What Does an Impotent Church Look Like?

I believe that political engagement is an important task for the Christian church. I don’t buy the rationale that says secular politics is a distraction from gospel priorities. On the contrary. Political engagement is demanded by gospel priorities when properly understood.

If believers in Jesus Christ take his Lordship seriously, then submission to our Savior King requires us to behave as citizens of God’s kingdom in every element of our earthly citizenship. Politics in the public square is unavoidable.

The question is, what does that mean in practice?

I know that I am not alone in believing that the church needs to be

politically active. The African-American church has always understood this fact. Jerry Falwell helped American fundamentalists and evangelicals finally  come to grips with this, too. Obviously, maintaining this conviction makes for strange bed-fellows nowadays.

So, is Christian political activism nothing more than the public expression of privately held religious preferences; preferences created by the kind of neighborhood you grew up in and whether it was on the right or the wrong side of the tracks?

Answering this question is crucial in the present era of “Christians for Trump.”

I am firmly convinced, and quite happy to debate anyone who cares to

disagree, that the evangelical church’s uniform support for Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their policy agenda, has exposed the thorough-going secularization of American Christianity.

It is symptomatic of the wholesale debasement of genuine Christian faith into unabashed, nationalistic civil religion. And that is the definition of American apostasy.

This damning secularization of Christian thought and action is, perhaps, the most influential legacy of the Religious Right. Anyone who takes his/her

marching orders from partisan political strategists (like Ralph Reed, for example) has abandoned the Lordship of Christ. The ethics and righteousness of God’s kingdom do not align with any of the Republican or Democratic party agendas given to us.

Obviously, many religious conservatives think otherwise. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their convictions, but sincerity alone doesn’t manufacture truth. Aristotle and Ptolemy sincerely believed that the sun orbited around the earth, and they were sincerely wrong.

The question becomes: Which partner is leading in the evangelical dance with politics?

Is your partisan, political commitment leading your life of discipleship?

Or is your citizenship in the kingdom of God leading your political commitments?

We all know what the correct answer is. And, of course, members of the Religious Right insist that they are living out that answer, for example, in their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.

All of this begs the question. How should the Christian’s citizenship in God’s kingdom transform the way we live out our American citizenship? If Jesus’ teaching about kingdom righteousness becomes our benchmark for public engagement, then what elements of our partisanship (whether to the right or the left) must be thrown away and replaced with Jesus’ new kingdom ethic?

Here is an historical example:

When the “Confessing Church” (composed of German, Protestant leaders who opposed Hitler’s attempts to control their churches) began its resistance against Nazi religious policies, debating these questions eventually led to a deep divide in their movement.

Everyone agreed that resistance to Nazi attempts at manipulating Christian worship services and determining church membership was every leader’s duty before God. But where should they draw the boundaries? The leaders often disagreed over which acts of resistance were (a) necessary expressions of Christian faith (so everyone could support it) and which actions were (b) merely an expression of personal political preferences. Seldom was there unanimity on this question. In fact, bitter arguments sometimes erupted threatening the organization’s future.

Of course, those accused of being “too political” or “unspiritual” in their

proposals responded by pointing out that it was impossible to separate the gospel’s ethical requirements from one’s evaluation of a patently immoral government policy. (I will ignore the ghastly role played by Martin Luther’s “two kingdoms” theology in the German church’s submission to Hitler).

The angry differences that erupted among these sincere, committed

churchmen exposed the differing horizons of their moral universes. After all, isn’t immorality in the eye of the beholder? Well, it shouldn’t be if everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should  (12:2).

Every Christian’s moral universe ought to align with Jesus’ example of living as a righteous citizen in the kingdom of God.

Among all the members of the German Confessing Church, the leaders most remembered and applauded today are those who traced out the most expansive moral universes, with boundaries unconstrained by partisan politics or subservience to government authority.

After the war, surviving members of the Confessing Church sometimes admitted that, for all the risks they had taken (and some were imprisoned and/or executed), they had not gone far enough. Their ethical boundaries had been too narrow. They had not always acted as faithful citizens of God’s kingdom.

