“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased” (Lk. 2:14).
Other than a few proper names, there is no word in my vocabulary more important to me than the word peace. I suppose it is because for a long time I lived without it. Anyone whose world has been stripped of peace knows just how much it’s worth.
But defining peace is nearly impossible. This is evident the moment you try to think of its opposite. There’s happy and there’s sad. There’s hope and despair. There’s joy and sorrow, good and evil, heaven and hell, dogs and devils I mean cats. But what is the opposite of peace? Is it war or is it worry? Is it Hostility? Restlessness? Angst? Anxiety? Fear? Bitterness? Hatred? Rage? Violence? Revenge? Discord? Division? Divorce? Chaos? Where is peace essentially located, or not? Is it in the heart or in relationships or in nations or between nations? Is it within or without? Is peace the natural state of affairs or do we, and does our world, default to its opposite, whatever that opposite may be at bottom?
Peace is such an all-encompassing word that there is no single word that can describe what it is like not to have it. Nor is it clear how to get it. There are no guaranteed paths that lead to peace, even though everyone is searching for it in one way or another, or perhaps running from its opposite, but there simply is no predictable profile of a person who has it or does not. We may have all been able to guess that Kurt Cobain struggled to find peace, but Robin Williams? Those at the top of the ladder are just as potentially bankrupt as those at the bottom.
Perhaps, then, there is no definitive opposite of peace to speak of, only its definitive absence. It is surely the case that no matter how many things a person might have, to have no peace is in a certain sense to havenothing. I do not mean tonot have anything but to have precisely nothing: an inescapable void right at the center of everything else, like the billions of stars in our galaxy that all have a supermassive black hole churning at the center. It is indeed the absence of peace that sets much of our world in motion, into commotion. Everyone is searching for its presence (or running from its absence) but more often than not search (or run) in vain. The absence of peace cannot be filled with any substitute presence any more than a black hole can be filled with starlight. It’s like the absence of a person. The only thing that can fill the absence of a person is that same person’s presence. There is no replacement for peace.
In the Bible the absence of peace is, in fact, a personal matter. There is a hole churning in the heart of the world. God made the world to be especially present to it, in it. After breathing the universe into being and hanging the stars and planets up like nursery mobiles on natural laws, he picked one planet to fill personally with his presence. Apart from his presence “the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). The formless void is creation with no particular reference points, no special order, no governing Lord, like the raging storms of Jupiter or the searing surface of Venus–character without face. The laws of nature may be able to loosely hold things together but they cannot put life together in the least. Special attention is needed. A Person is needed to make persons. The world apart from God is utterly indifferent to life. Indeed, the popular atheist writer Richard Dawkins is at least partially write:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” (Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life).
Except that down here, at bottom, on the ground from which we observe the apparently lifeless, though unspeakably beautiful, universe, life is teaming and sprawling in a messy abundance. The world is given its daily bread—indiscriminately, not indifferently—because God has intervened, bringing order and giving form, separating seas from trees and shaping up mountains from the mantle, filling the void with his presence calling forth sea urchins and seagulls, petunias and pomegranates, and finally breathing his Spirit into a creature filled with a unique blessing of life in the form of love, completing his work by entering into on the seventh day, his first day off and our first day alive. The table was set and we were born into a feast, born at rest (Gen. 1:1-2:4). The world with God is utterly at peace.
God had given dominion to human beings to govern the world in his image with his presence under his guidance. But they abused their power, seeking to become gods in their own image, and thus turned away from the presence of God (Gen. 3). It was not long before all creation all but returned to a formless void: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life…on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:10-11). It wasn’t that God caused something unnatural to happen so much as it was that he allowed nature to take its course. He had separated the waters in ordering creation to make an oasis of life (Gen. 1:7). Judgment was simply a matter of withdrawing his sustaining hand.
And in the book of Revelation, the rider on the “fiery red horse” did not bring judgment by wielding his own sword. He was simply sent “to remove peace from the earth, so that men would slay one another” (Rev. 6:4). Men apart from God are utterly indifferent to life. The natural world and all that is in it defaults to chaos in God’s absence. There is no more terrible a prospect of God’s wrath than God’s absence.
Perhaps, then, peace does have a definitive opposite in that it does have a definitive absence. The opposite of peace is godlessness, in a literal sense. In the words of Karl Barth, “The enterprise of the No-God is avenged by its success.” So if you want to find peace, you have to go straight to the source. There is no replacement for God.
About five years back, Keldy and I were meeting regularly with a young gal helping her through some of life’s regulars, a few irregulars as well. One evening we had one of those rare “come to Jesus” moments, because it was pretty clear Jesus had come to her. There were tears, confessions, a white flag slowly being raised from her heart. But I could tell there was still some white in her knuckles as it related to one very destructive relationship she knew she needed to let go. I tried to convince her that staying in this relationship was like holding on to a ticking time bomb. I’ll never forget her response: “I’d rather die with someone who hurts me than be left alone. I just don’t want to be alone.” For this girl, it wasn’t a presence she feared, no matter how destructive, but an absence.
I can’t say that I blame her. I know what all sorts of pain feels like, and there is no pain that hurts more than loneliness, especially the loneliness born of grieve, the loneliness of a presence missing. Indeed, “it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18), so we would rather die with the ones who hurt us than be left to live alone. “Your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16).
But that’s not our only option.
A few years later I got a text from the same girl. It’d likely been a year since I had talked to her. She was off to college and I had, quite frankly, given up on her. But Jesus hadn’t.
I saved our conversation:
G: [Her opening line:] “I am ready to give my life to Jesus. I’m not sure what to do, so I need your help.”
Me: “Did something happen? What changed?”
G: “I was lying in bed in my dorm room, by myself, and suddenly I just felt at peace. It felt like my room filled up with peace.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
G: “I mean I didn’t feel alone anymore, and the only thing I could think about was Jesus.”
Me: “Go and tell three people what just happened. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
His name shall be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” The Gospel of God-with-us is the restoration of the personal presence of God: peace, Shalom. The God-sized hole at the center of our hearts, which turned out to be anything but God-shaped (more like god-shaping—I believe Calvin called it an idol factory), was met with a Man with holes in his hands, who revealed how utterly void we are of peace without him—and he made peace by giving his life to those who tried to take it from them, loving them while they actively hated him with hammers, stripping them of the satisfaction of victory over an enemy, the satisfaction of triumph conflict born of mutual hatred (cf. Col. 2:15). The presence of God has come to us in the Person of Jesus Christ and comes to dwell within us in the Person of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself said,
“The Spirit of truth…is with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you…Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you…I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe’” (Jn. 14:18-29).
Jesus gives us his peace not as the world gives. I could think of no better time for us all to consider what it is we’re running after in our variously aimed pursuits of peace, but even more to consider what we might be running from. Perhaps we need to face the Absence square in the eye, like a man on Mars Hill, and fill the void with the Name of Jesus, calling on him to do what only he can do: to fill the absence of Life with the very Presence we’re running from. There simply is no replacement for Peace.
“Adam, where are you?” —Genesis 3:9
“It is not the war that disturbs our peace. The war is not even the cause of our unrest. It has merely brought to light the fact that our lives are all based on unrest. And where there is unrest there can be no peace. But God is peace.” (Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, Eberhard Busch).
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 yourside 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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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.
[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.
Dim Reflections For Now 