Full disclosure Part
1: I am a Christian. I believe Christ came into this world to restore our
relationship with God. I believe he lived and performed miracles, was
crucified, died, and rose again on the third day. I believe he ascended back to
God and will, in some form or fashion return. I also believe the Bible is the
divinely inspired Word of God and that having a restored relationship with God
requires belief in Christ and confession.
Full Disclosure
Part 2: I am a libertarian. I believe that individuals
and collections of
individuals should be free to make decisions regarding their lives without
seeking the approval of myself or a majority of our fellow citizens. I believe
government is necessary to protect the rights of individuals from being
infringed, that it should do so equally and without respect to the various
qualities of those individuals. I also believe that free economic exchange
among individuals has proven to be the most effective mechanism for raising
individuals and societies out of poverty. Therefore, I believe governments
should be very cautious in interfering in these exchanges.
Full Disclosure
Part 3: I believe that my faith should guide how I view politics, the use of
political power (i.e., force), and my fellow citizens. I believe reversing this
perspective, viewing my religion through the lens of my politics, distorts my
understanding of God, my understanding of my responsibilities to my fellow
human beings, and my understanding of the limits of political power.
Having set the
stage with these disclosures, I want to address what I believe has emerged as
the spirit of anti-Christ within the American Church.
I realize this will
be viewed as a very provocative, even inflammatory statement. So let me explain
what I mean by the “spirit of anti-Christ.” This is the perversion of the
relationship between religion and political power. In essence, the effort to
promote Christianity, the kingdom of God, or Christian principles via the power
of the state. To be sure, this is not new in Christianity. Certainly American
Christians are not the only ones to have been deceived by the notion they could
somehow usher in the “Kingdom of God” through the law. It has been a strain
within Christianity that has been alive at least since the conversion of the
Roman emperor Constantine and the subsequent declaration of Christianity as the
official religion of the empire.
So this deception
is not new. And although most of my comments will focus on what is considered
the “religious right” in American politics, it holds true for the much smaller
less organized and less influential “religious left” that has begun to emerge
over the last couple of decades.
As a Christian, I believe my perspective on
any topic of human interaction or spirituality must first begin with the words
and actions of Jesus. Given that His message was not a political message, but
rather a message of restoring our relationship to God, Jesus did not say a
great deal regarding political life. It simply wasn’t the focus of His mission.
However, what He
did say, I believe, should cause all Christians, and especially American
evangelical Christians to pause and reflect. In the Gospel of John, Chapter 18,
Jesus has been taken before Pilate. The Jews have accused him of blasphemy for
claiming to be the Messiah. Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
Christ responds, “My kingdom is not of
this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the
Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
In this short
passage we can obtain profound meaning. Christ’s
kingdom is not of this world. And since it is not of this world, the
worldly instruments and strategies for advancing it are also not of this world.
In fact, relying on them can prove disastrous. The history of Christianity is
filled with the atrocities of using the power of the law to bring about God’s
kingdom. From persecuting pagans, to the medieval practice of selling
indulgences, to the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials, and more,
when Christianity is advanced via the law, great suffering and injustice is the
result.
Yet, this
temptation to seek to use the power of the law to accomplish godly purposes has
been almost
too powerful to resist. From almost the time Emperor Constantine
converted to Christianity there was a pull to use the powers of government to
enforce Christianity upon the populace. It is this idea – the idea we can or
should advance Christianity via the civil law that is the true spirit of
anti-Christ – that has plagued Christianity since Constantine.
Jesus told Pontius
Pilate that if His kingdom was of this world, His followers would fight for
Him, because that’s what the followers of political leaders do. But his kingdom
is not of this world. And he does not expect, nor need, his followers to fight
for him. Jesus told his followers to take up their cross and follow him. What
does this mean? It means we should live as he did, and in so doing, demonstrate
the love, grace, mercy, and power of the One we follow.
But eschewing
political power is easier said than done, especially in a democracy, where,
unlike in Jesus’ time, citizens can impact the policies of the government. As
Christian leaders, especially evangelical leaders, saw changes happening in
society that troubled them, they again reverted to trying to impact society
through the law. Christian leaders began actively endorsing and supporting
certain candidates based on those candidates’ pledges to support “our Judeo-Christian
values” – through new laws, of course. Once again, we would ignore Jesus words
and attempt to demonstrate our fealty to him by fighting for him.
This “fighting” for
Christian values too often led us to sacrifice any real adherence to such
values on the altar of political victory. Christian leaders would endorse
candidates who had only the most marginal relationship to Christian teachings,
who demonstrated behavior quite the opposite of those teachings, or who only
cared about Christian values for the votes they brought. But we were told doing
so would “reclaim America for Christ.”
The American
political landscape in 2016 is a direct result of this anti-Christ approach to
politics. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican nominees project anything
that can be remotely tied to the principles of Jesus. One seeks power at all
costs. The other seeks fame at all costs. Neither seem disposed to seek Christ
at all. And yet we are told that as Christians we must choose one bad option
over the other. Once again, evangelical leaders across the country have
prostrated themselves before political power, denying the spiritual direction
of the one they claim to follow.
Indeed, evangelical
voters have been one of Trump’s major voting blocks. These voters propelled him
past his primary opponents with relative ease. The spirit of anti-Christ has
consumed us. We will willingly sacrifice all that Jesus taught us to “Make
America Great Again.” In fact, now that our hypocrisy has been shown, we have
many trying to make an argument that it is our Christian duty to support Trump;
that only he can stem the tide of secularism in our country; that only he can
restore us to our virtuous and prosperous past. Evangelical Trump apologists
are even trying to use Old Testament examples (because there is no way to use
the words of Jesus) to make the argument that God uses ungodly people for his
purposes. These are delusional words to justify their complete surrender to the
spirit of anti-Christ.
If we Christians
truly desire to have a profound and meaningful impact on society, we will
abandon this course we have been on for the past several decades. We will stop
looking to political power and those who wield it as the path to building the
kingdom of God. Instead, we will return to the words of Jesus. We’ll take up
our cross daily. We will show love, grace, and mercy to our neighbors and our
communities. We will seek justice for all our citizens. We will demonstrate the
power of what we say we believe through our daily interactions with our fellow
human beings. We will spend more time reading our Bibles and less time watching
cable news networks or listening to talk radio. We will learn to understand
that political power cannot accomplish what we seek – it can only destroy it.