Faith and Politics: Challenging the Lie That Christians Should Stay Silent

Hey everyone, welcome to That's a Good Question, a podcast of Peace Church and a part of Resound Media. You can find more great content for the Christian life and church leaders at resoundmedia.cc. That's a Good Question is a place where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language.

I'm Jon. I get to serve as a pastor as well as a part of this show. You can always submit questions to peacechurch.cc/questions. Today, we're gonna talk about a topic that has a lot to do with a class that we recently taught called Christianity and Politics.

I wanna invite you, if you wanna learn more about that topic, you can go to resoundmedia.cc and find that class, five sessions on there. Some great resources to learn more about that topic. But today, I'm here with Pastor Mitch.

Yeah, this is gonna be a great episode. If you like this episode, I highly recommend going to see and check out all five of those teachings. They're amazing. Today, we are in our last segment of calling out cultural lies. And today, we're going to be talking about Christianity in politics.

And so should Christians— Nothing controversial. Yeah, nothing there. We're going to say, yeah, everyone's going to be happy by the end of this.

Yeah.

Solve world hunger and world peace. Perfect. But the lie that we're talking about today is Christians shouldn't speak into politics. So, John, just a quick definition, what is politics?

Yeah.

So I think that's probably the, that's the best place to start with this conversation because people hear politics and they immediately are like, I wonder how many people have already said, I'm not listening to this episode because they're talking about politics.

Yeah. But people hear politics and they think, well, that's a dirty thing, that's a bad thing, that's terrible, Christians shouldn't play any part in that. But we've gotta ask the question, yeah, what is politics? So if we go back to the original Greek words at the root of the word politics, you got polis in Greek is city, polites is citizen, politika is simply the affairs of the city. So when you think about the actual root of what politics means, it's just the affairs of a group of people trying to live together, trying to get stuff done together, trying to make decisions. That's all politics really is, is the affairs of a group of people. And so my question then is how can Christians not be involved in the affairs of their community?

Yeah, it's making the city great again.

There you go, something like that. So on Sunday, you had a great illustration, you were preaching on this, you had a great illustration, could you share that? I feel like that was super helpful for me personally. Yeah, so this was a learning experience for me realizing just how much we're involved in this thing called politics. Realizing that when it comes down to even the most basic thing of

ordering a pizza with a group of friends, you are involved in politics. You have to decide what's going to go on the pizza. Then you have to decide, you know, how are we going to make that decision?

Okay. Is it only those who help pay for the pizza? Those are the ones who get to be part of the decision.

Is it only those who have the loudest voices? You know, for example, in my house, my four kids have the loudest voices. They don't pay anything for the pizza. I pay for the pizza, but they're the ones who are going to whine and complain the most if I don't get things that they like. So they're the ones who actually get to decide.

So then there's, there's some lobbying and bartering amongst them. One is like, if we all choose pepperoni this time, we can all choose sausage next time. Or there's some deal making, like if you vote with me on pepperoni, then I'll vote with you on sausage next time we do it.

Or there's even some under the table kind of bartering of I'll do you some favors, I'll do your chores. Or if you vote with me on pepperoni, then you can play with my Batman toy after supper. Every time that a group of people gets together and tries to decide something, there is this thing called politics.

Yeah, absolutely. It's an inevitable part of your life, and if you're trying to withdraw from politics altogether, the consistent thing is you can't have a decision on anything.

You can't be a part of any sort of decision-making process in any part of your life, which would be? Yeah, well, what it means is you've separated from community. If you're not gonna participate in politics, which is the affairs of a group of people, that means that you are living in isolation.

You've become a hermit.

Yeah, I mean, I even think of like husband and wife as you're making a plan to do a road trip. Like, you know, there's so many different ways of when do we stop? Can we stop for a bathroom break? And, you know, if you're not gonna be involved in politics of that, you're gonna have a very unhappy marriage. