When “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” falls short

“I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant.” (Translation: I follow Jesus, not Democrats or Republicans)

I’ve used this line before and I know of books who use it, or something similar, in their titles. I haven’t read these books and I’m not bashing them or those who would use this line.

If “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” means I follow the Kingdom of Jesus and will live, advocate, and vote according to those values, and I will stand up to the Donkey and the Elephant when they aren’t, then I’m all for it.

But where I’ve most often heard “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” used is by Christians who also say things like “Just preach Jesus (and don’t talk about issues of oppression and injustice, despite what the Bible clearly commands).” For more context: I wrote a lament on this a few years ago. Or “You’re replacing the gospel with social justice” (see lament again for context).

Where I’ve heard it most used is as a way of not saying anything against my political party when I need an out.

I ran into this view a lot in 2020 in white evangelical circles. The whole country was talking about the murder of George Floyd and back-to-back highly publicized cases of racial injustice caught on video that year with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. It was an unprecedented time where the macro-level tides were turning (albeit temporarily) toward humbly listening and empathizing with the realities of systemic racism. Everyone was talking about racial injustice. Everyone except the white evangelical church (with some rare exceptions).

When asked their thoughts on George Floyd, police brutality, and racial injustice, I kept hearing white evangelicals say: I don’t follow politics, they are all corrupt. I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant.

Speaking of elephants, I’ll name the elephant in the room: racial injustice and systemic injustice are Democrat political / cultural issues. More on why that is a problem later.

But what my white evangelical friends were really saying was not “I follow the Lamb and will stand up to the kingdom of the Elephant because on this topic, it stands in contrast to values of the Kingdom of the Lamb.” What they were saying was: “I can’t be a traitor to my political party (Republican, in this case) and to my friends, family, and church who are also of my political party. So I either 1.) Can’t speak out against racial injustice even though I want to, or 2.) I can’t admit publicly during this current cultural moment that I don’t think racial injustice is real, so (whether #1 or #2), I will instead say I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant (But in reality, I really follow the Elephant).

Democrat Christians do this too. The contexts are different because in this current era, it’s the Republicans who are merging with the name of Jesus / using Jesus to try to get votes in more overt ways than the Democrats. One of many examples of this overt strategy is Donald Trump saying on July 26th, 2024: “And again, Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you. Get out. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

You don’t hear Democrat politicians saying things like that. You sometimes see the other scary extreme from Democrats like Bernie Sanders in 2017 implying that Christian beliefs should disqualify someone from public office and are “Islamophobic” and that “[Someone holding orthodox Christian theology] is not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about.”

My only point with contrasting Trump’s statements to Sanders is that Republicans have overtly made the Elephant and Lamb synonymous and are trying to get the Christian vote that way. I see Democrats that I know or Christian leaders online doing this in more subtle ways during this election cycle. I think these subtleties are things we are all, myself included, need to be mindful of. I think some of the subtle merging of Jesus with Democrat policies is in reaction to the overt ways it’s been done by Republican leaders and some of the extreme ways it’s been applied by the more fanatical Republican followers, like at the January 6th Insurrection:

I say this to say I understand why the reaction of Jesus + Democrat = Jesus is happening. But these same principles apply.

It’s common for me to see left-leaning Christians and pastors writing and posting about God’s love for immigrant and refugee neighbor, our LGBTQ neighbor, and calling out Trump for his harmful and arrogant language against women, the disabled, immigrants, refugees, as well as his thinking he’s above the law with denying election results and saying that his 34-felony conviction “was a rigged, disgraceful trial.” But I don’t see them ever speaking out against issues where the Democrat party or leaders do not align with Jesus’ Kingdom values and where Republican ones do. I don’t see a distinction between the Kingdom of Jesus and the Kingdom of Democrat in their posts, and this too sends a powerful, unspoken message. More on that below.

One of the misunderstandings from my first and second posts was that I was saying Christians shouldn’t talk about politics or take stances on political policies based on their faith. That I was saying Christians should abstain from political viewpoints altogether, rather than applying their faith to the moral issues at stake in politics.

I’m actually saying the opposite. The nuance, and where those who have already merged Jesus with their political party give their pushback, is I am pointing out the danger of making the Lamb synonymous with our political party’s Elephant or Donkey, rather than speaking out prophetically (as Scripture does) for and against policies of both the Democrat and Republican parties. We are also focusing on unique political issues as they interact with Scripture, not on political parties and all that gets attached to them. We will each end up landing on one side of the aisle or another for our vote (unless we vote third party or abstain), but this is very different than assuming that Jesus and our party are one. (And perhaps when applying this concept, we will end up voting for a Republican president one election and a Democrat the next. Or a Republican senator, while voting for a Democrat president in the same election.)

A quick aside: My advice to pastors and churches is to preach all of the Bible and help Christians apply biblical, Kingdom principles to their lives and how they vote and advocate. Talk about how to apply Scripture to current cultural issues, while never telling them who to vote for. Give the Holy Spirit room to help them apply the Scriptural truths to their contexts. I also believe there are different mediums for different levels of this conversation and there are things that should not be said in a sermon or a Sunday morning that can be thought through critically in a blog or podcast episode. We as church leaders should also be careful with how we use social media because it is a medium that thrives on polarization. We also need to all realize that advocating for these issues and “being the change” in the trenches, life-on-life with local non-profits and actual human beings who are struggling is always going to have more impact than simply voting for a politician. And I think Republicans and Democrats can often serve side-by-side for these biblical causes in real life, without even realizing what’s happening.

