of the right way for the institutional church to address political life.

The Barman Declaration was drafted initially by the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, probably the most prominent Protestant the theologian of the 20th century.

The barmen Declaration is a masterpiece of prose addressing the situation of the German churches just after Adolf Hitler's National Socialist came to power in that country.

In no way was the Barman Declaration addressing the government, but it was addressing Christianity sitting in the pews in a way that told them about, well, you know, this particular teaching from the party in power is in conflict with what the Scriptures teach, you know.

And it went through a committee.

It was published.

I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of this effort as well.

Other people were part of this.

This Barman Declaration.

Most papal encyclicals are initially written in Latin, and then they're translated into other languages.

This one, uniquely, was written in German called Mitrene des Orke with Burning Concern.

And it was addressed to German Catholics.

It was to be read in the pulpits of all of the Catholic churches in Germany and addressing the distortions that were being introduced by the Nazis in Germany at that time.

And again addressing the apartheid ideology, again not addressing the government, but addressing the people sitting in the pews as to what to beware of in terms of what the apartheid government, the National Party in South Africa, was trying to promulgate.

Fast forward.

And this comes after I had written the book.

In the following months, there was a confessional doctrine that was signed by Orthodox clergy, warning Orthodox Christians of the dangers of the kind of nationalistic, pro Russian ideology that was being promulgated from the very top in Moscow.

And of course, there were many people that signed that.

I signed a supportive document for this.

But I think that is a good way to warn people, warn Christians about the dangers of the various ideological illusions that are on offer in today's world.

When does a political good become idolatrous?

When too much is made of it, when it becomes the center, you know, so liberalism is right to champion the rights of individuals.

Socialism is right to champion what we might call class solidarity or the rights of the disadvantaged.

But it becomes distorted when everything else is made to serve that particular good.

So liberals have a great deal of difficulty understanding the value of community.

And liberals would try to reduce all the diversity of communities in society to simple voluntary associations.

And that started already with Thomas Hobbes, you know, John Locke, already in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries.

And it's been applied nowadays to marriage.

I think there is so much confusion about marriage and about the structure of marriage today because the largest society cannot understand that there's a unique institution that cannot be reduced to a mere voluntary association of, thus far, two people, two partners.

How do we recapture then what marriage is?

How do we help show our people?

Because they're just being as catechized or discipled by that message as so many others.

How do we help challenge that?

Well, I think that's where we have to go to the Scriptures, you know, and the Scriptures, I would argue, reinforce creation because marriage has always been understood to have, as its sine qua non, as an essential component of marriage, the sexual complementarity, the male, female character of marriage.

And that's something that everybody understands.

Stood up until about five minutes ago in the course of human history.

So let's change gears for a second.

Okay.

We've talked a little bit about pastors and churches trying to figure out how to navigate this landmine.

I mean, this minefield.

We hear the term progressives and conservatives quite a bit.

And you devote some pretty.

I mean, you devote some pages to that very part of the conversation, but in a way that I'd not seen before.

Okay.

I actually really enjoyed your.

You would use the G.K. chesterton quote, where I'm going to read from your book, where he said GK Tester said of the ongoing battle between the two groups, the business of progressives is to go on making mistakes.

The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

I thought that was pretty funny.

I had to stop and read that to my wife.

But we're seeing conservatives and liberals within our society today.

People wear those labels quite a bit.

However, you brought something to it that I had not heard before.

Can you give us your take on progressives and liberals for a moment?

I mean, progressives and conservatives.

Yeah, progressives and conservatives.

I know that many Americans and increasingly Canadians think the liberals and conservatives are opposite each other, but they're really not, you know, because a lot of what goes under the conservative label is really just like an older version of liberalism, if you will.

You know, So I think it's better to talk about progressive, progressives and conservatives.

But I honestly think that progressing and conserving should be complementary.

You know, they shouldn't be isolated into separate corners because, you know, we live in a dynamic world.

You know, the world is constantly changing.

You know, there are many things that are worth keeping, but there are also many new things that we ought to entertain the possibility of adopting.

So, you know, I would argue that we need spiritual discernment to decide, you know, what should we dispense with and what should we keep.

You know, what should we progress to and what should we be aware of?

You know, so the change is not always necessarily going to be good, but it's not necessarily going to be bad either.

Conserving is not necessarily going to be.

Going to be a bad thing, but it's not going to necessarily be a good thing either.

So I think we have to do both.

And this is where I think we need to be spiritually discerning in terms of what we should keep and what we should.

What we should get rid of.

You know, I grew up near Chicago, and Chicago is constantly remaking itself with every generation.

A lot of the buildings that existed when I was growing up are no longer there, you know, constantly tearing things down.

I remember the Chicago Northwestern Railway, its station, it's, you know, neoclassical railway station on the west of the.

And I very much regretted that they did that because it was a beautiful building.

And they built this, you know, characterless office building in its place.

And then, you know, the trains run in the, in the, in the lower level.

