'Here we are, right at the end, and the election is a coin toss.' A friend said that to me just a few minutes ago, referring to the razor-thin polling margins between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
A few thousand votes one way or the other in as few as three swing states could produce radically different alternatives for the future of the country.
Since by nature of my work I’ve had to weigh in on a lot of controversial issues over the years, I’ve been cursed at a time or two. Sometimes, I’ve been yelled at with, 'God d--n you!'
When an unbeliever says that, it’s one thing. Christians, though, mean it literally.
A family I know and love was rattled recently to get a note from someone they considered a longtime friend suggesting that the family was going to hell. The cause for the impending brimstone was not that the family denied the faith, embraced some heresy, or adopted some unrepentant life of immorality. At issue was that the family did not support a presidential candidate.
The note-sender put in all the provisions of 'I’m only saying this because I love you,' which works for cruelty the same way 'this doesn’t actually count as sex' works for people who want to sleep with each other without giving up their purity rings. Adding a 'bless your heart' to the 'God d--n you' doesn’t really change it that much.
This sort of situation comes to me at least once a week these days and, in some ways, it’s jarringly new in our history. I can’t think of churches splitting over whether Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson should sit in the Oval Office, for example. I can’t imagine family members refusing to speak to one another over who voted for Jimmy Carter and who for Gerald Ford. That has changed over the past decade or so, and some of us aren’t used to it yet. I pray we never will be.
Much of this has to do with larger divisions in American life - the polarisation of the populace, the tribalisation of the parties, the trivialisation of politics itself. And some of it has to do with changes in the American church.
A market-driven religion seeks to appeal to 'felt needs' and especially to what drives the passions of the people to whom it wants to appeal. When the concern is what happens after death or how to be forgiven of guilt, a market-driven religion emphasizes those things.
And when the market secularises to caring more about how to thrive in the workforce or how to spice up a marriage, a market-driven religion will reflect that. When the market further secularises to the point that what people want is 'red meat' about why their political or ethnic or racial 'enemies' are bad, a market-driven religion can do that too. And it has.
That’s why we end up with an American religion in which people can gladly partner with prosperity gospel teachers who would be thrown out of a Billy Sunday crusade, not to mention the Council of Nicaea. These same people simultaneously denounce as maybe-not-even-regenerate those who are orthodox on every article of the faith but who won’t violate their consciences on supporting political causes or candidates they believe to be wrong.
In a politicised, secularised American Christianity, some seem to think that the apostle’s admonition to make your calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10) has to do with posting the right pop-political opinions on social media.
We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy. Trolling your neighbors on social media for their politics may cost you some self-respect, but you can budget for that.
On the other hand, bearing witness to Christ and persuading your neighbours to give their lives to Him requires something of you. Modelling Christ in word and life for your Haitian immigrant neighbours fleeing violence and poverty will require you to interrupt your life and comfort. Reposting memes falsely accusing them of eating household pets - because somebody’s cousin’s friend from high school said they did - takes only a few seconds.
While this might feel new to many of us, we should recognise that it’s rooted in something very old: an Americanised version of one of the earliest heresies in the church.
Much of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, addresses a dispute about what it means to follow Christ and to be united to Him in faith. Those the apostles pronounced to be false teachers suggested that the Gentiles seeking to follow Christ must first become Jews, with the marks of circumcision and the observance of diets and days. Concerning the teachers who insisted on circumcision for these Gentiles, Paul wrote to the Galatians, 'To them we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you' (2:5).
For the apostle, those who added to the gospel were not thereby practicing addition but subtraction. A gospel of 'Christ and' is another gospel altogether (1:6). Paul speaks of those who wish to add additional entrance requirements to the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected as 'anathema,' as those who should be cursed (vv. 8–9). If one is united to Christ, the old categories are broken down, and people who ordinarily wouldn’t be united together -Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, zealot and tax collector - find themselves in this mystery where the only defining category is Christ and Christ alone (Colossians 3:11).
The gospel, of course, works itself out in life - both in terms of how we live our lives personally and how we live our lives together, socially, culturally, and politically.
People can be committed, though, to the same goals of justice but differ as to how to get to them. The Bible mandates care for the poor. On some matters, the application is explicit and clear-cut: one should not exploit the pay of one’s labourers, for instance (James 5:1–6). On other matters, believers may disagree on exactly which public policies benefit the poor and what unintended consequences might actually hurt them. Somebody on that will likely be wrong. That’s why we have debate and moral persuasion.
