Where should politics and religion intersect?

Another interesting post went up recently at Revolution in Jesusland, a blog by a former (?) atheist who is studying the movement in Christianity today to revitalize itself. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there, but the piece that caught my attention was this.

On those points, the movement answers: "Okay, maybe, but Jesus never taught us to ‘take power.’ And so we must limit ourselves to witnessing from the ‘bottom’ and never try to put ourselves on ‘top’ in positions of power."

In college, I had friends who went off to join a weird little secretive Maoist party that was active on campus. It was a crazy thing to watch as they transported themselves back in time to the China of the 1940s. All their calculations about making social change here in America were messed up because their paradigm was based on the regime that Mao Zedong’s communists lived under as young persecuted revolutionaries. I think there’s a bit of that going on with this movement of Christian revolutionaries today. Too often, they’re applying the Way of Jesus to our modern-day world as though nothing has changed since the first-century Roman Empire.

But haven’t 2,000 years of redemptive history taken place since then?

This is a debate that Ward and I have from time to time. Where is Christianity supposed to be a "personal" phenomenon and where it is supposed to be a larger political force in the world. To break it down to the bare essentials of our argument, I would say the two sides are: (Nomad) "Jesus did not work on a political level and overtly rejected politics as a means to his ends. Thus, we should focus on the person-to-person side of our Christianity." (Ward) "Jesus's teachings affect all aspects of our lives and politics are just one more extension of our lives. Thus, our politics should be an active reflection of our morality and our Christianity." (This is obviously so simplistic as to almost be a caricature of the arguments, but I trust you get the point. Please be charitable in your responses.)

The question I continue to struggle with is how our personal sphere and the political sphere should intersect as Christians. Some people have wrought major change with political movements - Pat Robertson, the Moral Majority etc. But in the end, most of these are seen as failures or even embarrassments to the Church. But overall, the Christian movements that I see which have transformed our society have been apolitical - Promise Keepers, Billy Graham, etc.

What do Mod-Bloggers thing?