But, you know, you know, not every building should necessarily be preserved, but there are many, many buildings that are, I think, have a lot of character that we ought to keep.

But at the same time, we can't keep every building that's ever been built.

But we need to discern what's worth keeping and what's worth dispensing with.

And I think that applies to society as well.

There are various traditions that we ought to keep, but there are various traditions that we ought to dispense with.

I'm thinking especially of the kind of traditions of racial segregation in the American South.

You know, that was.

Those were traditions, but we're better off without them.

I don't think anybody can argue with that.

But there are also traditions that perhaps we were too quick to dispense with.

You know, like the.

I don't know.

When I was growing up, I was taught that a gentleman always holds the door open for a lady, you know, and that was pretty much dispensed with.

I think in the coming generation, feminism has been part of that, I think, you know, equality of men and women.

But it may be that some of those traditions that help to lubricate the relations between men and women, maybe we were too quick to dispense with some of those.

And now we are dealing with things like sexual harassment, sexual assaults, perhaps, that maybe might have been prevented, you know, if we simply recognize that, you know, a gentleman does not seduce a lady.

Well, even now, I don't know if you've kept up with the Cornell 7 and what's going on in the US with that.

You read the account of that and you're like, this thing is bad from the get go.

I mean, it's all bad.

It's just no one should ever be sexually assaulted.

But you're getting into definitions of who knew what when.

And it's just you look at it and you go, this whole thing is a train wreck from beginning to end, and you feel terrible for I mean, this young woman is her traumas being played out on tv.

But then the question is how much agency, what was allowed, what was it not so hard to navigate some of those issues?

And even now, as we're talking about politics, every one of us has that sacred opportunity to go to the ballot box or that little booth and exercise our right to vote.

One of the things that you mention in your book is that there's not so much, and I'm trying to think here, where the quote is, you had mentioned voting.

There's a difference.

Let me find this on page 83.

There's a difference between voting.

Oh, let me write this.

Where the two major parties are seriously flawed, which is where we're at right now, and where the minor parties have little chance of electing even one candidate to public office, we may have no alternative but to hold our noses and cast our vote against a candidate rather than for one whom we actually like.

Under such circumstances, we need to consider the following.

And you break that down.

Why did you bring that up and what do you mean by that?

Well, because there's no way that we can vote for a party that hasn't been tainted by one of these ideologies, idolatrous ideologies, as I put it in my books.

That's not possible.

But if we're going to be involved in politics, then we have to get involved somehow.

You know, on the local level, you might be able to get get involved.

You know, local, local elections are usually nonpartisan, at least in the United States.

You know that that's a possibility.

If you're going to get involved on the, the, maybe the county or state or federal level, then you have to work through a party in some fashion.

But I think you're, you're going to have to probably keep it at arm's length to some degree, because a party is a mixture of good and bad.

So if you're voting for the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, you're voting for the good in that party.

But you need to be very much aware of the toxic elements within that party as well.

And maybe you're in a position to try to work to mitigate that.

Those elements to whatever degree lies within your ability.

But it's also going to be, you will also have to recognize that there's a great deal of toxicity within those parties as well.

So when you're voting for one party, you're voting for the good along with the bad.

And different Christians are going to come to different judgments as to which party has the Most good and which party has the worst.

And oftentimes we find ourselves voting against a candidate.

Boy, it's not that I'm going to bring in the kingdom of God.

I just want to keep things from getting any worse than they are now.

I had a man that had been a deacon in the church, he sat down with me and he actually just said I had served in Chicago where it was very politically mixed and the area that I'm at now is much more one sided.

And so this gentleman had moved to this area and he had said to me, he goes, I don't even know how you call yourself a Christian and vote this way.

How do we respond?

Because my thought was to them, I don't think you can put it at that level.

I understand why you would say that.

But a lot of people's voting is in some respect exactly what you're saying.

They're trying to prevent the evil to happen.

Now the others are going to have competing ideas of what is good and many, and I would agree life itself would be that first line.

But it is then become the argument that we've heard before that when, for example, in America, when Democrats go into place, abortion goes down.

I mean, is that true?

And when Republicans get into place, which are more pro life, abortions actually go up.

And it's the same thing with guns.

I don't know if that's true or not, to be honest.

Okay, okay, well that's good to know because that's the myth, at least that's been put out there.

I'm wanting to know is that true or not?

Yeah, and I don't have those statistics at hand to be able to indicate whether that's true or not.

Okay, well then let's go back then for a moment to talk about our church's political witness.

What gives you hope actually for the church's political witness today?

Oh, that's a hard question.

I mean, I'm hoping that people will read their Bibles, I hope that they will go to church, I hope that they will keep an open mind about political matters, you know, not necessarily, you know, harden their commitments to particular political parties or particular political movements, you know, to be able to listen to each other.

And I guess I would see hope coming.

You know, I don't know whether I can see the signs of hope yet or not, but I think if people would simply sit down and listen to each other and try to talk things out about politics and why people vote in the ways that they do to listen to each other and to be open to changing their minds.