Some Christians believe the pro-life vision of care for the unborn always requires voting for the Republican ticket, no matter what. Others believe the pro-life vision is harmed long-term by tying it to sexual anarchy, misogyny, contempt for the vulnerable, and mob violence. Some believe their consciences require them to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree, even on major issues, but who will respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. Others don’t believe they can vote for either candidate in good conscience.
As you know, I have very strong views on the presidential election. I have and will continue to make those views known. To do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience, and my own sense of what it means to love my country. Some people disagree with me - even up to half the country. I do not believe those viewpoints are morally or rationally equal, of course, or I wouldn’t hold the views I do.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that those who disagree with me are, by definition, not Christians. To do so would be to add to the requirement of faith in Christ a commitment to see the political and cultural stakes of the moment the way I do. That would be veering close to the Galatian heresy. And that, the Bible says, really does endanger our souls.
We have the obligation to speak out when support for any partisan movement or personality is conflated with Christianity itself. It’s especially odd when those who defend slaveholding or white supremacist Christians of the past as 'men of their time' or as good Christians with 'blind spots' are nonetheless willing to say that only those who vote the way they do can be genuine Christians.
More serious than all of the issues combined - more serious even than the future of the American Republic itself - is the conflation of the gospel with a human personality or power. When the church yawns at Trinitarian heresy or scoffs at what Jesus defines as the fruit of the Spirit but unites around a partisan identity, we are heading toward something closer to the imperial cult against which the risen Christ warned the first-century churches—congregations persecuted by that cult for refusing to say, 'Caesar is Lord.'
Decisions one makes on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But if we confuse one day for the other, we’ve lost more than an election. It’s bad enough when we say to our political opponents, metaphorically, 'Go to hell.' It’s even worse when we think that’s the gospel.
My friend David Prince, with whom I co-taught preaching for many years, texted me a viral video I would not have expected to find profound.
The video is from the creators of South Park, which is about as far from Biblical Christianity as anything in mainstream popular culture. Former vice president Al Gore once named the creators 'funny nihilists.' In this video, though, the nihilism gave way to wise insight on storytelling.
The creators noted that too many films and movies put a sequence of story lines together as 'and then this happened.' But the parts of the story that are just as important, they said, were the ones hinging on 'therefore' and 'but.' The story is driven along by the continuity and coherence and also by the interruptions and crises.
The story of your life
If you think about the story of your own life, it’s not just one thing followed by another, but things that hold together by what came before and after, those sudden unexpected moments that changed everything.
Those who teach and preach (and even those who read) the Bible should see that too. The storyline of Scripture is not a series of 'this and then this and then this,' but a series of 'therefore' and 'but' moments that center the unexpected ways God brings all that about in Christ. The story is alive, and the story is true.
I didn’t expect the South Park guys to put that so succinctly, but they understand storytelling. Storytelling in the abstract is not enough on its own to help us see the kingdom of God - but those of us who love the kingdom of God should pay attention to the story it’s telling, and how we should tell it too.
'I don’t know how to say, "I’m lonely," without sounding like I’m saying, "I’m a loser,"' a middle-aged man said to me not long ago. 'And I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m an ungrateful Christian.'
After all, this man said, he’s at church every week—not just there, but active. His life is a blur of activities. But he feels alone. In that, at least, he’s not alone.
Repeatedly, almost all of the data show us the same thing: that the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' experts warned about is real. We all know it’s bad, and we sometimes have a vague sense of why it’s happening. The answers that some come up with are often too big to actually affect any individual person’s life. Smartphones aren’t going away. We aren’t all moving back to our hometowns. We see a kind of resigned powerlessness to change society’s lonely condition. So why can’t the church fix this?
Robert Putnam: Bowling Alone
The answer lies partly in a book published a near quarter-century ago: political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Earlier this summer, The New York Timesinterviewed Putnam, asking him whether, since he saw the loneliness crisis coming, he saw any hope of it ending.
Putnam reiterated that the answer is what he calls 'social capital,' those networks of relationships needed to keep people together. Social capital comes in two forms, Putnam insists, and both are necessary. Bonding social capital is made up of the ties that link people to other people like themselves. Bridging social capital consists of the ties that link people to those unlike themselves.
The first time I was on set with a television talk-show host who, like me, grew up Southern Baptist, he turned to me before we went on the air and said, 'Pop quiz: What should always be the first song in a hymnal?' I immediately responded with the right answer ('Holy, Holy, Holy'), and we high-fived. No one else on that set knew what we were talking about. The secularist in the producer’s chair might have thought, 'What’s "Holy, Holy, Holy"?' The churchgoing evangelical behind the camera might well have thought, 'What’s a hymnal?'
