Integrating faith and politics has been a defining theme of the semester for me, even over spring break. I had the opportunity to participate in the Immersion Trip to Washington DC, along with nine other Geneva students and Resident Director John Abarca alongside his wife Grace, who co-led the trip. I, like several others, signed up for the trip because I had never been to DC before, and I expected to see a lot of new museums, monuments, and government buildings – which I did.
But in many ways, the trip felt very familiar, like a continuation of a conversation that I had already been a part of throughout the first eight weeks of the semester. Taking Great Issues in Politics in the same semester as the Immersion Trip was a delightful coincidence.
The night before we left for the trip, our group met in the CSE, and we started to consider in preparation for the trip: How does my Christian faith bear on my engagement with politics? How should it? We promised to ask each other and ourselves hard questions throughout the trip, and to answer respectfully but honestly.
One of the first things we did upon arriving in DC was to take a night tour of the National Mall. We visited over a dozen monuments and buildings, including the White House, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the Washington Monument, and the Korean and Vietnam War Memorials. We discussed — around group photos and trying not to lose each other in the dark by waving our glowing green wristbands — what the role of Christian values in the American founding and in our history has been.
There were those questions again: What role did Christianity play in Western civilization? What would the disappearance of those values mean in American society, and to what degree is it my responsibility, as a Christian, to incorporate those values into my role as a citizen?
Only this time, the questions weren’t in the Great Issues in Politics reader. They were on the curved walls surrounding Thomas Jefferson, in the inaugural address to Abraham Lincoln’s left. I have to say, they were more awe-inspiring in that form.
The next day started with a tour of the Capitol building and then a three-hour journey through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was a grueling journey. At the end, I picked up a pamphlet and a small identification card. The card told a very short story of Benjamin Soep, a young Jewish man from Amsterdam, who was deported in 1941to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He was the same age as me when he died.
Then the pamphlet, as if to add salt to a wound, asked: “What is your responsibility now that you’ve seen, now that you know?” I had been asked a similar question about ethical culpability weeks earlier, just before I packed up my notebook and never gave it another thought. Now it was impossible not to.
After another busy day of touring the National Archives and the Smithsonian Museums of Natural History and Air and Space, we wound up in nearby Alexandria to visit the Center for Public Justice (CPJ), a Christian civic education and policy organization. We learned some of the details of their mission to equip citizens, develop leaders, and shape policy to advance justice for the transformation of public life.
As we debriefed over ice cream and later that night on the metro, the group discussed CPJ’s focus on the responsibility of citizens to pursue justice and engage faithfully with politics, even on an everyday level. We each considered where we might get involved locally or learn more about a specific topic so that we are better able to serve and act justly within our own community.
More broadly, we asked: How would American society and the world change if the church truly acted as the hands and feet of the Lord Jesus Christ in every sphere of life, even the political?
I came back to campus a few days later. The first reading I sat down in the library to do was from a book titled Messiah the Prince, discussing the implications of the Kingship of Christ over the nations for the role that biblical values should play in government and politics. There was a weight that accompanied the reading that I think might not have been there without the Immersion Trip.
That’s because, when we talk about politics and government, it isn’t usually grand ideas of justice and the Kingship of Christ, or even our nation’s history and the beautiful buildings in the capital that we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about petty (or massive) arguments, ten-second social media clips, and whatever happens to make the news on any given day. The discussions we had on the trip and the touring we did made the first set of ideas more real to me. It showed me my own responsibility to answer the questions that follow from them.
Even though the Immersion Trip is over, that’s something I will be doing for a long time.
Reagan Shields ‘26
Opinions expressed in the Geneva Blog are those of its contributors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or official position of the College. The Geneva Blog is a place for faculty and contributing writers to express points of view, academic insights, and contribute to national conversations to spark thought, conversation, and the pursuit of truth, in line with our philosophy as a Christian, liberal arts institution.
Apr 2, 2025
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