Followers of Jesus face two extremes when it comes to Christianity and politics. Do we aggressively invade culture with political solutions or trust the Spirit to change hearts?
One side thinks we should retreat from culture. Arguments don’t persuade, they say. That’s the Spirit’s job, accomplished when we preach the simple gospel. Let God first change the hearts, and the culture will follow. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.
Activist types, on the other hand, engage culture with political solutions reflecting Christian values. They say believers are to be politically active, salt and light to a dying world. Return America to its Christian roots, and restoration will follow. Don’t ignore the symptoms. Transform culture by creating the proper political and moral climate.
The biblical approach, though, is not to address the disease or the symptoms. Christians must do both. When a patient is sick, a doctor’s ultimate goal is to bring healing by curing the disease. Yet, he doesn’t ignore the pain, anguish, and debilitation the disease causes. He treats the symptoms and the disease. Both are necessary for a suffering patient.
In the same way, we can take an interest in our culture by becoming involved citizens who seek not a Christian nation, but rather a just government. As believers, we can also be fully committed in word and deed to seeking the salvation of our fellow citizens, as commanded in Scripture.
In short, government can’t cure the disease by making people good in an ultimate sense. It can, though, control the symptoms by restraining sinful men from being as bad as they can be, and that is a good thing.
Sometimes, well-meaning believers campaign for political solutions to solve what are essentially spiritual problems. The way to avoid this is to carefully distinguish between gospel, moral teaching, and partisan political viewpoints.
Gospel defines what is necessary for Christians to believe in order to attain salvation. It answers the question “What must I do to be saved?” The answer is not political, but individual and theological.
Moral teaching consists of conduct obligatory for all people in order to cultivate human flourishing. Yet civic virtue does not determine one’s salvation. Christians are saved by God’s unmerited grace, not by a properly cast vote in an election.
Political viewpoints are developed by applying moral convictions and personal preferences to issues of the public good.
Sometimes Christians hold political views that seem to be inconsistent with biblical principles or morality. The temptation is strong to make “Christian” political correctness the litmus test for faith. No particular political view, however, is a requirement for salvation. Our Christianity is determined not by our view of the deficit, or of the border, or even of abortion, but by our view of Christ.
One caveat, however. Though political viewpoints per se should not be a test of faith, there are some positions that seem to be profoundly un-Christian since they conflict directly with a biblical view of the world. Abortion and homosexuality immediately come to mind. It’s possible to be a Christian and hold errant views here, but something is clearly wrong. If one’s Christianity completely fails to inform their political life, then it may not be relevant to the rest of their life, either. If this is a pervasive pattern, their claim to be Christian is in question.
Only God can save America. Christians can be used by God, though, to treat the symptoms through positive interaction with culture. They can also play a redemptive role in the lives of others to cure the disease by being faithful to speak the truth of the gospel.
This does not mean giving Christians a preferential place in the public square. Rather, it means working together with our neighbors to create a just society by persuasively appealing for the common good. Moral and rational appeals done incisively, yet graciously, can go a long way to move our culture towards the kind of human flourishing Scripture promotes.
The Bible has been rejected by many as an authority. Merely quoting chapter and verse amounts to throwing scriptural rocks at people’s heads. It just makes them angry. Paul told the Colossians to “let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you should respond to each person” (4:6). This is good counsel for us, too.
We can form our public arguments on the basis of common grace and natural revelation and not by Scripture. It’s the same truth, just a different tactic. We can accommodate our language without changing our message.
As Christians, we have no privileged place in the debate on public policy. The legitimacy of our views in the public square comes solely from our appeal to the common good and justice for all in faithfulness to the commands of Scripture.
Yes, we continue to proclaim the simple gospel, the faith of our biblical fathers, which alone can cure the disease of sin. When it comes to politics, though—to treating the symptoms—our message is best framed using the moral and political language used by our founders in the preamble of the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.