I think that would be a source of hope.

How then do as pastors help our people navigate those waters to remain faithful to God's kingdom while participating in the life of our nation and confronting the idolatrous elements which sometimes seem to be driving those ideologies?

Yeah, yeah, I think maybe, maybe by encouraging the sorts of gatherings in which people would indeed talk and listen to each other on those very issues.

So facilitating those kind of conversations at the church.

Yeah, I think so.

Or maybe, you know, not necessarily at the church itself, but maybe maybe in people's homes, maybe in so called third spaces, you know, people can get together maybe in.

We have something in Canada called Tim Hortons and those are.

That's where we.

That's where I meet people.

I'm going to actually meet my elder at church this afternoon at Tim Hortons, you know, and I don't know what the equivalent would be in the United States, you know, but yeah, I mean, I think there are places where people could meet and sit down and talk with each other about such matters.

And if ministers are going to have series in which they're preaching on politics, I think preaching on abortion, I think that falls within the legitimate range of topics that could be preached on.

I think I would avoid talking about the actual politics policies that might be able to diminish abortions, because I think in terms of the actual laws that would regulate abortion or try to mitigate it in some fashion, I think that's probably something that political leaders should try to work through in the best ways that they can.

And I think there's a lot of space in between the, the absolute pro choice and the absolute pro life.

I think there's a lot of space for compromise, which is what people nowadays are not willing to look for.

How do we know if a subject or topic is worthy of preaching that is considered to be part of politics?

Like you mentioned abortion.

That to me is a given.

There's other things though, like racism, for example, or immigration.

How, how do you determine if a topic has come to the surface enough that we determine or discern that that's the topic we should be talking about?

Well, I think we have to probably pay attention to the news.

You know, Christian nationalism is something that has come in into the public consciousness.

I think something needs to be done to address that.

And I think in so doing, maybe we need to say, well, what is the good in nationalism?

What is the good?

But where does it go wrong as well?

And that's not going to be easy to do.

But I think that's what we need to do in the best way we can.

Well, that's why I think we need to recover a way of finding nuance in a conversation where people are polarized.

Nuance is in some respect.

There's no quarter given to nuance any longer.

It has to be one extreme or the other.

And that's a whole other discussion.

But we are coming to the end of our time, and those ministry leaders that are out there really bear a huge burden of trying to understand and discern.

And most pastors today don't know how to engage the culture.

Politics, as James Davidson Hunter told me, is really the last sphere that Christians can exude or exert any type of public influence.

What's a concluding thought that we can give to these ministry leaders as a means of encouragement to help them discern how to move ahead properly?

I would tell them to keep their eyes on Jesus Christ and His kingdom.

There's no substitute for that.

Recognize that our own efforts in politics or other areas of life, you know, God can use them for his own purposes, but ultimately we're not the ones in control.

And God will bring his kingdom to fruition eventually.

You know, we don't know his timeline.

We don't know his schedule for that.

You know, he may use us for his purposes, but we should avoid thinking that everything that's.

That the whole burden is on our shoulders.

You know, we should accept what God has given us to do and to try to be, you know, to be a healing presence in everything we do.

But recognizing that God is ultimately in control and that he's the one who will bring his kingdom to fruition in his own good times.

Keep your eyes on Jesus.

That's always good advice.

Keep your eyes on Jesus and his kingdom, and he will bring it to fruition.

Dr. Coyzas, thank you so much for being a guest on Ministry Deep Dive.

I would encourage those that are looking for a guide then consider getting the book Citizenship Without Illusions.

It's through university press.

It's been out for a couple of years.

And you got a new book coming out, too, so make sure that you follow him on Amazon so that you can learn about the new book that he has coming out.

When is that supposed to come out?

I haven't received a date yet, but probably within the next year or so.

Okay, awesome.

Well, again, thank you for being a guest on Ministry Deep Dive.

You're very welcome.

Well, I hope today's conversation with David Koizas has challenged you to think differently about politics, citizenship, and what it means to live faithfully as a follower of Jesus in our increasingly divided world.

As we've discussed, faithful Christian citizenship involves far more than simply casting a vote every few years.

It requires us to think biblically, discern the competing ideologies that are actually shaping our world today, and then participate fully in the places where God has called us.

And that's really at the heart of what we're doing at Apollos Watered.

We want to help Christians move beyond simply reacting to the culture around them and begin engaging in with biblical wisdom, theological depth, and missional purpose.

It's also why we're developing Apollos Academy, a new initiative designed to train ministry leaders to advance the gospel by engaging the culture in an ever changing world.

We're excited about what's ahead, and we want you to be part of it.

So if you haven't already, head over to ApolloSwatered.org and sign up for our newsletter.

It's the best way to stay connected with what we're doing, hear about upcoming conversations and resources, and be among the first to know when Apollos Academy launches.

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Thank you for listening and tuning in to Ministry Deep Dive.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

Stay watered everybody.