Strangeness of the Month Club
with your host, Kent B. True*

As you probably know, our club "meetings" are delayed a few months from writing to publication. As I write this it is late October, 2006 - just a couple of weeks until the Congressional elections. Such elections always dominate the news, usually to the point of making you want to jump off a nearby bridge. But that is not our topic this month. The question here is: just how "political" should Christians and even congregations be? We will not be voting on this question! Rather, come, let us reason together as we consider . . .

Politically Scared to Death
Christian Standard, October 8, 2006
focus on the entire issue, but with special attention to
Darrel Rowland, "Is the Church Getting Too Involved in Politics?"

This issue of the Christian Standard was devoted to the question, "One Lord, One Faith, ONE PARTY?" Pictured on the cover was a Bible-toting elephant "zapping" a Bible-toting donkey with a cross, reminiscent of the way Hollywood portrays someone attacking a vampire. This issue of the Standard was mostly devoted to people who are worried that Christians have overly-politicized the Christian faith and the church.

The Standard is simply reflecting a recent hot-spot among theologically "conservative" Christians. This same kind of hand-wringing has popped up frequently in Christianity Today and other such publications.

Dwight Eisenhower once commented, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply-felt faith - and I don’t care which one!" Now it seems that some Christians want to say, "If you are devoted to the historic Christian faith, you should pick a political position - and it doesn’t matter which one!" Does the Christian faith have little or nothing to say about politics? Why does even the possibility of this connection seem to bother some people?

In this issue of the Standard, newspaper editor and Bible School teacher Darrell Rowland reveals that he is "scared to death" about the church getting too involved in politics. He expresses the worry that mixing politics and Christianity might blur the essentials vs. opinion distinction:

This business of faith (essentials) and opinion (nonessentials) is frequently misunderstood. For what are the "essentials" essential? The historic answer of the restoration plea is that the essentials are those things required to make one a Christian. Many moral matters might be very important to the Christian faith, but not required to make one a Christian. A person who is very confused about abortion and personhood can be a Christian. Such a person might have a lot to learn about the moral implications of the Christian faith, but that doesn’t necessarily separate someone from the body of Christ.

So nothing about the restoration movement requires that we stop talking about politics in the church. More than that, the church should talk about many political issues because they are moral matters. And it is important that we do not discount moral matters simply because they are also political matters. At one point, Rowland wonders, "Do we issue the clarion call for prayer requests to support the holy cause of tort reform?"

Suppose many mature Christians realized that the legal system was being abused to oppress innocent people? Suppose they taught, lobbied, and organized voters to change that situation.  Just why is that sort of thing a problem? If you don’t think the Bible speaks very directly about abusive legal systems, you haven’t read very much of it! While that doesn’t make your view of abusive legal systems essential to becoming a Christian, it also doesn’t make this an unimportant issue, or an issue that shouldn’t be taken up by the local congregation.

Our Bible school teaching friend also worries about the church being too conservative, politically speaking, when he asks, "Shall we change the old song to say, ‘And they’ll know we are Christians by our . . . right-wing politics’?" and then adds "How about people who believe feeding the poor and caring for the sick are at least as scriptural as opposing abortion and gay marriage?"

I will agree with Mr. Rowland when he questions the importance to the Christian faith of the legal limits of campaign contributions. I also don’t care much about labels like "right-wing." But it is high time for the church to stop worrying less about "how much . . . we contribute to the stereotype" and worry more about the ethical teaching of the Christian faith that does have direct applicability to political questions.

Abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent, helpless human being. So-called "gay marriage" is a concerted attempt by the radical homosexual lobby to gain social and political approval for a Biblically forbidden lifestyle. How can the church be the church and not address these issues in the political arena?

And let us make something unmistakably clear: feeding the poor and caring for the sick certainly are scriptural. But where in scripture do we find the justification for using the power of the government to extract money from people by force to build bureaucracies that supposedly feed the poor and care for the sick, but mostly build powerful fiefdoms for highly-paid officials to waste a lot of money on pointless projects? Even if we were to get past the bureaucracy and waste, when will Christians finally realize that there are many good works that people should do, but which we just as surely cannot rightly force them to do?

As a Christian concerned with ethical issues and political positions, I too struggle with how to express myself through our two party system. There are some small, almost insignificant, parties that often express the Christian moral agenda better than "the big two." But leaving those aside for now, let’s once again stop worrying about what everyone thinks and be open and honest - something you don’t see much in politics.

"Can we agree that Christians are called to a higher standard than either the Democratic or Republican platform?" asks Mr. Rowland. Yes sir, we can. But that does not relieve our responsibility to evaluate all party platforms by that higher standard.

Republicans are often disappointing. But their national party platform, while certainly flawed, at some points is in harmony with the Christian ethic. And, as Darrell asks, "What about Democrats?" The sad answer is that the Democratic national party platform could not be more anti-Christian. In a lot of slick wording and convoluted language it advocates stealing from some to "give" to others, legal endorsement for sexual immorality, and not only the slaughter of innocents, but the "duty" of us all to pay for that slaughter.

So it is little wonder that Christians who take the Bible seriously have to vomit up the Democratic Party, and at least nibble on the Republican Party, though even it sometimes leaves a bit of bad taste in our mouths.

In fairness to Darrel Rowland, he does at one point admit that he does not view "the Democratic Party, which so often gets all-but-automatic support from urban churches that have long been involved in politics, as the solver of all our nation’s woes, either." Again, let us be very up-front and clear here. The Democratic Party as a whole (in its modern incarnation, but that’s another story) has done almost everything imaginable to oppose the moral teaching of the Christian faith. When it comes to supporting the historic Christian faith in the political arena, the modern Democratic Party gets an F minus. I’m sorry to have to say that, I wish it were not the case, and I wish Christians had even slight support from the Dems as a party - but we don’t, and we might as well admit it.

But, "Don’t you wonder what happens to the credibility of our salt-and-light redemptive voice if we link our cause to a specific political party?" No, but I do wonder what happens to our credibility on those occasions when one party or candidate is right, and another is wrong about a moral issue, and we are afraid to point it out for fear of alienating "seekers." If these "seekers" are truly seeking, then they might as well know up front some of the moral positions of the Christian faith.

At one point Brother Rowland claims that:

There is a lot of confusion in that statement. We of course should never ask anyone to "convert" to a political agenda. There is no salvation in political positions, only in Christ. But the disciple of Christ should immediately begin to learn the ethical teaching of the Christian faith. And like it or not, that ethical teaching has some political implications that not everyone is going to accept. But that should not, and must not, keep the church from that teaching. It is not a misperception that Christian moral teaching is in harmony with some political positions, and in irreconcilable conflict with others. If "enemies" are pointing that out, they are doing us a favor.

In the editorial introduction to the October 8, 2006 Standard the editor urged that this was all a matter of "balance." Advocates of the historic Christian faith sometimes forget just how active the "big seven" of the denominational world are in politics. And with very few exceptions these denominations spend significant resources pushing for a pro-homosexual, abortion-on-demand and paid for by our tax dollars, expanded welfare state government-should-provide-everything, private property really belongs to the state, the family should be subservient to the machinery of the state, never-execute-a-murderer style political agenda. Christians who make known the moral teaching of the Bible are the only real "balance" available here.

If "conservative" Christians appear to some public affairs editors to be on the far end of the political scale, that’s probably because someone moved the fulcrum away from the middle.

[There was commentary on this column.  Read it here.]