That little detail of shared tribal memory, though, represented more than trivia. It was a way of recognizing one another—the same sort of church background, from the same sort of time period, the same sort of shared experience. We knew in that moment that, even if no one else in New York City knew the names of Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, we did, and, even if no one in that television network building could say what words would follow 'I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag,' we would. All of us experience equivalent moments of bonding social capital.
Putnam makes it clear that one form of social capital is not 'good' and the other 'bad.' When you’re sick and need to be taken care of, usually that comes from relationships made with bonding capital. That’s good, but—when taken too far—really dangerous. Putnam notes that the Ku Klux Klan is 'pure social capital' of the bonding sort. Bridging capital, Putnam argues, is much harder, but both are needed for a person or a society to escape isolation.
I subscribe to the YouTube channel of the poet Malcolm Guite. Whenever one of his videos—usually him talking in his study, pipe in one hand and a book in the other—pops up, I save it to watch at night when I have time. A couple of weeks ago, though, his video prompted me to stop right there and watch immediately.
That’s because Guite’s setting was one of my favorite places on the planet, a place where I once felt a sense of overwhelming awe at the creative work of God. He was in the Lauterbrunnen Valley of Switzerland.
Guite pointed out that those of us who found ourselves at some point or other moved by this place are hardly alone. J. R. R. Tolkien—walking through there as a 19-year-old—later modeled Rivendell, the mythical spot of respite and safety in the Lord of the Rings books, after that very setting.
After the video, I picked up my copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to read the section set there, the one that Guite read aloud from a bench at the bottom of the Lauterbrunnen waterfall. I noticed how many highlights I’ve made in that part of the book over the years, even though I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did so. One especially caught my eye.
Speaking of Bilbo Baggins’s journeys, Tolkien wrote: "When he had left Hobbiton he had wandered off aimlessly, along the Road or in the country on either side; but somehow he had steered all the time towards Rivendell."
I wonder if you’ve found that to be true in your life. I have in mine. Knowing that we are, as Scripture tells us, pilgrims in this time-between-the-times, we sometimes expect that we should be marching forward to Zion with a detailed map, knowing exactly what route we are taking. We are surprised, then, when the roads veer off in ways we did not expect. Sometimes, we might even feel lost, and so lost that nobody will even know how to find us.
Only later do we realize that we were—usually completely beyond our own noticing—steering the whole time toward the truer and greater Rivendell. That’s because we are pilgrims, yes, but also sheep. We think we are steering when, often, we are being steered, toward green pastures and still waters.
Maybe that’s where you are right now—what seems to be the valley of the shadow of death. Look behind you, though. Maybe what’s been chasing you has been goodness and mercy, the whole way.
When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance.
Lots of those contrasts were fair game - that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though - Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.
The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.
Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, 'J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.'
The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, 'I was only joking!' (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, 'Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.'
If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, 'I can see Russia from my house.' Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.
The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.
In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the 'Workers of the world, unite!' sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media 'to spread false rumours and conspiracy theories' so as to 'turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.'
Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as 'civil death,' meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, 'Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.'
This does not just have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors - especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that 'He’s a Marxist' or 'He’s a liberal' are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth - so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.
On the geo-political level, the metaphor of 'civil death' is appropriate - even when it doesn’t work - because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: 'He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' (John 8:44).
Could a US presidential voting choice send you to hell?
Since by nature of my work I’ve had to weigh in on a lot of controversial issues over the years, I’ve been cursed at a time or two. Sometimes, I’ve been yelled at with, 'God d--n you!'
When an unbeliever says that, it’s one thing. Christians, though, mean it literally.
A family I know and love was rattled recently to get a note from someone they considered a longtime friend suggesting that the family was going to hell. The cause for the impending brimstone was not that the family denied the faith, embraced some heresy, or adopted some unrepentant life of immorality. At issue was that the family did not support a presidential candidate.
The note-sender put in all the provisions of 'I’m only saying this because I love you,' which works for cruelty the same way 'this doesn’t actually count as sex' works for people who want to sleep with each other without giving up their purity rings. Adding a 'bless your heart' to the 'God d--n you' doesn’t really change it that much.
This sort of situation comes to me at least once a week these days and, in some ways, it’s jarringly new in our history. I can’t think of churches splitting over whether Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson should sit in the Oval Office, for example. I can’t imagine family members refusing to speak to one another over who voted for Jimmy Carter and who for Gerald Ford. That has changed over the past decade or so, and some of us aren’t used to it yet. I pray we never will be.
Much of this has to do with larger divisions in American life - the polarisation of the populace, the tribalisation of the parties, the trivialisation of politics itself. And some of it has to do with changes in the American church.
