Why do so many American evangelical Christians demand that our religious values be enshrined in government policy? Do we really believe that same sex marriages will stand in the way of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
I am not proposing that we ignore the influence of our faith in the voting booth or in the town square. Nor am I advocating that Christians back away from the truth. But, the freedom to express our values must not be confused with a claim to government sanction. And our right to religious practice is not a license to limit the freedoms of those who do not agree with us. After all, a government that is powerful enough to compel the values that Christians hold sacred is also powerful enough to coerce practices that Christians regard offensive.
Ironically, the very principle that serves as the legal device unbelievers have used successfully in the courts to remove the icons of our faith from secular landmarks finds its origins with bible-believing Christians. The establishment clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which prohibits the government from creating an official church of the United States, is directly related to the American Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were fundamentalist Christians who were denied the freedom to exercise their faith and who came to America to escape religious persecution from the Church of England. With the growing intolerance of America’s “enlightened” liberal elites and unveiled hostility toward the evangelical community, we should work to strengthen rather than weaken our commitment to the political primacy of the First Amendment. The church should endorse rather than challenge the unambiguous separation between our doctrines and our laws.
Yet, for biblical Christianity there is an issue of greater urgency than simply the protection of individual political rights for those of us with dual citizenship in the United States of America and the Kingdom of God. The First Amendment holds sacrosanct the church’s freedom to witness the love of Jesus Christ to an ever-growing unbelieving world. And is the proclaiming of the Gospel not the primary role of the church? During His time in our world, Jesus Christ neither promoted nor modeled political action. His directive to His Apostles was only that the church be a witness to His resurrection and the vehicle for exposing God’s grace to the lost. Against this truth, can the mission of the “religious right” be in alignment with the mission of the church? The biblical story of the adulterous woman that Jesus saved from a stoning is supposed to be a lesson on how the church is to be an extension of Jesus, not the crowd!
The Church today has become obsessed with legislating the rulebook rather than introducing our neighbors to the Rulemaker. What makes the Gospel life transformative is not God’s law, but God’s Son, Jesus Christ. And when the message of the church is presented as a set of “traditional family values” and debated in the political arena, however well intentioned, the message of the Gospel is obscured by the violence of the on-going culture war. Think about it! If the lost are lost without Jesus Christ, what good will our traditional family values be to them?
We live in the greatest political structure ever devised by man. Believers should exercise their political rights and participate in the political process. However, Christians must also recognize that political power is a worldly delusion! Remember the exchange between Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilot just before Jesus was executed? Pilot said, “Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above…” The fact is that God did not choose to change the world through political power. God chose to manifest His power and redeem the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reality is that political power is no power at all!
I am opposed to legalized abortion. But isn’t the church’s primary role to witness God’s love to the aborted child’s mother? And, how can we do that while holding a stone in our hand? Even if the church could overturn Roe v Wade, would that increase the population of heaven by one member? The Christian witness across time and the globe has led to documented change in the hearts of people and the cultural values they embraced when exposed to the Gospel by the church. For all of the perceived political strength of the evangelical community today, our government is more hostile to Christian expression, and our culture more destined for hell than at any other time in US history.
The twelve men who walked with Jesus, His disciples, also misunderstood His mission because they too were convinced that Jesus would deliver a political solution. However, Jesus was not a martyr. Jesus is our Savior. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ demonstrates that there was no political solution considered or capable of achieving God’s purposes. Two thousand years later could the American evangelical community be making the same mistake, again?
