I Didn't Move; You Did (#20) May The Revival You Desire For America Begin In You

As I said at the beginning of this series, I have not abandoned evangelicalism’s stated theological convictions. I just no longer recognize them in its public expression. If faith without works is dead, evangelical orthodoxy without evangelical orthopraxy might just be dead too.

If we are going to call for truth and respect in our nation, we must model it and demand leaders who model it, or people will have no reason to think we are serious about truth.

If we are going to emphasize the importance of personal character, we must model it and demand leaders who model it, or people will have no reason think we are serious about character.

If we are going to lobby for laws that support strong traditional families, we must model it and demand leaders who model it, or people will have no reason to think we are serious about the importance of traditional families.

If we are going to focus on sexual honor and purity, we must model it and demand leaders who model it, or people will have no reason to think we are serious about either of these things.

If we are going to demand that all people be treated with the value, worth and dignity due them as image bearers of God, we must model it and demand leaders who model it, or people won’t think this applies to all people.

If we are going to reject the Black Lives Matter and the #metoo movement because there are woke DEI socialist plots, please, for the love of God, also demand that we find even better ways to address the very real sins of racism and sexual harassment that have haunted our nation, lest people think we are either ignorant or heartless.

If we are going to demand a wall at our borders, we should also demand lots of doors, so that our desire for order and safety when it comes to immigrants and refugees is clearly matched by our desire to show compassion and generosity.

If we are going to follow Jesus' lead from the Sermon on the Mount, and be blessed as peacemakers as individuals and a society, we are going to need to use and promote language, attitudes and policies that are in line with peacemaking, or people may observe that we take our cues from Rome's pax Romana - the peace by the sword - rather than the pax Christi - the peace of cruciform love.

If we are going to value the economy more than anything else (which, according to polls, we do), we should commit to being radically generous with our money, lest people think we are trying to serve both God and mammon.

If we are going to value life, let us do it from womb to tomb, and let us show it by supporting parents and children with our money, time, friendship and things, and by supporting private and public systems that make the choice for life easier rather than harder, lest people think we only care about the lives of children when the weight of the support is on the mother, and costs us nothing.

If we are going to support America First, we should explain what that looks like for someone whose allegiance is first and foremost to the global kingdom of God rather than to the local empire of the United States. And if we don't know what that means, maybe we should figure that out.

I Didn't Move; You Did (#19): The Shift Toward Political Idolatry

During this series, I've looked at the public moral witness of evangelical leaders over the last fifty years (start reading them here). 

Again and again, I found the same themes: care for the poor, concern for racial justice, compassion for immigrants, peacemaking, honesty, the honoring of the imago dei in everyone, the need for personal integrity, the rejection of nationalism, the necessity of impartial justice, and the conviction that the Church must never become captive to any political ideology.

This is a loaded list of issues to address by the political parties of the American empire. Historically – perhaps because of the complexity – evangelical declarations of faith and practice publicly refused to equate the gospel with any political party. All parties and politicians were held to a shared standard; followers of Jesus were expected to follow paths that look like Jesus, whatever direction it would take them. As cited in the earlier posts that excerpted from historical conservative evangelical declarations of faith and practice:

“We must resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near-religious loyalty.”

“Our equal duty (is) never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality.”

“The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests...”

“The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness. The saying is wise: ‘The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.” The Evangelical soul is not for sale. It has already been bought at an infinite price...”

Yet in spite of such clear direction, there is an increasing litmus test for being a Christian: support of one party, with almost unwavering loyalty. You must be all in or all out, and there can be no questioning or challenging of the leadership. Perhaps when leaders insist that “I alone can save you,” (as stated at Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016), well, the stakes are pretty high.

This has resulted in a demand for unflinching loyalty to Trump that has moved beyond the moral flexibility I have been recording in this series and into borderline idolatry. Christians in the halls of power who are meant to be the prophetic heirs of Nathan, speaking truth and righteousness to power, have abandoned their calling.

“We must resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near-religious loyalty.”

“Our equal duty (is) never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality.”

