American Civil War by Georgiana Romanovna

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Drawing Lines & Choosing Sides

As an evangelical pastor—in order to say what I need to say and to whom, I have to begin with a statement that may seem a bit abrupt but will hopefully preempt (and also demonstrate) the problem I intend to address:

I believe abortion is murder (except as a means of preventing the death of a mother) and I would support a federal ban on all abortions. Moreover, I have never and will never vote for a pro-choice candidate to assume the highest offices either of our federal or state governments.

This is my position on abortion. It is a red line for me. I am that stereotype. I make no apologies for it. Now that I have made a public confession of it and lost all credibility to half the country, I’d like to speak to the other half: to those who need to hear me confess my pro-life commitment publicly before you are willing to hear me say anything else politically. I want you to hear me say Yes, I am on your side politically (so far as it goes), so I can explain why No, God is not on our side politically. God has his own red line: Jesus Christ is Lord.

“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”

—Joshua 5:13-14

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From One Evangelical to Another [endnote 1]

I am not writing as a polemicist but as a pastor. It’s not that I think I’m “right” and have something to say—I hope I’m not to some extent—but I’m genuinely puzzled, and equally troubled, by the willful and politically confused [mis]handling of the Word of God and Name of Jesus Christ throughout this campaign season. In my living memory, I do not recall an election ever being so explicitly framed as a holy war by both sides—both sides claiming to be on the side of the Good, both sides defining the evils of the other, both sides presuming definitions of good and evil that can be divided cleanly along partisan lines—but one side, the Right side, has been increasingly entangling their definitions of good and evil to names and terms and confessions of the Church, thereby effectively redefining “christ” and “christian” and “jesus is lord,” claiming that Jesus is on our side.

It has become commonplace now for celebrity pastors and Christian leaders, such as Eric Metaxas (known by some for his biography of Diedrich Bonhoeffer, by others for his ongoing misrepresentation of Bonhoeffer’s theology), to claim unequivocally that this election is a spiritual battle not against flesh and blood but against Democrats who are apparently more “principality and power” than “flesh and blood.” In this particular instance (representative of many like it) he, with the approval and echoes of a likeminded and likelipped panel of celebrity pastors, then proceeded to publicly urge all Christians whose pastors are not publicly endorsing Trump in this spiritual battle against the demoniacrats to leave their churches—to break fellowship with real communities made up of real relationships built up over years and decades in the name of Jesus Christ and held together by the Holy Spirit—dividing the body of Christ in the name of Jesus+Trump2024. He was at a church when he said this.

“Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13)!

As a card-carrying Protestant, I can appreciate on this rainy Reformation Day that dividing is sometimes necessary to preserve the integrity of the Church—except where uniting is necessary to preserve the identity of the Church. It’s like the difference between calling off an engagement on grounds of faith and calling off a marriage on grounds of faith, on account that a spouse has just become too liberal politically. When Paul wrote to the liberal Corinthians, he did not call for division but for an alignment with the reality of the Church’s union in Christ as his body, the indivisible temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3; 6; 12), reminding them that “all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10). The only occasion for division in the New Testament seems to be the excommunications of individuals doing harm to the local Church community (cf. Mt. 18; 1 Cor. 5) or explicitly to the Name of Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 1:20).

Consider the difference between these criteria and the likes of what Eric Metaxas and company have called for. Consider the effect this public messaging has to a lost world, who hears the Church saying allegiance to Jesus is concretely proven (or not) by allegiance to Donald Trump (or conservative / pro-life policy, etc.) on November 5, Election Day, the day we will all choose whether or not we are the elect of the Lord Jesus Christ in our vote for the next president-elect. (If you don’t think this is the impression many believers and unbelievers alike have about this election, I will be happy to provide a truckload of examples.) Christ alone divides the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, and too many Christians have assumed their position on the threshing floor and begun pronouncing “judgment[s] before the appointed time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (1 Cor. 4:3-4).

 My concern is that the Church of Jesus Christ is being sucked into an echo chamber of collective self-deception among self-identifying evangelical Christians, who are daily listening to themselves call Jesus “lord” and themselves “christians” and “evangelicals” using definitions that “distort the Gospel of Christ” and thus lead people away from Jesus or to a false gospel (Gal. 1:6-7). I believe the most important problem facing the Church in America is not how our faith in Jesus should inform our politics but how our politics is informing our faith in Jesus. It is possible to be wrong about the former and end up with the wrong politics, to be sure, but it’s also possible to be wrong about the latter and end up with the wrong Jesus. Jesus is Lord—and this is far more than a political claim but not less (see part 2 in followup post)—but “not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter my kingdom” (Mt. 7:21).

