This is a follow-up post to: “Galatians On Adding Politics to the Gospel”
1. When we attach Jesus to our political party, it always lessens the impact of the gospel. Whether you mean to or not, you’re attaching all the baggage of your political party on to Jesus in the eyes of a watching world. As soon as you say “Jesus + Republican” or “Jesus + Democrat”, that’s exactly what non-Christians see and it’s what they understand the gospel to be. If you are a Republican Christian trying to share the gospel with someone who happens to be a Democrat, or vice versa, you will have to sway them to your political party before you can ever turn them to Jesus. Or if you think you can lead them to Jesus and then their “heart will soften” and they will see the truth of their political errors, you have the same problem, just inverted. Jesus & your political party are still a package deal. And if you think that the two are one in the same, we have a major, major problem on our hands that I hope these posts help with. The public witness of the church has been weakened tremendously, along with scores of people leaving the church, because of Christianity and political parties being announced as one in the same. While we need to call out the overt forms of this, we also need to pay attention to the subtle forms and how we contribute to them.
(Does this mean our faith in Christ shouldn’t influence our perspective on political issues or influence how we vote? Of course it will! And it should. More on that in #6 and in my forthcoming follow-up post When “I Follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” Falls Short.)
2. No matter how many of your political party’s policies you think match Jesus, many don’t. We are all bias in this area and I won’t spell out all the policies from both parties that I don’t think line up with the teachings of Jesus here. I know I have my own biases and as soon as I lay out specifics, I will lose anyone who disagrees and/or who has attached Jesus to their political party. But my point is, I see way too many Christians acting like Jesus would agree with EVERYTHING their party says, which is simply false. It conforms Jesus into our image, instead of us being conformed into his.
3. All of the personal / moral baggage of your political leaders gets connected to Jesus. When you attached a political leader to the mission of Jesus as one-in-the-same, all of the sin, corruption, and harm that person has inflicted on others in their personal and political life now becomes associated with Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need the help of any of your favorite political leaders or media talking heads to amplify his name. He is doing just fine on his own, and his way has never been the way of power. I’m also tired of political leaders using Jesus as the worm on their political hook to try to get Christians’ votes. We should know better.
4. Jesus gets attached to the worldly way of power when we attach him to our political party, something he taught explicitly against. Jesus’ way is the way of the upside down kingdom where the first is last and the last are first. Where the master becomes the servant, where leaders wash feet, and where the outsider and the oppressed are brought to the table in love and community. His human disciples (just like us!) resisted this. They wanted him to pursue worldly power. How else would he free them as their Messiah? He needed to be a military and political leader with power and they were consistently pushing him toward this and/or they were jostling for position to gain power and notoriety within his kingdom. We find one of his responses in Matthew 20:25-28 (“Gentiles” here is a reference to non-believers / the world):
25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Yet Christians today are jostling for power, desiring to rule and lord over others, and trying to gain notoriety within the political landscape. So much of this is rooted in our desire to “win” and belittle the other side like a heated football rivalry, rather than loving and seeking to understand those who are different than us. (I’m not saying Christians shouldn’t run for office, but as soon as you do, you’ve entered a corrupt system that awards power for its own sake–like Lord of the Rings and the ring of power. A Christian politician’s disposition should be strikingly different than the prideful arrogance and belittling that we see in modern debates and campaigns, but sadly there are fewer and fewer Frodos out there.)
5. Jesus had a different way of being in the world. In Jesus’ day, the political parties were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. It was also Caesar and the Romans, and his puppet king Herod. You never see Jesus aligning himself with any of these broken, worldly, power-driven political groups. He never endorsed any of them or did any campaign speeches for them. His kingdom and his type of power were entirely different than theirs.
6. When you attach Jesus to your political party, you can’t talk about the whole Bible. I’m going to do a whole follow-up post on this one topic next, as I want to make sure I’m clear on what I’m saying and not saying in these past two posts. But when you attach Jesus to your political party, you have now eliminated from conversation anything the Bible says about the policies that the other side holds. The two-party system is like two separate bags of groceries. One of the bags has milk, peanut butter, lettuce, and chips in it. The other bag has eggs, butter, carrots, and salad dressing.
We write “Republican” on one and “Democrat” on the other and force everyone to pick one. What an illogical system. But what’s worse is when Christians can’t see there are items in each grocery bag that are close to the heart of Jesus and Scripture. Instead of addressing these issues with biblical clarity, we fall back into what the talking heads on our political news channel tell us we can and can’t say. The last thing we could ever do is go against our political party or leader because we’d be a traitor to our cause, even when Scripture clearly says otherwise. We end up reading Scripture through the lens of our political party, rather than reading our political parties through the lens of Scripture. We all have biases, myself included, and we need to be humble about those. But if you disagree with this point and truly believe that 100% of your grocery bag is endorsed by Jesus, I pray that the Holy Spirit softens your heart to the idol of politics in your life and that he opens your eyes to the damage that view is doing to the gospel and your view of Scripture as God’s word.
Stay tuned for my next article in this series: When “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” falls short.
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Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
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- Ep. 107: Mark & Beth Denison on Betrayal Trauma - November 4, 2024
- When “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” falls short - October 31, 2024
- Why We Can’t Merge Jesus With Our Political Party - October 24, 2024
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