Wondering about Dissidence

 I haven't yet read the 3rd chapter of McKnight & Matchett's Revelation for the Rest of Us, but I wanted to pause for a moment to consider the question, Is a Christian a dissident?

To this question the authors answer an affirmative, "Yes, by definition, a Christian is a dissident."

And of course we have a long history of Christian dissidence. I was just reading yesterday in Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World about a fellow named Benjamin Lay. He was a Quaker who spent much of his life campaigning against slavery. A noteworthy, colorful, and heroic figure, and a certainly a dissident!

Christian dissidence is real, and it is constant, for we will always be crosswise with the world (the system, the governing authorities, the powers (Eph. 6:12). I'm with Stanley Hauerwas in believing that Christians are  resident aliens in whatever country they finds themselves. The ideal is, we are in but not of, isn't that right?

But none of this means--or does it--that a Christian is by definition a dissident. Wikipedia says a dissident is a person who "actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy or institution." And all of McKnight's examples in chapter 1 are true activists in this regard, as are Wikipedia's. None of this "they also serve who stand and wait." 

I think the case is well made that many Christians will be called to active non-cooperation with Babylon (along with, of course, many non-Christians), and even at times civil disobedience. We all have to wonder about the hidden degrees of complicity with evil that just being participants in a market society involves us in. The Amish, for example, have drawn that line in a very different place than most other Christians. And many of us have probably not thought deeply enough about where that line should be. What shall we boycott? When shall we march? When do we move from prayer to activism? And is "activism" a requirement of the faith?

When do we move from a personal "no" to an active coaxing of the people around us to also say "no"?

And have we not seen many examples of activism seeming to supplant faith? Is there a way that activism can come to seem as worldly as happy complicity? 

We are resident aliens in Babylon. Wherever we live, we are not truly at home. Babylon is here, around us, infiltrating and shaping us more than we know. We are less in and more of than we care to admit. In John's Revelation we have a call to remain strong and endure, even if by being crosswise with the world we may provoke the world's anger against us. 

I look forward to reading more of what McKnight and Matchett have to say about these things. 

Well, I'm just wondering aloud here. Perhaps I'm "kicking against the goads!" Faith is not simply in inward disposition, it is walked out. 

Here we might look to the Amish, who are certainly actively trying to maintain their separateness from the world, but are they in fact dissidents? Their lives embody a critique of the world as it is, but they are not really activists trying to change the world, only to remain untainted by it.