Martin Niemöller (who was imprisoned) became one of the most outspoken in lamenting the fact that the Confessing Church had never publicly

condemned Hitler’s policies of anti-Semitism. They had never publicly defended their Jewish neighbors. Nor had a single church leader publicly opposed the Nazi eugenics program that took thousands from their medical asylums and sent them off to die.

This is our challenge today.

Every Christian’s lifetime goal must be the conformation of one’s own moral universe to the righteousness of God’s kingdom as taught and modeled for us by Jesus of Nazareth. As our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and everything else will follow” (my paraphrase, Matt. 6:33).

I once preached a message on those words of Jesus in a white, middle-class, Protestant church where the elders nearly banned me from the pulpit. [There were two services. An elder walked out of the first service in protest. I was summoned to a meeting with the others before the second service. At least one of them believed that I ought not to preach again).

The goal of my message was to pose this challenge: How should our commitment to live as righteous citizens of God’s kingdom here and now shape the ways we think and behave as earthly citizens of an imperialist nation with a massive military budget that loves to make war?

IF we want to take Jesus’ words seriously, that we seek God’s kingdom righteousness first, then we MUST grapple with these kinds of questions. And change our behavior accordingly.

Tragically, those church elders were spiritually crippled, straight-jacketed inside a minuscule moral universe grossly deformed by their American first, nationalistic, Republican party world-view. They were not interested in seeking the Father’s kingdom and righteousness FIRST in EVERY area of life. They were not thorough-going disciples of Jesus Christ.

We are currently facing a spiritual pandemic that is killing evangelicalism and its public witness.

The church is infected with a deadly political virus called partisanship. That partisanship is an ugly symptom of our deeply rooted secularism. In pursuing the cause of militaristic nationalism, we have taken our eyes off Jesus.

Huge swaths of the church have been coopted by the commercialized, smoothly marketed messaging created by high-paid political operatives who began courting evangelicals during the Reagan presidency. Rather than seeking God’s kingdom, we seek victory for their side, predominantly Republican, in the next political campaign.

This brand of herd loyalty is easy to implement. Whereas, conforming our lives to the pattern given to us by the suffering, crucified Jesus of Nazareth is far more difficult and costly.

Following a crucified Savior entails suffering, but it also demands carefully focused, consistent thinking, from top to bottom.  How must Jesus’ kingdom-directed life and teaching transform the way we address our contemporary problems? There is no political playbook from any party providing easy answers to that question.

Take for instance the “pro-life” movement. The label itself is an example of a very self-conscious political framing. The words pro-life do not honestly describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.

For example, it is a demonstrable fact that publicly funded preschool programs, the WIC nutrition program and Head Start, to name only a few, make significant improvements in the future prospects, health and well-being of young children, especially those growing up in poor communities.

Yet, conservative “pro-life” voters typically back policies intended to defund these sorts of community assistance programs that give a leg up to our most vulnerable citizens. In this regard, supposedly pro-life conservatives most often vote anti-life.

Worse yet, these faux pro-lifers support politicians who want to slash the budgets of social benefits programs and in order to channel those funds to

the ballooning budgets for military contractors and our wasteful Pentagon. Instead of helping to enrich the lives of America’s most vulnerable, our tax dollars are spent on expanding assassination programs, and devising new weaponry intended for the efficient slaughter and impoverishment of hungry people around the world who happen to stand in the way of American empire.

That is the opposite of pro-life. It is pro-death, pain, exploitation, and suffering.

But what about the Supreme Court?! (I hear certain readers ask). This is the new clarion call among today’s pro-lifers. Overturning Roe vs. Wade is the end-all-and-be-all of to a pro-life political victory.

It’s true. Adding anti-abortion advocates like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the court may eventually lead to that result. But in the meantime, America’s highest court is now stacked with justices who regularly act to strengthen corporate power against the interests of the working class.

For example, Justice Kavanaugh only appeared on the president’s list of nominees after his decision as an appeals court judge to support a trucking company’s decision to fire one of their drivers.  The driver violated

company policy by leaving his truck unattended in order to walk to a nearby convenience store. The truck had broken down in a blizzard. After calling for help and waiting, the driver soon found that he could no longer feel his legs. He feared that he might die of hypothermia as he waited. Should he stay with his truck? Or should he walk to a nearby convenience store to warm up?

