The impact of partisan politics on my evangelical community has been extremely painful to me. How did we get here?
This year promises to be a momentous one for U.S. politics. In recent decades, both major parties have cried wolf about the next election being the most consequential ever. 1860, anyone? While I don’t think the nation will split apart with half a million people dying as happened with Lincoln becoming president, 2024 does portend huge consequences, regardless of the outcome.
I dread the cacophony of campaign messaging. I dread the countless neophyte civics expert wannabees pontificating on arcane constitutional theory. I dread the tensions between loved ones. I feel exhausted already anticipating the demoralizing political ads. And I am deeply concerned for the wellbeing of the church in the U.S. through all this.
We live in a democracy. We are self-governing, meaning we choose our own masters – or better said, we are our own masters. Voting is as sacred a duty as our civic world offers.
But how does all this jive with a life of faith, a life built on eternal values that far transcend election cycles? How is our sacred faith to intersect with our coarse governance?
Much talk is made about whether faith has a role in politics. How does faith influence how we vote? How is faith to influence how we govern? It should be a healthy and robust discussion.
Contrary to some opinion-holders, faith is far from a private matter. First, everyone has a belief system, even atheists and people who don’t give faith a thought. Second, whatever faith we have affects everything we are and do, and by extension, everything and everyone we encounter. We are people of faith, whether we realize it or not. So, our faith, or faiths, will have immense impact on our collective engagements, including and not least our politics.
Of even greater concern to me, as important as all I’ve said thus far, is what impact our politics has on our faith. I’m not talking about whether or how government should affect religious practices, though that is a valid discussion. I’m talking about how our practice of politics affects our life of faith, both individually and communally. And that, my friends, is the 2024 outcome that concerns me the most.
I remember as a teenager listening to a handful of adults having a political discussion in the church hallway. It was a heated conversation, with emotions just on the edge, between a company manager/diehard Republican and a couple of Democratic-voting union guys going at it with strong words. My father, the pastor, wasn’t around but if he had been he would have shut that conversation down – or at least insisted that they move off the church property if they wanted to continue.
Dad didn’t object to political conversations as long as they remained civil, but partisan politics had no place on church property, at least not in that forum. He believed that church buildings are a sanctuary devoted to spiritual matters, a safe place for all seekers, a space where the Holy overshadows all else. Yet something else comes into play when political debate enters these sacred halls, something more than just sacred space being profaned. Partisan arguments inevitably interfere with sacred communal life – they destroy community.
Political conversations have been rancorous since the founding of our nation – and long before. Good, healthy debate is what contributes to a healthy democracy. But that is just it – the operative word here is “healthy.” And when it is not healthy, it can destroy families and rend nations. Again, witness the 1860s. So, I have appreciated churches where restrictions are put on partisan discussions. Conversations about issues of our time, especially how they interface with our faith, are critical, but if people of opposing parties come to feel unwelcome in our sacred spaces, then the gospel message is eclipsed.
Particularly in recent years, it has become difficult to distinguish between political parties and religious movements to the point that one religious movement, American evangelicalism (and the reference is to white evangelicalism in the U.S.), has had the meaning of its name hijacked. Ryan Burge recently documented this troubling trend. Evangelicalism is no longer understood as Christian, but increasingly politically non-Christian. See The Rise of the Non-Christian Evangelical – by Ryan Burge (graphsaboutreligion.com).
To a growing number of people in the U.S., evangelical is more of a political term than it is a religious term. “Evangelical” has always had an amorphous feeling, encompassing a wide range of church teachings and practices. As a religious movement in the U.S., it has been around at least since the First Great Awakening in the early 1700s. In the mid-twentieth century, it came to identify people of orthodox (small “O” Christianity) who were not comfortable with the divisive “Fundamentalist” camp on one hand and the more liberal mainline Protestant churches on the other. (Due to different historical influences, “evangelical” remains identified with mainline Protestantism in Europe.)
My favorite definition of evangelicalism is David Bebbington’s, known as the Bebbington quadrilateral, where he identifies four qualities characteristic of evangelicals:
- Biblicism – regarding the authority of the Bible as the written word of God.
- Crucicentrism – a focus on the saving work of Christ on the cross.
- Conversionism – the belief that human beings are to be brought to faith in Jesus Christ.
- Activism – Christians are to be about advancing the work of Christ in the world.
There has been much discussion on Bebbington’s definition, but to cut all that short for the moment, I find it helpfully brief for most conversations. And I think that, while Bebbington was describing the British church scene particularly, his definition does encompass the broad spectrum of people known as evangelicals around the world. As a self-identified Pentecostal, a movement I see as distinct in some ways from evangelicalism, I feel spiritually at home in this definition.
But something has gone woefully wrong in modern white evangelicalism, specifically as found in the U.S., and that is an increasing identification with political partisanship. While the current state of national politics is derailing the evangelical train, it can be argued that the trend started decades ago with the Moral Majority.
In the 1970s, voices on all sides of political discussions could still be heard within the evangelical movement, and to an extent those divergent voices remain, albeit much less visible. But over time there has been a growing sense that only one voice in evangelicalism is correct: the fourth component of evangelicalism equals political activism on the political right.
Granted, certain justice concerns helped fuel this trend. I speak specifically of the concern for unborn children. But unfortunately, racial overtones from evangelical silence in the Civil Rights movement, and white (mostly evangelical) flight, left an indelible stain on evangelical activism.
It is often argued that evangelicals are not alone in being captured by a political party. Fingers are pointed at mainline Protestants and traditional Black churches. While these churches may be as diverse in their levels of political engagement and leanings as evangelicals, the argument has plausibility.
However, I doubt Ryan Burge could come up with similar conclusions if he were to present a comparable study on mainline Protestants. Certainly, people who are non-Christian in mindset would be welcomed in many mainline churches I know. However, the idea of Hindus, for example, being identified as part of some political mainline Protestant movement is not something I’ve seen.
A different question arises with the Black church in the U.S. Historically, the church became the center, the only option, for free exchange of ideas and social engagement within the Black community. This was true not only before Emancipation, but throughout the Jim Crow era. It was the Black church that nurtured the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century as the community’s heart and soul. Even today, Black churches remain a primary unifying institution in the Black community. The same cannot be said for white congregations, whatever their theological orientation. They are not the heart and soul of the white demographic in our nation.
More specifically, the finger-pointing has to do with the politicization of the pulpit. And here I have no studies to present. I only know from anecdotal experience that the Black churches with which I am familiar do invite civic leaders to speak in their pulpits on certain occasions, as do many evangelical churches, but if politicians come courting voters in those Black churches, they are given a much lower platform from which to speak – and with limitations common across the political spectrum.
Even so, the Black church and the white evangelical church are in two different situations. We can discuss more elsewhere about the unique role of faith in the Black community, but the question remains whether the white evangelical church wants to limit its activism to being an arm of the GOP. And if so, what does that do to its ability to perform what it has seen as its primary form of activism – proclaiming the good news of salvation? After all, if the third component of evangelicalism is conversionism, then the church cannot neglect its priority of converting the lost, be they donkeys or elephants or any other political animal.
Will the way we do politics in 2024 affect the way we do faith? The way we have been doing politics in recent years has had a great – and I submit – negative impact on our faith-doing. It is not a new problem. It is a growing problem reaching critical stage.
We’ll be revisiting this topic of politics and faith from time to time, especially over the next few months. To keep up, subscribe here. For background information, check out howardkenyon.com/resources/.