A Political Tightrope

A few weeks ago I posted a note from Eastern Canada:

“As believers, help us to understand what is going on in your country with your present government as we try to process it all. The ‘church’ and its leaders are silent! We are so confused as to why no one is speaking up? Can you help us understand?”

I soon learned that not everyone is silent. Some 55,000 of you saw that note, and more than 2,000 responded to it. Comments ranged from thoughtful and gracious to strident and name-calling, proof of the deep divisions in the U.S. and especially in the church.

Younger voters may be surprised to learn that Christians’ involvement in politics is a recent phenomenon. During my childhood, conservative churches rarely meddled in politics, emphasizing instead personal behavior and preparation for the next life. Nowadays, Christians comprise a large, sought-after voting bloc.

In 2014 I published a book, Vanishing Grace, that gave cautions about evangelicals’ love affair with politics. (Note: this was two years before Donald Trump became a presidential candidate and political lightning rod.) Over the next decade a clear pattern emerged, as many polls attest: the more vigorously Christians entered the political arena, the more negatively they were viewed. Not so long ago a huge majority of the uncommitted still viewed Christians favorably. Now, a diminishing minority of young “outsiders” have a favorable impression of Christianity and only 3 percent have a good impression of evangelicals. Have Christians obscured the good news by their enthusiasm for politics?

Some Christians want to focus on personal morality and leave public morality to secular politicians. Others seek ways to guide the broader culture while still communicating grace. Rather than propose a single path, I will instead make a few observations and suggestions for Christians to consider as we interact with a world that does not always share our views.

1) Clashes between Christ and culture are unavoidable.

The Bible shows a variety of ways in which believers engage with culture. Kings such as David and Solomon virtually combined church and state. Prophets often denounced the surrounding culture—yet even as the prophet Elijah was violently opposing Ahab’s regime, a “devout believer in the Lord” named Obadiah ran Ahab’s palace while sheltering God’s true prophets on the side. Amos and Hosea thundered against the state; Isaiah acted as a kind of court prophet. Daniel held high office in two different pagan governments and Nehemiah led a detachment of Persian cavalry.

The theologian John Howard Yoder has pointed out that Christians will never wholeheartedly embrace or reject culture, but rather we must discriminate among its various parts. We will categorically reject some elements (pornography, tyranny, human trafficking), accept others within limits (commerce, transportation, taxes), and provide a new motivation to others (family life, education, peacemaking). We will use some aspects of culture (music, art, language), albeit in our own way, and we will heartily promote certain activities (hospices, care for orphans, homeless shelters, soup kitchens).

Yoder recounted 51 separate times in which Jesus confronted injustices, and throughout history Jesus’ followers have followed suit. Early Christians were instrumental in ending the Roman practices of gladiator games and infanticide, and in the years since, Christians have led moral campaigns against abuses such as slavery and sexual trafficking.

2) Christians should choose their battles wisely.

The sociologist Peter Berger has written of the “world maintaining” and “world shaking” functions of religion. Founders of the United States recognized that a democracy, with less top-down control and more freedom, needs a religious foundation to guide and motivate its citizens. In John Adams’ words, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The nation’s leaders counted on the church to teach and equip people to act responsibly.

When the church moves into the world-shaking business, however, it must do so wisely and with care. Alas, Christians involved in politics have tended to go off on tangents. In the 1840s and 1850s the ironically named “Know-Nothing movement” demonized Catholics and raised hysterical fears about them. As late as 1960 the National Association of Evangelicals urged all evangelical clergy to warn against the dangers of electing a Catholic president, just before the election of John F. Kennedy.

The church’s landmark moral campaign, Prohibition, absorbed more sheer energy from Protestant Christians than any other political effort. A Prohibition party actually ran candidates for President, and within two decades the U.S. passed a constitutional amendment banning alcohol for the entire nation. For five years the nation mostly complied. Then drinking began to increase, accompanied by organized crime and corruption. In the final analysis, concludes historian Paul Johnson, “what looked at first like the greatest victory for American evangelicalism turned instead into its greatest defeat.” The failure of this moral crusade drove Protestants out of the political arena, and not until the late twentieth century would they return in large numbers.

More recently, Christians have debated the pros and cons of gay rights. A few decades ago the Church of England debated an issue with close parallels: divorce. The Bible has far more to say about the sanctity of marriage and the wrongness of divorce than it says about homosexuality. C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he continued to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

Currently, I hear much from Christians about the slippery slope of transgender, when in fact those who identify as trans represent less than one percent of the population. The more Christians focus on tangential issues, the less we will be heard on matters of true significance. I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, all biblical mandates. Only recently have evangelicals taken up the cause of creation care. Evangelicals trumpet family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it. Too often the agenda of certain religious groups matches line for line that of conservative politics and not the priorities of the Bible.

3) Christians should fight their battles shrewdly.

