Greg Koukl and Natasha Crain discuss various objections people have to Christian political involvement and offer a simple test to help you evaluate these objections when you encounter them.
Transcript
Greg: What you’re talking about, though, is—when you talk about the common good—obviously this is going to have ramifications for action in the culture, not just in the micro but in the macro, as well. Things that have to do with public policy. Okay? And you do talk about that. I mean, When the Culture Hates You is an activist book in many ways, and I don’t mean political activist book, but it has ramifications in that area, and you talk about that in the book. Tell us a little bit about that.
Natasha: Right. So, the way that I phrased that is—the third chapter is called “When the Common Good Is Political.” So, the common good and all of these ideas and the things that we should be concerned with as Christians, it’s not always political in nature. There are a lot of other things that can be going on that we’re advocating for locally or with our local schools, things like that. But, like you say, it often overlaps with political things. And it’s a big, dirty P word, right? For a lot of Christians, they don’t want to get “political.” So, what I try to do in that chapter is take everyone a step back, where hopefully we can all agree on something. Let’s put the baggage down and just understand, what does that word even mean? Can we just get to a basic definition?
Politics is just the way that people living in communities make decisions about how they’re going to live together. That’s all it is. So, when you strip away all the baggage that people sometimes import to the conversation, I think most people are going to hear that definition, go, “Okay, yeah, I think Christians should be involved in that.” Christians have lived under different forms of government throughout history. We’re talking about today in a constitutional republic in America. What does that look like? If we are citizens of this country, and we have the opportunity to influence our governing structure through our voting and other ways to make and enforce laws that promote the common good—that promote God’s actual good for people—of course we should take advantage of that opportunity.
Now, just because we have the right in the society in which we live doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing that. We’d have to look to the Bible to see, is there some reason why we should not be engaged in those activities? But when you go to Scripture, you see there’s nothing forbidden about that. In fact, you see throughout the Old Testament, for example, that God is very upset with nations for not practicing righteousness—both the nation of Israel and the surrounding nations. It’s not even just about Israel. You see Daniel, for example, who’s talking to King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon and basically telling him, “Hey, break off your sins by practicing righteousness and having mercy.”
So, there’s this expectation that we can see running throughout the Bible that God does care about the moral health of societies. And we have Romans 13:1–7 that speaks to the fact that all authority is from God and that the civil rulers are God’s servants to promote what’s good and restrain what’s evil. So, at the very most basic level—yes, there are going to be disagreements that arise once we go from the basic level—but at the basic level, we should be able to all agree that if you have the opportunity to advocate for what is actually truly good and advocate against what is evil in society, that Christians should take that opportunity.
Greg: Well, I think of this verse in Proverbs 3—I think is where it’s located—and it says something like, “Don’t withhold good from them to whom it is due when it’s in your power to do it.” And this is something that—your point about the Bible is really good—but something a lot of folks don’t understand or haven’t taken into consideration. They think, “Well, there’s not that much pointing in this direction.” Look, they didn’t have suffrage; we do. They didn’t have the right to participate in the political process; we do. So, we have an opportunity. That’s how slavery got ended—the involvement that good people had to end something that was evil. And so, not withholding the good to them to whom it is due when you have the power to do it.
Of course, what the other side is going to object to is us forcing our views on them, somehow, through the political process. You address that, I think, in the book.
Natasha: Right. So, I have a chapter that covers objections that often come up about this. And you’re right, one of the most common ones is, “You’re just imposing your values on us.” And it’s important to understand that there’s nothing that’s special about Christians advocating for our views when it comes to public policy. That’s just the nature of public policy itself. Any kind of public policy, it involves one group’s views imposing their views on another group.
So, in a constitutional republic, we all have the right to advocate for what we believe. It doesn’t mean if you’re coming to it from—you know, if my rationale is, “Well, this is my religious belief, so, I’m bringing it to bear,” we would be psychologically profiling people all day, as I say in the book. If we were looking to see, “Well, what was your motivation? Was it religiously motivated? Well, you can’t use that in your voting.” It doesn’t work that way. And yet we’re always told, “Hey, you’re imposing your views on us,” because they think that somehow Christians are different—that If you have a religious rationale in some way, then that’s problematic. But if that were the case, then we shouldn’t be able to advocate against murder, either, because most religions would agree that murder is wrong. So, it doesn’t hold up logically; it doesn’t hold up even from a civic sense.
And you mentioned slavery, and that kind of ties back to this, because I use something in the book called what I call the “slavery test.” So, when you hear an objection to political involvement, something like, “Hey, Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics, because you’re imposing your views on other people,” try it out by saying this first: “Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery, because we shouldn’t have imposed our values on others.” We all hear that, and we go, “Well, no, because slavery was an evil institution in America that needed to be eradicated.” We don’t say, “Well, we don’t want to—we want to just kind of sit back, and we don’t want to impose our values on others.” No, we look back with an eye toward history, and we condemn the people who didn’t see it at the time. And we say, yes, absolutely. Praise the Lord that there were people who were standing up and saying that this is wrong. They weren’t afraid to impose that view on others, because it was the objectively right thing to do.
And you can do that with all kinds of objections. Another one is, “Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery, because we shouldn’t have sought power.” That’s a common objection today. It doesn’t hold up. Or, “We shouldn’t have worked to end slavery, because it would harm our witness.” No. Or “because it would cause divisions in the church.” It did cause divisions in the church at the time, and we still look back and say it’s good that it caused the division because right division is what we want, not getting rid of all divisions completely. So, the slavery test, I think, is a very powerful way of looking at these objections to Christian political involvement, to start to see through these mantras—these phrases that people say—that really don’t hold up biblically or logically, even.
Greg: Well, part of the point is to show, I think, that it’s not really a two-way street here. It’s a one-way street. And I think of the statement—where did I hear this? I don’t know—”What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too,” because they don’t want Christians involved in politics if Christians are advocating against them, but when Christians are advocating in favor of the things that they agree with, they have no concern at all.
Natasha: Right. That’s why the progressive Christians aren’t hated. Culture doesn’t hate progressive Christians, because their political views overwhelmingly line up with progressive values. And so, they don’t hate Christians.
There’s an article that I mentioned in the book from the New York Times by a writer named Nicholas Kristof, and it said something like, “Hallelujah, progressive Christians arise.” Something like that. I’m forgetting the exact title of it. And he was basically celebrating that there were more and more progressive Christians that were in government. But can you imagine any headline ever coming through the New York Times that said something opposite: “Hallelujah, more conservative Christians are coming into government”? That’s laughable. You know you would never see that in the New York Times.
So, we can celebrate any kind of progressive Christian who’s holding to the popular progressive values on things like abortion and gender and sexuality, but conservative values that run contrary to the popular moral consensus—those are never going to be celebrated.