A market-driven religion seeks to appeal to 'felt needs' and especially to what drives the passions of the people to whom it wants to appeal. When the concern is what happens after death or how to be forgiven of guilt, a market-driven religion emphasizes those things.
And when the market secularises to caring more about how to thrive in the workforce or how to spice up a marriage, a market-driven religion will reflect that. When the market further secularises to the point that what people want is 'red meat' about why their political or ethnic or racial 'enemies' are bad, a market-driven religion can do that too. And it has.
That’s why we end up with an American religion in which people can gladly partner with prosperity gospel teachers who would be thrown out of a Billy Sunday crusade, not to mention the Council of Nicaea. These same people simultaneously denounce as maybe-not-even-regenerate those who are orthodox on every article of the faith but who won’t violate their consciences on supporting political causes or candidates they believe to be wrong.
In a politicised, secularised American Christianity, some seem to think that the apostle’s admonition to make your calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10) has to do with posting the right pop-political opinions on social media.
We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy. Trolling your neighbors on social media for their politics may cost you some self-respect, but you can budget for that.
On the other hand, bearing witness to Christ and persuading your neighbours to give their lives to Him requires something of you. Modelling Christ in word and life for your Haitian immigrant neighbours fleeing violence and poverty will require you to interrupt your life and comfort. Reposting memes falsely accusing them of eating household pets - because somebody’s cousin’s friend from high school said they did - takes only a few seconds.
While this might feel new to many of us, we should recognise that it’s rooted in something very old: an Americanised version of one of the earliest heresies in the church.
Much of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, addresses a dispute about what it means to follow Christ and to be united to Him in faith. Those the apostles pronounced to be false teachers suggested that the Gentiles seeking to follow Christ must first become Jews, with the marks of circumcision and the observance of diets and days. Concerning the teachers who insisted on circumcision for these Gentiles, Paul wrote to the Galatians, 'To them we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you' (2:5).
For the apostle, those who added to the gospel were not thereby practicing addition but subtraction. A gospel of 'Christ and' is another gospel altogether (1:6). Paul speaks of those who wish to add additional entrance requirements to the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected as 'anathema,' as those who should be cursed (vv. 8–9). If one is united to Christ, the old categories are broken down, and people who ordinarily wouldn’t be united together -Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, zealot and tax collector - find themselves in this mystery where the only defining category is Christ and Christ alone (Colossians 3:11).
The gospel, of course, works itself out in life - both in terms of how we live our lives personally and how we live our lives together, socially, culturally, and politically.
People can be committed, though, to the same goals of justice but differ as to how to get to them. The Bible mandates care for the poor. On some matters, the application is explicit and clear-cut: one should not exploit the pay of one’s labourers, for instance (James 5:1–6). On other matters, believers may disagree on exactly which public policies benefit the poor and what unintended consequences might actually hurt them. Somebody on that will likely be wrong. That’s why we have debate and moral persuasion.
Some Christians believe the pro-life vision of care for the unborn always requires voting for the Republican ticket, no matter what. Others believe the pro-life vision is harmed long-term by tying it to sexual anarchy, misogyny, contempt for the vulnerable, and mob violence. Some believe their consciences require them to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree, even on major issues, but who will respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. Others don’t believe they can vote for either candidate in good conscience.
As you know, I have very strong views on the presidential election. I have and will continue to make those views known. To do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience, and my own sense of what it means to love my country. Some people disagree with me - even up to half the country. I do not believe those viewpoints are morally or rationally equal, of course, or I wouldn’t hold the views I do.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I think that those who disagree with me are, by definition, not Christians. To do so would be to add to the requirement of faith in Christ a commitment to see the political and cultural stakes of the moment the way I do. That would be veering close to the Galatian heresy. And that, the Bible says, really does endanger our souls.
We have the obligation to speak out when support for any partisan movement or personality is conflated with Christianity itself. It’s especially odd when those who defend slaveholding or white supremacist Christians of the past as 'men of their time' or as good Christians with 'blind spots' are nonetheless willing to say that only those who vote the way they do can be genuine Christians.
More serious than all of the issues combined - more serious even than the future of the American Republic itself - is the conflation of the gospel with a human personality or power. When the church yawns at Trinitarian heresy or scoffs at what Jesus defines as the fruit of the Spirit but unites around a partisan identity, we are heading toward something closer to the imperial cult against which the risen Christ warned the first-century churches—congregations persecuted by that cult for refusing to say, 'Caesar is Lord.'
Decisions one makes on Election Day have implications for Judgment Day. But if we confuse one day for the other, we’ve lost more than an election. It’s bad enough when we say to our political opponents, metaphorically, 'Go to hell.' It’s even worse when we think that’s the gospel.