This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Since by nature of my work I’ve had to weigh in on a lot of controversial issues over the years, I’ve been cussed out a time or two. Sometimes, I’ve been yelled at with, “God damn you!” When an unbeliever says that, it’s one thing. Christians, though, mean it literally.
A family I know and love was rattled recently to get a note from someone they considered a longtime friend suggesting that the family was going to hell. The cause for the impending brimstone was not that the family denied the faith, embraced some heresy, or adopted some unrepentant life of immorality. At issue was that the family did not support a presidential candidate.
The note-sender put in all the provisions of “I’m only saying this because I love you,” which works for cruelty the same way “This doesn’t actually count as sex” works for people who want to sleep with each other without giving up their purity rings. Adding a “bless your heart” to the “God damn you” doesn’t really change it that much.
This sort of situation comes to me at least once a week these days and, in some ways, it’s jarringly new in our history. I can’t think of churches splitting over whether Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson should sit in the Oval Office, for example. I can’t imagine family members refusing to speak to one another over who voted for Jimmy Carter and who for Gerald Ford. That has changed over the past decade or so, and some of us aren’t used to it yet. I pray we never will be.
Much of this has to do with larger divisions in American life—the polarization of the populace, the tribalization of the parties, the trivialization of politics itself. And some of it has to do with changes in the American church.
A market-driven religion seeks to appeal to “felt needs” and especially to what drives the passions of the people to whom it wants to appeal. When the concern is what happens after death or how to be forgiven of guilt, a market-driven religion emphasizes those things.
And when the market secularizes to caring more about how to thrive in the workforce or how to spice up a marriage, a market-driven religion will reflect that. When the market further secularizes to the point that what people want is “red meat” about why their political or ethnic or racial “enemies” are bad, a market-driven religion can do that too. And it has.
That’s why we end up with an American religion in which people can gladly partner with prosperity gospel teachers who would be thrown out of a Billy Sunday crusade, not to mention the Council of Nicaea. These same people simultaneously denounce as maybe-not-even-regenerate those who are orthodox on every article of the faith but who won’t violate their consciences on supporting political causes or candidates they believe to be wrong.
In a politicized, secularized American Christianity, some seem to think that the apostle’s admonition to make your calling and election sure (2 Pet. 1:10) has to do with posting the right pop-political opinions on social media.
We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy. Trolling your neighbors on social media for their politics may cost you some self-respect, but you can budget for that.
On the other hand, bearing witness to Christ and persuading your neighbors to give their lives to him requires something of you. Modeling Christ in word and life for your Haitian immigrant neighbors fleeing violence and poverty will require you to interrupt your life and comfort. Reposting memes falsely accusing them of eating household pets—because somebody’s cousin’s friend from high school said they did—takes only a few seconds.
While this might feel new to many of us, we should recognize that it’s rooted in something very old: an Americanized version of one of the earliest heresies in the church.
Much of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, addresses a dispute about what it means to follow Christ and to be united to him in faith. Those the apostles pronounced to be false teachers suggested that the Gentiles seeking to follow Christ must first become Jews, with the marks of circumcision and the observance of diets and days. Concerning the teachers who insisted on circumcision for these Gentiles, Paul wrote to the Galatians, “To them we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you” (2:5, ESV throughout).
For the apostle, those who added to the gospel were not thereby practicing addition but subtraction. A gospel of “Christ and” is another gospel altogether (1:6). Paul speaks of those who wish to add additional entrance requirements to the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected as “anathema,” as those who should be cursed (vv. 8–9). If one is united to Christ, the old categories are broken down, and people who ordinarily wouldn’t be united together—Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, zealot and tax collector—find themselves in this mystery where the only defining category is Christ and Christ alone (Col. 3:11).
The gospel, of course, works itself out in life—both in terms of how we live our lives personally and how we live our lives together, socially, culturally, and politically.
People can be committed, though, to the same goals of justice but differ as to how to get to them. The Bible mandates care for the poor. On some matters, the application is explicit and clear-cut: One should not exploit the pay of one’s laborers, for instance (James 5:1–6). On other matters, believers may disagree on exactly which public policies benefit the poor and what unintended consequences might actually hurt them. Somebody on that will likely be wrong. That’s why we have debate and moral persuasion.
Some Christians believe the pro-life vision of care for the unborn always requires voting for the Republican ticket, no matter what. Others believe the pro-life vision is harmed long-term by tying it to sexual anarchy, misogyny, contempt for the vulnerable, and mob violence. Some believe their consciences require them to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree, even on major issues, but who will respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. Others don’t believe they can vote for either candidate in good conscience.
As you know, I have very strong views on the presidential election. I have and will continue to make those views known. To do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience, and my own sense of what it means to love my country. Some people disagree with me—even up to half the country. I do not believe those viewpoints are morally or rationally equal, of course, or I wouldn’t hold the views I do.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that those who disagree with me are, by definition, not Christians. To do so would be to add to the requirement of faith in Christ a commitment to see the political and cultural stakes of the moment the way I do. That would be veering close to the Galatian heresy. And that, the Bible says, really does endanger our souls.
We have the obligation to speak out when support for any partisan movement or personality is conflated with Christianity itself. It’s especially odd when those who defend slaveholding or white supremacist Christians of the past as “men of their time” or as good Christians with “blind spots” are nonetheless willing to say that only those who vote the way they do can be genuine Christians.
More serious than all of the issues combined—more serious even than the future of the American Republic itself—is the conflation of the gospel with a human personality or power. When the church yawns at Trinitarian heresy or scoffs at what Jesus defines as the fruit of the Spirit but unites around a partisan identity, we are heading toward something closer to the imperial cult against which the risen Christ warned the first-century churches—congregations persecuted by that cult for refusing to say, “Caesar is Lord.” Decisions one makes on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But if we confuse one day for the other, we’ve lost more than an election. It’s bad enough when we say to our political opponents, metaphorically, “Go to hell.” It’s even worse when we think that’s the gospel.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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