The Stolen Words of True Community

It’s hard to know where to begin attempting to adequately summarize the word-circus of profanities entangling the Name (and therefore conception) of Jesus Christ in current political discourse. Instead, I’ll start with a principle description of the problem and then (in the final section) a particularly poignant and representative example.

The problem—The Propaganda of the Echo Chamber: In his Ethics, Diedrich Bonhoeffer described how Hitler (no, I don’t think Trump is analogous to Hitler but, as a social phenomenon, propaganda works the same in every age) “made use of the meanness of the human heart by nourishing it and giving it other names. Anxiety is called responsibility; greed is called industriousness; lack of independence becomes solidarity; brutality becomes masterfulness. By this ingratiating treatment of human weaknesses, what is base and mean is generated and increased ever anew.” He then describes how attempts to oppose this vision of reality would be vilified and demonized as a threat to humanity, so that the ulterior motives of all involved remain hidden (to all involved) behind “the stolen words of true community.”

Slowly, over time, as the language seeps into the vernacular of everyday descriptions of people and problems (or is forcefully shouted through the screens into the minds of a fearful nation), fundamental terms like “good” and “evil” and “God” and “loyalty” begin to change in their imagined meanings and proper syntax. I believe the terms and confessions that belong to the communion of the saints are being stolen and coopted in American political discourse, willfully by false Christians (whose motives are transparent unto themselves) and unwittingly by genuine Christians (whose motives may be pure but whose regurgitation popular Christian-political tropes echo Gospel distortions that people hear as a false gospel—it’s not just what gets said but what gets heard!), to break up the body of Christ to form a new communion.

With the emergence of even the most primitive forms of mass communication, long before the digital age, Bonhoeffer recognized the ever-present threat of the spin-cycle of deceptions possible when the language of God’s Word is taken out of context and thrown to the brothels in the public exchange of political discourse, where words and definitions exchange fluids and names, so that the language of God begins to evolve into “the language of Ashdod” (Neh. 13:24)—and thus “the name of God is profaned among the nations” (cf., Ezek. 36:23; Rom. 2:24). To profane is ‘to make common’ by improper use (taking his Name ‘in vain’), leading to confused conceptions of God based on human projection, not divine revelation.

The Evangelicals Who Beat Their Wives: Evidence of this type of ‘profanity’ doesn’t have to be inferred from the hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance of evangelicals. According to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research, it’s out in the open. “43 percent of evangelicals said Jesus was ‘not God’ and 65 percent seemed to disagree with the doctrine of original sin. [However], On hot-button social issues like abortion and sex outside of heterosexual marriage, however, evangelicals were nearly unanimous that they are sins.”[2] Who exactly do we evangelicals believe defines sin?! If this study is even approximately representative, the implication is clear: the term “evangelical” has been adulterated to such an extent that about half of the self-identifying evangelicals in this country are not evangelical Christians—they are evangelical Republicans.

The trickle-down effects of this evangelonomics is ugly, particularly among men. It leads to absurd statistical contradictions that have long plagued the Church’s reputation, and therefore our witness of Jesus Christ, because of so many self-designating “evangelical Christians” who don’t belong to, and are thus not representative of, the body of Christ. In her illuminating book, The Toxic War on Masculinity (advocating for the return to godly masculinity), conservative author Nancy Pearcy exposes the way studies that fail to differentiate between what she calls “devout” evangelicals (qualified by their attending church at least three times per month) and “nominal” (“in name only”) evangelicals (who do not attend church regularly) misrepresent the character of practicing Christians, leading to a number of misleading statistics that have been used as fodder for charges of Christian hypocrisy. It’s worth quoting at length:

Whereas “evangelical Protestant men who attend church regularly are the least likely of any group in America to commit domestic violence…Nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotypes—shockingly so. They spend less time with their children, either in discipline or in shared activities. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness. And their marriages are far less stable. Whereas active evangelical men are 35 percent less likely to divorce than secular men, nominals are 20 percent more likely to divorce than secular men. Finally, for the real stunner: Whereas committed churchgoing couples report the lowest rate of violence of any group (2.8 percent), nominals report the highest rate of any group (7.2 percent)…Sociologist Brad Wilcox, one of the nation’s top experts on marriage, summarized his research in Christianity Today, writing, ‘The most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all” (Pearcy, 36-37).

When you account for the difference of these designations, the results describe two entirely different groups, indeed two “churches”—the gathered evangelical church and the ungathered evangelicals. Except that they are gathering—at Trump rallies.

Rallying Around “Jesus is Lord”

The example: Jesus is Lord is Not a Conservative Confession: At a campaign rally last week, as Kamala Harris was criticizing Donald Trump for his part in selecting supreme court justices that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a few hecklers began shouting, “Christ is King!” “Jesus is Lord!”, to which the Vice President responded, “You guys are at the wrong rally!” This response elicited a predictable reaction of evangelical outrage, on the one hand, but also reinforced all the implicit and explicit claims (of many evangelicals) that the Jesus-is-Lord people do not belong with the Harris-for-President people and therefore obviously do belong with the Trump-for-Present people.

