Prophetic Politics

PROPHETIC POLITICS
acted in accordance with. To be truly effective a political prophecy cannot and must
not enable contesting narratives to be heard. It is the primary object of prophetic politics
to prevent the story recipients from getting the impression that there would
even exist another way of depicting political reality. Unless other charismatic figures
are offered as an option, even a feeble prophet gains acceptance of his vision if it is
able to give the impression of being grounded well enough in common values. Faith
certainly has inspired American politicians from Abraham Lincoln to George W.
Bush but in most cases the inspiration derives from its use as a weapon in politics instead
of it being something that reforms the outcomes of political decision-making.
Gutterman focuses his attention on the actual mechanisms of how prophesies are
communicated and he sees ‘sacred stories’ as the foremost vessels of spreading the
vision. For him prophetic politics simply means that political figures or institutions
base their identities in certain Biblical narratives which enable the formation of relatively
stable political identities and visions. (2005) I argue that any story which is foundational
to a given culture can be viewed as sacred. These sacred stories are so
sedimented into a certain cultural context that they are able to mould the culture and
the vision of politics by setting limits to the more mundane stories that can be told
about related subjects. There is not necessarily anything religious in these stories, but
the term is used to imply their unquestionable status in the given culture. They themselves
create laws of telling within their respective storyworlds by establishing themselves
as ‘common sense’ or simply almost eternal truths. There can be many different
sacred stories and they may differ from one period of time to another. (Gutterman,
2005: 10–15, 30–34) As Corrine Squire argues, master narratives are ‘always less stable
and unified than they appear, more susceptible to fracture and diversion.’ (Cit. Andrews,
2004: 4–5) Even the type of master narrative which practically seems to have
been engraved in stone is teetering on a tightrope. This creates the constant need for
a prophetic politician to rearticulate, reshape and retell his narratives so that they are
more likely to dominate the discourse. Northrop Frye writes:
It is obvious […] that one major source of order in society is an established pattern
of words. In religion this may be a scripture, a liturgy, or a creed; in politics
it may be a written constitution or a set of ideological directives […] Such verbal
patterns may remain fixed for centuries: the meanings attached to them will
change out of all recognition in that time, but the feeling that the verbal structure
must remain unchanged, and the consequent necessity of reinterpreting
it to suit the changes of history, bring the operations of criticism into the center
of society. (Frye, 1957: 349)
Frye allows the sacred story the chance to change its meanings and leave itself open
for reinterpretations. The Constitution and other sacred texts and stories from the
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