The near-total alignment with a party or person is a siren call that for many is hard to resist - and difficult to maintain. This position is going to need over-the-top justification, since no one deserves that kind of loyalty. And there is a comparison at the very top for evangelicals – Jesus, to give the ultimate stamp of approval to comparisons to David, Cyrus, and Jehu. [1]

So, let's look at some of the ways admiration has moved toward idolatry.

"I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 15B): The Shift Toward Christian Nationalism And The Abandonment Of Character

In the first part of this series, I spent a good deal of time looking backward. I revisited the statements, declarations, and public witness of the evangelical movement that shaped me. Again and again, I found leaders insisting that Christians must care for the poor,  pursue justice, tell the truth, defend the vulnerable, practice humility, and maintain enough distance from political power to speak prophetically to it. And we would do all of this not just personally but corporately. We were called to build a society that valued these things as well as reflected in leaders and laws.

Then I turned to the present. I have been asking a simple question: What happened? Why have so many voices that once challenged immoral presidents and unjust policies now defend and even applaud them? To look at this, I have been chronicling various areas in which a profound shift has taken place and explaining how it reveals the conservative evangelicalism I was raised in moving from solid Kingdom foundations of orthopraxy to shaky Empire foundations of power, violence, callousness and idolatry.

In the previous post, I argued that Christian nationalism changes the church in predictable ways. First, it encourages the nation to borrow God's authority for the empire's actions. We saw that in the way war can become wrapped in the language of divine mission, turning national victories into God's victories and military power into an instrument of God's kingdom.

But there is a second consequence, one that may be even more damaging to the church itself.

Once the church becomes closely intertwined with a political movement, it gradually abandons the call to speak prophetically to those in power. Instead of holding leaders accountable, it begins protecting them. Instead of confronting sin wherever it appears, it starts making exceptions for "our side." The result is not simply political compromise. It is moral compromise that deals a devastating blow to the public witness of the church.

I think nowhere is that shift more visible than in the evangelical movement's dramatic reversal on the question of character.

" I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 15A) Christian Nationalism And The "Sacrament" of War

In the first part of this series, I spent a good deal of time looking backward. I revisited the statements, declarations, and public witness of the evangelical movement that shaped me. Again and again, I found leaders insisting that Christians must care for the poor, pursue justice, tell the truth, defend the vulnerable, practice humility, and maintain enough distance from political power to speak prophetically to it. (My previous post looked at the kind of global responsibility the evangelical movement once took seriously.)

Then I turned to the present. I have been asking a simple question: What happened?

Why have so many voices that once challenged presidents now defend them? Why have leaders who once insisted that character matters decided it suddenly doesn't? Why has the movement become so comfortable with nationalism, partisan identity, and political power?

I don't think there is only one answer. But I do think one answer explains much of the shift. It is the growing embrace of Christian nationalism, a danger we were constantly warned about for the past 50 years. Here are some excerpts from the declarations I posted.

We must resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near-religious loyalty.

God has ordained the two co-existing institutions of church and state as distinct and independent of each other with each having its own areas of responsibility (Rom. 13:1-7; Mark 12:13-17; Eph. 4:15-16, 5:23-32).

All too often we have abandoned our Lord’s concern for those in the shadows, the twilight, and the deep darkness of the world, and become cheerleaders for those in power and the naïve sycophants of the powerful and the rich…

…The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests...

Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith…Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church – and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons...

Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power, what is right outweighs what is popular, just as principle outweighs party, truth matters more than team-playing, and conscience more than power and survival...

The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness. The saying is wise: “The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.” The Evangelical soul is not for sale. It has already been bought at an infinite price...

We repent of our failures to condemn and restrain violence by remaining silent, by promoting nationalism, or by unjustly supporting conflicts through deficient theological justification.

We lament that some Christians have looked to the state rather than the gospel as the key means for bringing about God’s intentions for the world. This takes an especially regrettable form when wed to nationalism—here defined as the belief that every state should have a single, national culture and no other—or ethnonationalism—which is the belief that every ethnic group should have its own state. This is a great evil in our world.

We lament that many Christians have been sadly complicit in it, as well as in the claims of ethnic and racial supremacy it fosters. Against this, we assert that no modern state is able to claim or will ever be able to claim to be the special agent of God’s saving rule.

