Church vs. injustice, not church vs. state

The central argument in Ilsup Ahn’s wonderfully truthful book is straightforward: “The public is a new sacred space for the church’s ministry of justice and peace.” The church’s place is not on one side of the dualistic church-state divide. The church is neither a religious nor a political movement. Rather, it is a public movement that transcends both private organizations and government authority by building and extending what Ahn calls “rhizomatic relationships” based on justice.

Ahn’s concern is the privatization of the Christian faith that results from its depoliticization, which in turn comes from the church’s being understood primarily as one side of the separation of church and state. Such a privatized church has by and large focused on individual morality and the salvation of the soul rather than on social and ecclesial activism organized to serve as “resistance . . . to an unjust system and structural process.”

Essentially, Ahn argues that the separation of church and state is not what we should prioritize. Although much of the Western church has lost its way, complicit as it is in the assumptions and power dynamics of colonialism and neoliberalism, it can recover its core communal identity as God’s covenantal people by adopting a new political-theological paradigm: the church versus structural injustice.