Half a century ago, evangelicals were known for evangelism, not politics, but 52-year-old J.D. Greear never knew that world.
He grew during the era of Jerry Falwell, not Billy Graham, and was on his way to a career in politics before receiving a call to ministry and eventually becoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Long before the murder of Charlie Kirk, Greear saw culture wars growing more tribal and violent. He wanted to offer a more redemptive vision to believers who sought to be faithful to Christ but weren’t sure how to do that amid the tensions of daily life.
J.D. Greear
“Many Christians feel leveraged as pawns in a culture war they never asked to be a part of,” he writes in Everyday Revolutionary: How to Transcend the Culture War and Transform the World.
Grear is particularly concerned about members of Gen Z who are coming to faith and attending church amid unprecedented division. “Will they turn into soldiers in the culture war, or will they do something beyond that?” he wonders.
Greear serves as pastor of The Summit Church in the “Purple city” of Raleigh-Durham, N.C., where members differ over Kirk’s legacy and many other current issues. While some white members revere Kirk as a martyr, some Black members see him as a racist.
The good thing is their faith commitment transcends their ideology enough that they can worship God together in the same room, the pastor says. Greear doesn’t sow discord among the flock by weighing in on what he considers secondary issues.
He’s not silent, however. He did recently weigh in on local efforts to promote transgender identity in schools that he felt went “too far.”
Everyday Revolutionary upholds Daniel, the Jewish prophet, as the role model we desperately need at this moment. Daniel demonstrated how God’s people could live as faithful exiles in Babylon by exhibiting just the right balance of boldness and love, he writes.
Daniel demonstrated how God’s people could live as faithful exiles in Babylon by exhibiting just the right balance of boldness and love, he writes.
“Daniel was so courageous that he ends up in the lion’s den,” Greear said in an interview, “but he was so beloved by the Babylonian king that the king wept for him. How can we become like that?”
He answers the question in the book: “The ‘babylons’ in which we are placed should have no one who loves them more, even as it’s clear that we disagree with so much of what they stand for.”
Daniel lived in Babylon. Peter lived in Rome but called it Babylon. Greear toggles back and forth between Old and New testaments to provide illumination for those of us who live in one of the most powerful Babylons yet: America.
He warns against the dual temptations of assimilation and separation.
“God told them not to work for the overthrow of Babylon, whether subtly or aggressively, or to seek out some secret enclave in Babylon where they could sequester themselves waiting on God to deliver them,” he writes.
Instead, God (through Jeremiah) told them to stay put and help create the best Babylon for everyone: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
That isn’t a message Greear remembers hearing at the independent Baptist Christian school he attended, where the message was “come out from among them, and be ye separate.”
There’s an important difference between Daniel’s Babylon, Peter’s Rome and our America, Greear says. Americans have a voice in how the country is run, but he sees that difference coming with a moral duty.
“When God sovereignly puts in our hands the power to bless and help our neighbors through the promotion of justice, good laws, and good candidates, and we failed to do that, we are disobeying his command to love our neighbors,” he writes. “We do have some opportunities they did not (but) that doesn’t change our primary assignment however: to show Babylon that Christ is holy.”
Instead of trying to change the world through acrimonious activism, Christians should live lives of kalos, the Greek word that means good, beautiful and virtuous, he advises. “God’s plan to change the world through us focuses not on political activism but on his exiles living quiet, beautiful, kalos lives, accompanied by clear gospel testimony.”
“We should embrace our duties as citizens, but our primary calling remains to be his witnesses, not his political revolutionaries.”