What would you have done?

Judge Kavanaugh, the latest pro-life darling, determined that the company was justified in firing an employee who refused to lay down his life for their sixteen-wheeler.  That ruling won Kavanaugh his contentious nomination. And the vast majority of evangelicals stood to cheer. (I won’t even begin to comment on the vile conservative abuse spewed out against the women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse).

Was Kavanaugh really a pro-life nominee?

America’s broken, corrupted “justice” system serves the political purposes of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are not equal before the law.

Why did the NYC police department implement its “stop and frisk” policy in black neighborhoods but never on Wall Street? I suspect they would have collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.

Yet, American evangelicals regularly rally around the bi-partisan flag demanding that officials get “tough on crime” – excepting, of course, the white-collar crime flagrantly committed by men like Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and their corporate donors.

Tell me again. What, exactly, is pro-life about any of this behavior?

America’s population is now separated by the greatest economic divide between the haves and the have-nots since the Great Depression. That divide expands and deepens year by year as a result of government, economic boondoggles ensuring that wealth redistribution is always moving upwards to further enrich the already rich. All the while, most evangelicals link arms with the wealthy, corporate interests who exploit the poor and the working class.

There simply is no excuse for any Christian supporting the policies of either party which perpetuate national behaviors so cravenly antithetical to Jesus’ teaching about the righteousness of God’s kingdom.

Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.

Such misguided thinking is an investment in the work of the anti-Christ. The resulting behaviors reveal the overt repudiation of Jesus’ Lordship over his church.

Genuinely pro-life behavior begins among the citizens of Christ’s kingdom who live it out in the streets by enhancing the lives of those who most need help. That includes influencing the culture around us, our society, our leaders, and our nation, by working to enact consistent pro-life policies for all people everywhere.

To further stretch our moral boundaries, evangelicals should be in the forefront of calling for the US to abandon its budget-breaking quest for global supremacy, a quest that tramples other nations underfoot like discarded human refuse left behind for global scavengers to devour.

Now that would be pro-life.

Jesus is clear. His kingdom’s pro-life values declare:

• The first will be last, and the last will be first
• Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your reward
• Woe to those who neglect to do justice
• Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry

Our Lord welcomes every immigrant and asylum seeker with open arms.

Our Lord prioritizes the poor. He picks them up and cares for them. He does not ridicule them as lazy creators of their own hardships.

How can any society be positively influenced by a secularized church that long ago exchanged the mind of Christ for the distorted thinking of this evil age?

How can the church show others the importance of thorough-going pro-life policies when we are incapable of implementing them among ourselves?

American evangelicalism has become the useless salt described by Jesus: You are [supposed to be] the salt of the earth, but once that salt loses its saltiness, it becomes useless, good for nothing. It can only be thrown out onto the dirt (my paraphrase, Matthew 5:13).

Jesus’ words address the American church today.

No, Donald Trump is not the church’s greatest friend. He is another in a long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.

Evangelicals are president Trump’s useful idiots.

I am sorry, but any purported “Christian” who cannot perceive these facts about our president, American politics, and our nation’s behavior throughout the world has become a spiritual alien who knows little if anything about God’s kingdom.

Such people are spiritually malnourished, perhaps even dead, after suckling at the swollen teats of American civil religion, that secular, bastardized gospel which subverts Jesus’ kingdom values while substituting the depraved values of this fallen world.

God’s kingdom is what truly matters. The church is its citizenry. All of which entails much, much more than simply “getting people saved.”

Saved for what?

Jesus calls us to love indiscriminately. To prioritize people in need, no matter who they are. Yes, personal acts of benefaction are crucial, but that is not enough. The scale of America’s social problems is so vast that our government must play a major role in rectifying our problems. Only true citizens of the kingdom of God possess the vision necessary for developing the required solutions.

Will a mass movement of the Christian church stand up to demand that our government take greater and greater steps towards mercy and justice for all?

I hope. But, personally, I don’t see it.