"As pastors are increasingly called upon to address political issues, the question arises: how can they do so in a way that is biblically responsible?" - Providence
"Half of U.S. Protestant churchgoers (50%) say they’d prefer to attend a church where people share their political views, and 55% believe that to be the case at their congregation already....Around 1 in 5 (19%) now strongly agree they prefer to attend a church where people share their political views, up from 12% in 2017." - Lifeway
"Nearly two years into his presidency, Joe Biden’s job rating stands at 38% – identical to Donald Trump’s approval rating at a similar point in his presidency, but lower than those of some other recent presidents in the run-up to their first midterm election." - Pew
"I would love to see Christians pontificating much less about complex matters they don’t understand....But even if we did all that (and we should), we would not be free from politics. There is no category called 'politics' that can be safely quarantined from the category we call 'religion.'" - Kevin DeYoung
"The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself." - The Atlantic
"... the most troubling element in [contemporary American politics] lies beyond our mere partisan differences. It involves a distinctive politics of passion that could, if left unbridled, lead to the ruin of our experiment in republican self-government." - Law & Liberty
(Posted in July of 2020)
My thoughts below predate COVID-19, masks, hydroxychloroquine, or churches defying public health emergency orders. Last fall, different controversies were exposing problems in how believers evaluate conflicting claims and decide what to believe.
But those problems are still with us, and the current raft of controversies is exposing them even more painfully.
Many Christians who claim to revere the Bible lack biblical habits for evaluating truth claims and consequently lack skill in judging the ethics of situations in a biblical way. It seems almost ubiquitous now—the habit of putting the political/culture-war lenses on first, and embracing or rejecting claims based solely on source classification (friend or foe). The result is that ideas are accepted uncritically if they’re perceived to be from “our people” and rejected reflexively if they’re seen as from “the other side.”
What’s missing is weighing ideas and claims on their own merits—on things like evidence and sound reasoning. Increasingly, what’s completely missing is any nonpolitical consideration of what Scripture teaches and what sound application requires of us.
More than ever, believers need to meditate on a genuinely Christian view of truth and on a genuinely Christian approach to evaluating truth claims. At least five principles are are fundamental that effort.
"The specific issues are many, some comparatively new (critical race theory, former President Donald Trump), some all too familiar (racism and race relations beyond the one theory, roles of women, sexual ethics, Christian nationalism, church handling of abuse), all with a political edge." - C.Today