To gain the attention of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus’ words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency—in short, our lack of grace—has proved so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs. Such tactics, let alone comments about hurricanes and terrorism as acts of God’s judgment, undermine the credibility of Christians engaging culture.

In one commendably shrewd tactic, Protestant Christians have formed alliances with Catholics, Jews, and Muslims on some issues. All these groups share a belief in one God who has revealed moral principles we ought to live by. In engaging culture, each group has something to contribute. It has become common to see Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, and evangelical pastors linking arms in peaceful protests outside abortion clinics.

Fifty evangelicals and Roman Catholics met with fifty Jews to identify areas of mutual concern: adoption reform, divorce reform, opposition to gratuitous sex and violence, character education in the schools. And Jewish rabbis have raised some of the loudest alarms about the dangers of a purely secular society. Rabbi Joshua Haberman wrote a much-discussed article in Policy Review in which he, a survivor of Hitler’s Germany, said,

As a Jew, I differ with a variety of Bible-believing Christians on theology, our nation’s social agenda, and matters of public policy. I am, at times, repelled by fits of fanaticism and narrow-minded, rigid dogmatism among fundamentalist extremists. Yet far greater than these differences and objections is the common moral and spiritual frame of reference I share with Christians, including fundamentalists. The Bible gave our nation its moral vision. And today, America’s Bible Belt is our safety belt, the enduring guarantee of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

Modern democracy, which grew out of Christian soil, compels us to recognize others’ rights even when we deeply disagree with their positions. We seek to persuade but not to coerce. More, the gospel commands me to love my enemy as well as my neighbor. As Christians we may work within institutions, but always wary of their limitations and always conscious of our primary charge to love. Institutions cannot really express love; justice is as close as they come.

Historian Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. Society needs the restraint offered by religion, and the state welcomes it—as long as the state can call the shots.

The evangelicals who supported Hitler were startled to learn one day that the German government would now appoint church officials. Soon all pastors were required to take a loyalty oath to Hitler and his government. In contemporary Russia, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is the loudest cheerleader for what he calls a “holy war” against Ukraine, and boasts that Russia is the most Christian nation on earth. In China today the communist government subsidizes official Three-Self churches, a way of keeping them under its thumb, and appoints Catholic bishops who do not have Vatican approval. When church and state get too close, the church always loses.

The church works best as a separate force, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm’s length from the state. When the church accepts as its main goal the reform of the broader culture, we risk obscuring the gospel of grace and becoming one more power broker. That is how many post-Christians view us now, as a right-wing conspiracy intent on passing laws against them. In the process, they miss the good news of the gospel, that Christ died to save sinners, to free us from guilt and shame so that we can thrive in the way God intended.

The state will often try to use religion for its own purposes, but when it does so the gospel itself changes. Civil religion invites us to share in a nation’s military glory; the gospel calls us to take up a cross. Civil religion offers prestige and influence; the gospel calls us to serve the needy. Civil religion rewards success; the gospel redefines success and forgives failure. Civil religion values reputation; the gospel calls us to be “fools for Christ.”

In a recent article in Christianity Today, a medical missionary tells of the impact of PEPFAR in saving babies and their mothers from needless deaths from AIDS. Matthew Loftus says, “My salary as a missionary is covered by private donations from churches and friends back in the States, but many of the drugs and supplies we use in our daily work come from programs funded by the US government as well as international institutions.”

Loftus reports, “On January 24, clinics around the world that are funded by PEPFAR via USAID received a stop-work order. That directive has thrown HIV-positive patients across the world into confusion and chaos. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out a waiver a few days later, but it has not resulted in any clinics on the ground receiving funds they need.”

He adds, “I wish I could bring everyone who has power over PEPFAR’s survival to my mission hospital. I wish they could see how a relatively small amount of money has done incredible good. I wish they could meet the hardworking people who rely on PEPFAR to survive. God has blessed America richly with an abundance of resources. There are few better ways to steward that blessing than keeping people alive.”

In my career as a journalist, I have seen firsthand the good that can result when missionaries join hands with local governments in campaigns to address diseases such as leprosy, malaria, and guinea worm infections. I have visited underfunded prisons where inmates were starving until churches organized a food program. I have seen notorious brothels in India go vacant thanks to the work of International Justice Mission in freeing the victims of sexual slavery.

Politicians will wrangle over budgets, of course. But in a rare burst of unity, organizations such as Compassion International, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and Bread for the World joined together in a “Prayer Vigil for Foreign Aid,” protesting the 83 percent cuts in foreign aid even as the military budget increased. With our proud history in responding to emergency needs around the world, can’t we keep the tiny percentage of foreign aid that has done so much good in the world?

Many Christians are familiar with Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25: “I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” It’s easy to overlook one key element in that story: God is judging the nations. We have, in Augustine’s words, a dual allegiance as citizens of the city of God and also of the “city of man.”