I read Francis Schaeffer back in the 80s and 90s. I taught the How Should We Then Live video class to high schoolers. Though Schaeffer had some unfortunate influences (#rushdoony), he had some good insights that were spreading throughout the evangelical world.

“There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole "Constantine mentality" from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the official state religion. 

Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian.

We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: "We should not wrap our Christianity in our national flag.” ― Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto

The late Billy Graham, Christianity Today’s founder, gave us a loud warning in an article he wrote for Parade Magazine in 1981, when he said: 

“I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”[1]

Historically, evangelicals advocated for a prophetic distance from power, especially wealth and political authority, from which they could freely speak truth and righteousness to those in power. They had a stated suspicion of nationalism and “near-religious loyalty” to the state.[2]

Today, in practice and teaching, it endorses proximity to power[3] and defense of leaders regardless of character, often openly embraces Christian nationalism, and seeks to merge faith with political identity.

"I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 1): An Ode To A Lost Evangelicalism

I spent 45 years as a proud conservative evangelical. It was my home. It wasn’t perfect, but nowhere else was either. Evangelicalism helped shape my love for Scripture, my devotion to Jesus, my commitment to conversion, prayer, mission, and discipleship. I owe much to people within it.

In the circles I grew up in, I was also taught the importance of engaging with the community and the world in a way that brought healing and hope.

We sent missionaries near and far dedicated to telling others about the good news of the Gospel, often accompanied by acts of service to show that we cared about the whole person, not just their souls.

We promoted foster care, adoption, and crisis pregnancy centers as a proactive way to build a culture of life.

Evangelical disaster relief organizations did incredible work in meeting practical needs in areas devastated by natural disasters.
Personally, my experience in the local churches in my life - Sunday School, youth group, services, revival meetings, potlucks, small groups, community outreach - gave me many wonderful memories and formed me in ways that I still cherish. [1]

The evangelical neighbor who quietly loves Jesus, serves the poor, cares for refugees, tells the truth, honors his marriage vows, and treats political opponents with dignity is not the source of my disillusionment. In many ways, they are evidence that the best of evangelicalism still shows sparks of life.

And yet, here I am, feeling the need to no longer be associated with evangelicalism because of the terrible toll the Trumpification of conservative evangelicalism has taken on its witness, reputation, and impact.

I’m not a grumpy curmudgeon, pummeled by evangelicalism, who now just wants an excuse to throw shade. No, conservative evangelicalism was the Christian ecosystem into which I was born, and for most of my life, it felt like home.

I helped build it. I voted party line most of my life. I participated in the ecosystem. This is not a story about “those people.” It is a story about me and “my people.”

Speaking of “my people,” this series is not primarily aimed at the sincere evangelical Christian who voted for Donald Trump while wrestling with competing concerns and difficult choices. I know many such people. Some are dear friends. Some remain among the most faithful followers of Jesus I know.

Many Christians concluded that one set of policies represented a lesser evil than another. Whether I agree with that conclusion is not the point. Reasonable people can disagree about political strategy, candidates, and public policy.

My concern is different.

What Kind Of Person Am I Becoming? A Lesson From The Early Church

I've been thinking about recently is how often our modern assumptions about power are the exact opposite of the assumptions of the earliest Christians.

If you read early Christian writings, you will see that for the first few centuries Christians had almost no political influence, no cultural dominance, no armies, and often no legal protections. Still, they were inordinately confident that they would eventually win.

Why? Not because they expected to conquer Rome with a sword (they were forbidden); not because they expected God to destroy their enemies (Jesus wasn't about that); not because they thought they would seize the levers of power (the Sanhedrin had showed the danger in that). 

They believed they would win because they thought love was ultimately more powerful than violence, truth more powerful than propaganda, and self-sacrifice more powerful than coercion.

That sounds naïve to our modern ears. Yet somehow this tiny, marginalized movement exploded across the Roman Empire and then the world. It has outlasted emperors, persecutions, and entire political systems for 2,000 years.

How is this possible? Well, if you read people like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, or Athanasius of Alexandria, you will hear them often talk as though the cross isn't merely how Jesus saves people. It's how reality itself works. 