The problem that I mentioned earlier of racial justice being a Democrat issue (and abortion being a Republican issue, immigration being a Democrat issue, and so on) is that it handcuffs pastors and churches from being able to talk about them at all. You can talk about abortion if you’re in a Republican church, but don’t you dare speak about refugees and immigrants (even though the Bible does a lot) because you will now be a traitor to the Republican party. Many of the Republicans in your church have already made up their minds about this based on the political news channels they watch daily or the latest rant by Trump.

And if you’re in a Democrat church, don’t you dare talk about the killing of unborn children or how unborn children are also an oppressed, voiceless people group that fall in line with God’s heart for the oppressed in Scripture. Or to talk about God’s design for sex being between a man and a woman, and figuring out how to navigation God’s design and command with compassion and empathy.

But “also” doesn’t compute in our polarized political culture. It’s either/or and if you aren’t with us, you’re against us. Pick your grocery bag and pledge your allegiance and loyalty to the party.

Pastors and churches on both sides do this because we need the support and loyalty of our constituency, most of whom are reading Scripture through their political lens, instead of the other way around.

When we align Jesus with our political party, we can no longer preach and apply the whole Bible. We can only preach the parts that agree with our political party. The Bible is a prophetic book. Prophetic here meaning speaking truth to power, like the Old Testament prophets would speak biblical truth to the Israelite kings who were disobeying Scripture.

Can you imagine God redacting Exodus 22:21 Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt or Numbers 15:15 You and the foreigner shall be the same before the Lord because it offends Republican policy and/or racist rhetoric? God saying something like, “Sorry guys. I don’t want to lose your vote. I really need your support. We can just throw that one in to the Apocrypha or something.”

Yet this is how we think Scripture works.

When we merge Jesus with either political party, we lose our ability to nuance. The political parties (and their subsequent news networks) train our brains to polarize. They feed us extreme, inaccurate views of the other side to turn us into righteous black-and-white thinkers. If we nuance anything, it incriminates our party and breaks the loyalty oath we’ve made to it. But in reality, all of these issues are extremely complex and nuanced.

When we merge Jesus with our political party, we lose our ability to nuance…

-…border security AND humane treatment of immigrants, including more just and merciful laws (and laws that work at all) for modern-day immigrants. (See Matthew Soerens for more)

-The realities of centuries of racist laws that have created significant economic disparity between whites and people of color. That it’s fair, data-driven, history-driven, and life-on-life story-driven to acknowledge these disparities as biblically unjust and oppressive, requiring action to bring equity (biblical justice). AND to see how not all government or social handouts are helpful, but can create chronic dependency.

-The unborn babies have rights AND pregnant women have rights. That it’s just (Micah 6:8) to allow for abortions in cases of rape and when the mother’s life is at risk, while not using this argument to make blanket statements that all abortion is okay. To hold in tension that both a woman AND an unborn baby are equally human, and to wrestle with this hard truth rather than reverting back to either/or thinking.

-To advocate for free birth control for all if our true motive is to have as few of abortions as possible, without being called a “Communist.”

-That abortion is the killing of a baby (acknowledging some contested grey area here on when a zygote officially turns into a baby / human). That less than .05% of abortions reported are done because of rape though this is the leading moral argument for making all abortion legal, along with the health of the mother, with 4% being reported for physical health problems to the mother, though it’s not reported what percentage of that 4% would be fatal. But then how abortions increased 11% after Roe vs. Wade was overturned and 8% during Trump’s first term in office, with many Christians I know voting for Trump or always voting Republican because of a ‘pro-life’ stance against abortion laws. But how trends show that abortions have decreased when Democrat presidents are in office:

When we merge Jesus with our political party, we aren’t able to analyze potential reasons for this, like the access to birth control for poor mothers because of the Affordable Care Act or other policies that make it more realistic for a poor mother to bring a baby into the world and raise it. When we have merged Jesus with our party, we call these efforts out as “Communism” and dismiss the data. Because loyalty to our political party is more important than actually seeing abortions reduce, which is what we say we want. I’m not saying this is an open-and-shut case to vote Democrat, but we do have to un-merge Jesus and ourselves from our political party to objectively digest all of this information without blinders on.

-Affirming the dignity of LGBTQ+ people, including legal rights for them as humans AND upholding the Bible’s design of sex and marriage between a man and a woman. But having an understanding that holding non-Christians to commands from the Bible that they’ve never agreed to follow is something we need to consider in our approach.

-That being against exposing young children to what can feel like a multiple choice of sexualities is reasonable and that not allowing adolescents, whose brains aren’t fully developed, to make lifelong sex-change surgery decisions under law is also reasonable.

But none of these nuances are an effective way to build a platform in today’s market. Not as a politician or a pastor or an author or a church or a Christian university. So instead of speaking prophetically from Scripture against the Donkey and against the Elephant, because our loyalty is to the Lamb, we go with the flow so we can avoid rejection and gain power. I’m guilty of this as well.

(Have you ever noticed how intentionally inefficient Jesus was at building a platform? If that was his goal, he was terrible at it.)

I’m not saying I’m right and you’re wrong if you disagree with me on any of these nuances. I’m doing the best I can with Scripture and the Spirit, and I hope and trust you are too. The very nature of nuanced conversations is that we will often end up coming to different conclusions, but we are able to humbly consider the entire context of what’s happening in culture and in Scripture and in our diverse sets of backgrounds and perspectives, rather than the pre-programmed “us against them, all or nothing” answers given to us by our political party.

Humble us, Lamb. Our loyalty is to you and your upside-down kingdom values. We stand with the (spiritually AND physically) oppressed, as you do, even when it offends the Donkey or the Elephant. And we proclaim your good news to the poor, as you commanded and modeled to us.

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
¹⁹     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” -Jesus, Luke 4:18-19

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