Naturally, Trump picked up on this line of reasoning and capitalized on it, beginning with his first response at a rally in NC, where he reassured Christians they belonged in his movement (“in our movement we love Christians”) and, after the crowd stopped chanting “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” (to which he reciprocated thank-yous), he then gave them their marching orders: “At Trump rallies we don’t tell Christians to get lost; we tell Christians to get out and vote! You don’t have the choice of sitting out this election because if Kamala Harris gets four more years the radical left is not going to leave Christians alone. It’s going to get worse and worse. You will suffer greatly.” This this past weekend, at the MSG rally, the rhetoric reached new heights in this ever-escalating holy war of words, where Kamala Harris achieved the rank of “the devil” and “anti-Christ” by one speaker (as he held up a wooden wall crucifix), with enthusiastic approval from the crowd—not to mention Hillary Clinton is “some sick bastard…a sick son of a bitch,” and “the whole fucking [Democratic] party a bunch of degenerates, low-lives, Jew haters.” This is the side Jesus is on. No—Jesus is Lord.[3]

These are the words forming a new communion. It’s not about Trump himself; it’s about the words being used to rally people around him and the fact that the name of Jesus Christ is being brought night after day into alliances with many strange bedfellows.

The notion that Jesus is more at home at Trump rally, where he is “welcomed” with open arms, than at a Harris rally, where he is “rejected,” seems almost willfully naïve. We teach our kids to know better. We teach our kids to be aware that sometimes invitations come with ulterior motives. Hansel and Gretel were welcomed in with open arms. Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem with outstretched arms of evangelistic praise by the same crowd who cheered him into execution a week later. Jesus does not always respond compliantly to our invitations, even if we don’t support abortion or claim to believe in him or shout his name in protest of his enemies: “Many believed in his name…But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man” (Jn. 2:24-25).

Just because “their side” supports abortion, it doesn’t follow that Jesus is therefore on “our side.” This is like saying the Caiaphas was on Jesus’ side but Pilate wasn’t, like Jesus was more at home in the Sanhedrin than he was in the Praetorium. You don’t think the chief priests and the Pharisees would have been pro-life? This is like pretending the Gospel leaves us with the impression that to join the side of Jesus one only needs to affirm the laws and policies closest to God’s Law, like the Pharisees did. Does Jesus take sides based on a legal basis? What implications follow from that thinking? Iraq, for example, has a federal ban on abortion, so if America goes to war against Iraq, whose side will Jesus take? Does Jesus take sides based on a legal basis—or does he give us his own commands and call all our laws and policies and presidents into his courtroom for examination and judgment?

The Minimal Ethic of a “Christian” Nation

Of course, I genuinely believe most Christians have good intentions in the desire to see justice in their nation. The problem is when the Church tries to ‘christen’ the nation, rather than call it to repentance and faith in Christ. You don’t get a more Christian nation by getting policies that are “closer” to Christ’s commands to not be angry or lust or turn the other cheek or refuse seats of honor, etc., but by getting more Christians in the nation who obey Christ, who truly “know [him” (Mt. 7:21-23!). This requires accurate definitions of sin and righteousness, sin according to God’s Law and righteousness according to faith in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the Church’s job includes naming first its own sins (integral to our confession), but then, yes, the sins of the world and of the state—like abortion and no-fault divorce (the latter policy was first signed by Ronald Reagan as Governor of CA in 1969 in the Family Law Act)—the naming of which helps the Church and the state know the difference both the Church and the world.[4] That difference is the Church’s visibility.

For the church to get the world to adopt Christian convictions, it has to abstract “moral principles” from Christ’s specific commands, detaching them from Christ himself (as though Christ wants obedience to his commands apart from “know[ing him]” (Mt. 7:21-23!)! This depersonalizing reduction leads to a “minimal ethic.” We dilute Christ’s commands to what can be reasonably agreed upon and adopted by the world. How is this effort any different in principle to the efforts of secular humanists? How is political evangelicalism not merely religious humanism? Regardless, when the world does adopt this minimal ethic it, in turn, becomes the new standard for “Christian ethics.” Then you end up with people who call themselves “evangelical” and “Christian” because they hold to the high standard of not murdering babies or supporting the state sanctioned murder of babies.

