Our increasingly polarized environment must not scare us away from proclaiming the values of the Kingdom of God.
The Pew Research Center recently confirmed what my Facebook feed has made me suspect: the United States is becoming more and more polarized.
In January, Pew posted an article with some particularly intriguing graphs, plotted using responses to ideological issues, showing more and more people moving into polarized ideological camps and isolating themselves there.
Perhaps more troublesome is that our congressional representatives, those who make and repeal laws affecting everyday Americans, not only mirror this polarization but seem hell-bent on demonizing the other side at every opportunity. Veteran lawmakers have bemoaned the decline of compromise. Fueled by 24-hour cable news and recent midterm elections that brought in ideological crusaders with no interest in governance, we are constantly led to see others not just as those with whom we disagree but as domestic enemies.
In this kind of environment, it’s hard to think of many issues that have not gotten “political.” This makes the Christian public witness tricky.
Some people ask, “Should pastors and churches be political?” It is a good question, and one that calls for clarification of terms.
Pastors, and churches as a whole, should never be partisan; i.e., endorse or support a candidate or party. In the first place, a pastor should not want to be partisan, as it can easily alienate him or her from a portion of the congregation. Partisanship in religious institutions is also supposed to be grounds for revoking our tax-exempt status, even though some defiant churches and pastors have gotten away with it.
But whether churches and their pastors should be “political” is a different question and depends on what one means. What exactly makes an issue “political”? In common usage, it seems that an issue is considered “political” if it’s something politicians are currently fighting about. But avoiding all such issues is not only unrealistic but would sacrifice our public witness and relegate us to the spiritually abstract.
Many denominations have a solid history of adding a prophetic voice to moral and ethical issues of the day. This includes my own denomination, American Baptist Churches USA, which can claim Martin Luther King Jr. as one of its own. Our domestic arm, American Baptist Home Mission Societies, has a number of initiatives including children in poverty, prisoner re-entry, and immigration and refugee services. The Roman Catholic Church, as another example, also has a long history of social teaching, including the primacy of the family, the value of life from conception to death, and care for God’s creation.
The preceding paragraph mentioned at least a half-dozen issues that politicians and their ideological camps are currently fighting about. Imagine what a large part of the church’s historic public witness would be silenced if it were concluded that we could not speak on anything about which there is current political disagreement.
Some confuse the separation of church and state with the separation of religion and politics. The former is absolutely necessary for a free society; the latter is impossible. Churches and their leaders absolutely have a right and a responsibility to speak to moral and ethical issues, especially where suffering is happening or human dignity is at stake.
If “being political” means getting caught up in the brouhaha of personalities, polls, etc., then that, of course, is best left for the front porch or living room. But our increasingly polarized and volatile environment must not scare us away from proclaiming and living the values of the Kingdom of God. We must uphold “justice, mercy, and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23), and if a certain politician or party happens to fall in or out of line with such values, so be it.
I believe this public witness is more important than ever today, for several reasons. First, it is only the church that can reclaim our faith and the witness of scripture from those who would use it only for political purposes. In a 1981 issue of Parade magazine, Billy Graham famously and prophetically warned that the political establishment has no interest in religion except to manipulate it. People like to scoff at the way candidates pander to Christians, but there are many more consequential examples, like the use of scripture in intelligence briefings during the Iraq War.
A second reason this public witness is crucial today is because, as church affiliation and biblical literacy continue to decline, we’re seeing too many Christians rely primarily on the narrative of their political party as their guidepost, not possessing the theological tools to evaluate such narratives in light of the values of the Kingdom of God. We Christians too easily explain away or dismiss the teachings of Jesus in order to keep our political views intact.
As David P Gushee and Glen H. Stassen wrote in their 2002 book Kingdom Ethics, “When Jesus’ way of discipleship is thinned down, marginalized or avoided, then churches and Christians lose their antibodies against infection by secular ideologies that manipulate Christians into serving the purposes of some other lord.”
Nevertheless, I am encouraged. In the midst of all this polarization, the decline of religious institutions, and worsening biblical illiteracy, I see a trend.
I see an upwelling among followers of Jesus, a group that is getting louder, finding their courage and their voice. It is, to use a term employed by at least one other writer, a Christian moral minority.
Sociologically speaking, this is not a new phenomenon, but its contemporary manifestation is emerging.
This Christian moral minority (unlike Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority) crosses both political and theological lines, rising above division and demonization, and is seeking to return the church to its calling to live and witness to those kingdom ethics as highlighted in Gushee and Stassen’s book. The Christian moral minority acknowledges that we have been “guilty of evading Jesus … especially the largest block of his teachings, the Sermon on the Mount.”
The Christian moral minority does not necessarily advocate for specific public policy on every issue, knowing that such positions are never free from oversights or drawbacks. They may be attacked from both polarized political camps for not always toeing the line, but continue to stubbornly witness to kingdom ethics.
When I speak of this Christian moral minority, I am not pointing to an organization or even a clearly definable group. It is not theologically homogenous. Rather, it identifies a trend of believers who are speaking with an increasingly unified voice to reawaken us to the call to “love our neighbor as ourselves” and make that commandment the primary filter through which we approach our world’s many complicated and divisive issues.
Most importantly, these Christians are not allowing issues of policy to remain in the abstract, but are using the power of story. They are holding up real life stories of human suffering and shining a light on real life consequences of oppression and neglect, claiming the mandate to honor the image of God in every person.
I place in this moral minority Christian writers and speakers as diverse as Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. I’ve seen it in high profile pastors as different as Brian Zahnd and Andy Stanley. I’ve seen it my connections on social media — people who I never thought would agree on anything but who have recently and independently spoken truth to power.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declared that to put these teachings into practice is to build one’s house on a rock (Matt. 7:24). In one sense, the chaff is being separated from the wheat. The moral minority is forcing the nominal Christians out of hiding and creating a “come to Jesus moment” where we have to decide whether or not we are standing on the rock of his kingdom ethics, or in the sand of political ideology.