The power of cruciform love is the deepest truth of the universe. It's the fulcrum which moves the cosmos itself.

If they're right, then the question isn't "How do I defeat those who claim to be my enemies?" The question is, "What kind of person am I becoming while I engage them? Will I look like the Empire or the Kingdom? Will I look like Caesar or Jesus?" 

After all, the means by which we engage enemies determines who we are in the end. If we are going to defeat those who seek to oppose Jesus and his ways, it needs to be with the same means Jesus used: the power of a cruciform, self-giving, love that points toward the Jesus in whose footsteps we follow. 

For a while, the church followed Jesus - imperfectly, to be sure, but consistently. Unfortunately, they lost its way when the siren call of Empire broke down their resistance. 

In their book From Revelation For The Rest Of Us: A Prophetic Call To Follow Jesus As A Dissident Disciple,  Scott McNight and Cody Matchett offer a sobering explanation.

“It took three centuries for Babylon—the way of Rome—to take over the church, and in some important ways it destroyed the church...The fallout from this has been so immense we need to slow down a bit to examine it more closely.

When Constantine became emperor of Rome and part of the church, the empire began to wind the church into a tight thread, binding it closely to itself. Church and empire, empire and church, closely knit to the point that the difference was often unnoticeable.This interwinding today is often called 'Constantinianism,' but more accurately it should be called 'Christendom'—that is, the process whereby Christianity became an institutional political power that sought power in Europe, North Africa, and (western) Asia. 

Constantine used his government powers to establish churches, demolish pagan temples, restore exiled Christians to their homes and jobs, 'unify' the theology of the church, and banish or silence threatening voices.Constantine unquestionably operated at times with a charitable tolerance, but the dirty deed had been done: the state became the power of the church. 

States do what states do, and they do this through war and violence. An expert on Roman history, Ramsay Macmullen, states it this way, 'The empire had never had on the throne a man given to such bloodthirsty violence as Constantine.' Though he was a supposedly Christian emperor, he was known for violence and was a man with a sword in his fist, not the word of God...

With Theodosius I the empire completes its 'Christianization' and becomes Christendom. A more forceful way of saying this is that when the church ties itself to political powers, as it did from Constantine to Theodosius I, it becomes Babylon. 

Christendom was the most tragic mistake in the history of the church. Aligning with Babylon turned the church into an agent of empire; put differently, the church surrendered its calling to the powers of empire.

Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–340) knew Constantine personally, saw some of the events of this time firsthand, and later wrote up a fawning account called The Life of Constantine, giving him titles like 'God- beloved' and 'Thrice blessed…' 

Perhaps the most widely known (and tragic) story about Constantine is his claim to have a vision of the cross before a famous battle, the one that cemented his position as the sole ruler of the empire. The vision was written in the sky: 'By this [the cross] conquer' following which he had a vision from Christ himself. And here is the tragedy of tragedies: the cross became the symbol for his military might, his palace, and his churches. 

Constantine became 'their redeemer, saviour and benefactor' even though in truth he was a brutal warmongering emperor whose goal was dominance and whose method was power through intimidation and violence… the man with a cross for a banner was a bloodthirsty man who defaced the way of the Lamb as he ruled in the way of the dragon. 

Violence, empire, and power would forever mark the churches that bound themselves to the state.The relationship of churches to the state can often be a first indicator or warning sign of Babylon’s presence inside the church.”

There is much to learn from this, lest we are condemned to repeat a history that moved the church so tragically far from the way of Jesus. When we reject the power of cruciform love as the greatest and best means of bringing healing, hope, restoration, peace, justice, mercy, and love, we have abandoned the way of Jesus and embraced the faux hope of Constantine, the violent pax Romana brought about by the sword that is not peace, and will never be able to put down the sword. 

We don't talk about Christendom much anymore; "Christian Nationalism" sounds much more civilized.

Yet the temptations, the compromise, and the allure of power will still mark the churches that bind themselves to the state. 

May God save His church from this path, so that we may be ambassadors of the enduring hope of cruciform love, and thus be spared the fate that awaits those who trust in empires.