The Church’s Confession

Furthermore—don’t get me wrong in the statements above that began with a couple of Christian hecklers: I’m all for evangelistic heckling, and I’d be happy join in heckling people with the Name of Jesus and the call to repentance at a Harris rally, but not because I think there is more need for repentance and conversion among Democrats than Republicans. Herein lies the rub, and it has everything to do with the particular confession in question. “Jesus is Lord” is singular confession that defines Christ’s identity in relation not only to Christian identity but to human identity. Jesus is not “my Lord” or “the Church’s Lord”—he is Lord in the absolute sense—King of kings and Lord of lords—the one to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given” (Mt. 28:18).

“Jesus is Lord” is not a Christian confession—it is the Christian confession. It is the divine claim from God’s Word that divides the world and unites the Church. “Jesus is Lord” is the Church’s confession. It is constitutive of it. It belongs to no other group as a group than the group that believes it, and that group is the Church. It’s function as our confession is to give reason for our way of life (we say what we say and do what we do because Jesus is Lord). The Church cannot be identified with boundary markers typically associated with religious identity (e.g., ethnic, linguistic, national, etc.), only by its confession. When Nero set out to arrest Christians in Rome, the only way to find them was to get them talking—confessing—and talk they did: Jesus is Lord! Many were promptly killed for it. This confession is treasured above life by those who truly believe, because there is “no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4).

“Jesus is Lord” is the confession of the Church’s faith in the world (this is why we’re weird, different) that is at once our proclamation to the world, “because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). It is no an exaggeration to say, therefore, that this confession is the single most important statement that the Church has to say to the world, and that no statement could be more important for the Church to communicate to the world clearly, which is also to say not to miscommunicate to the world, and at the very least not use the Church’s confession in service any other syncretistic allegiances (which form false alliances). Sadly, Jesus anticipated precisely this kind of miscommunication: “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you” (Mt. 7:23).

What to Do on Election Day

I’m going to have to end with a conclusion as abrupt as the beginning of this article, but I will put out a followup article tomorrow (Lord willing!) that includes an exposition of the above reference from Matthew 7 and its troubling implications. For now, I just want to offer an orientation to Election Day different than what many popular Christian leaders are suggesting, placing an ultimatum on the children of God to the effect that their vote for Trump is an exercise of their faith in Christ, and that the refusal to vote, or a vote for the opposition, calls their faith into question. To this I say: Leave the children alone. The children of God are free! The conditions for life and faith as a child of God and co-heir with Jesus Christ will not be amended by some evangelical pastor or leader caught up in the faithless anxiety of a political moment, recklessly drawing new dividing and uniting lines around anything other than the name of Jesus Christ. If your convictions lead you to vote for Trump, for Harris, or the vote of a non-vote because you are being so radically misrepresented by both candidates, Beloved, you are free.

Here’s the rule: if it’s not necessary for salvation, it’s not the right boundary line.[5] “Whosoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10). There’s salvation. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst” (Mt. 18:20). There’s the Church. The name of Jesus is the boundary for both. May the name of Jesus Christ be hallowed by his Church.

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[1] Disclaimer: I May Be Wrong—I Hope I Am. I may be wrong in the analysis that follows, and the interpretations and intuitions and judgments it presumes—I truly hope I am to some extent. If I am wrong, fundamentally speaking, it is because (a) I have underestimated the general American’s ability to readily discern and understand the Gospel through the maelstrom of popular and political Christian messaging and / or (b) I have overestimated the importance of hallowing the name of Jesus Christ and the integrity of our—the Church’s—principal confession: Jesus is Lord. If my ‘estimations’ are even approximately accurate, then my sense of urgency is justified.

[2] The Week, “Has U.S. evangelical Christianity become more a political culture than a religion?”

[3] Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Jesus is not on “our side” because our side has become so vulgar or whatever. This has been true of every side since Ceasar on through Biden by way of Washington. Nor am I an anarchist who thinks the governing authorities have no responsibility before God and/or the Church should just stay out of politics. It’s an issue of definitions and roles—the most fundamental issue—and the Church has different responsibility before God than the governing authorities. I will offer an approach to navigating the complexities of the Church’s relation to state in a democratic republic in a followup article.

[4] The Church that has preserved its identity will understand how and on what basis to condemn not only abortion but also no-fault divorce, and explain why this policy has, according to Jesus’ definition of marriage (which is utterly different than our state-authorized contract with its godless terms and conditions), millions of people are living in adulterous second- third- fourth-, etc., marriages, who were married by pastors who never thought twice about the implications of Jesus’ teaching on marriage and amendment to the divorce clause in the Old Testament (cf., Mt. 19:7-12). We would also be able to encourage people to see the obvious connection between this destructive marriage policy and the increase in abortions in our country.

[5] And if an individual has is not harming the body of Christ or the confession of the Church’s faith, they must not be treated as excommunicates.

[6] For more explanation and implications of the “minimal ethic” described above, see Hauerwas, “Why Bonhoeffer matters: The challenge for Christian ministry at the end of Christendom.”