Among evangelicals, especially pastors, it’s become a common refrain, one I’d like to banish from the lexicon. It has a few variations, but generally it goes something like this: “I’m sick of politics; I now ignore the whole political scene and just focus on Jesus.”
Too Late for Distancing
Sorry, pastor, but that’s not possible. It’s too late for that. Too many of your peers have for so long—and so fervently—mingled and mangled faith and politics that there’s no turning back. To fail to address the problem is to tacitly approve of it. The enraged bull your syncretism created escaped the corral, and now it has devastated the china shop, annihilated the ice cream parlor, demolished the dentist’s office, and wrecked every restaurant in town. You can’t absolve yourself of your responsibility by simply declaring your estrangement from the rampaging beast.
Nor is following after the bull and cleaning up its mess sufficient recompence. The only way to even begin righting the wrong is to re-capture the crazed creature, return it to an escape-proof corral, and then make reparations to all who were victimized by the upheaval. But even that isn’t enough. The final and most-important step in setting things right is to admit your complicity in allowing the bull to escape and then publicly promise to do everything within your control to ensure the beast never escapes again. Or to turn it into steaks and burgers.
You thought allowing the rowdies within your assemblies to release the beast would be okay because society needed to be shaken—even demolished—so that it could be rebuilt in the image you desired and were so sure we needed. A straight-up theocracy might have been a bit more than you wanted, but a theocracy-lite might be just the right prescription for our nation’s ills. And who better to lead a watered-down version of a theocracy than a man who throughout most of his life opposed, in word and deed, all the tenets of a theocracy? Who better than a man who now, clearly, only pretends to support the lifestyle evangelicals want to impose on the nation?
With Donald Trump as its new standard-bearer, the evangelical movement would—you supposed—get the best of both worlds, this one and the one you all claim to long for. But such a quest was doomed from the start. As the Bible—remember it, the book the MAGA playbook replaced?—says, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.”
So, now that your hope for a diluted theocracy appears to be fading, you want to divorce yourself from your reserved relationship with the MAGA world. You want to pretend you are and always have been too spiritual to be sucked into the muddy world of politics.
Promote Proper Political Engagement
No, that is unacceptable. Spiritual leaders have a moral duty to be politically engaged—just not in the way the Christian nationalist MAGA movement has offered up. Evangelical leaders must advocate for Christian values. But those values also must be properly discerned through genuine, gritty scholarship. Reject self-serving name-it-and-claim-it “theology.” Reject calls for radical Christian nationalism. Teach you congregation to share the message of unconditional love that Jesus taught. Teach you congregation to love their neighbors as themselves—with no exceptions (Mark 12:31). Teach you congregation to love—yes—even their enemies (Matthew 5:44). Teach your congregation the historical fact that every time the church became too intimately involved with governments tragedies were the result.
And accept your responsibility to speak openly, directly, specifically against movements like MAGA that misrepresent true Christianity. More and more Americans are recognizing the damage done by the raging MAGA bull. Now is the time to corral it forever. Cage the beast and free the church. May the two never again become so intimately connected.