By Bob Allen
Author Jonathan Merritt wrote a USA Today op-ed piece that ran the day before the official May 7 release of his new book, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars.
The son of former Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt, who serves on the staff of his father’s Atlanta-area mega church, said coming-of-age Millennials are forging a different path from Christians on both the right and left who have used the Bible as a political tool and reduced Christianity “to little more than a voting bloc.”
Merritt’s previous book, Green Like God, explored the generation of rising evangelicals’ move from concern about just abortion and gay marriage to a broader array of social issues such as creation care.
In his new article Merritt noted three shifts that are occurring in culture. He said Christians are moving from partisan to independent, from a narrow to a broader agenda and from divisive rhetoric to civil dialogue.
“Christians of yesteryear saw the two-party political system as an indispensable mechanism for promoting their values, but young Christians recognize the limitations and pitfalls of partisan politics,” Merritt wrote.
While a decade ago a majority of young evangelicals identified themselves as Republicans, Merritt said, a survey of 700 young Christian leaders attending the Q Conference in Washington found that 61 percent claimed they don’t affiliate with either the political right or left.
Merritt said there “is no longer a strict hierarchy” of issues like abortion and gay marriage to which young Christians feel like they must attend. “I’ve spoken with hundreds of young Christians, and one of the common denominators I encountered was the wide array of issues that enlivened them,” he said, “caring for the environment, protecting the poor, waging peace, advocating for immigrants and, yes, protecting the unborn.”
Like Americans in general, Merritt said, young Christians are weary of angry and polemical language “that stymies progress and the common good.”
“Christians are awakening to the ways in which our cultural coarseness has affected their own community,” Merritt said. “They’ve heard their leaders resort to extreme rhetoric, insults and name-calling, whereby those who disagree with Christians are accused of being unpatriotic, pagans, baby-killers and anti-God.”
Merritt said that is why 70 percent of non-Christians ages 16 to 29 say Christians are “insensitive to others.”
While veteran culture warriors like James Dobson and Richard Land either oppose the culture shift or deny it is occurring, Merritt said Christians exercise far less influence over society than they did a decade ago, and the trend is due in part to partisan and uncivil engagement in the public square.
“So I say bring on this new brand of political engagement,” he concluded. “Because crucifying the culture war model could be the only hope for resurrecting American Christianity in a new century.”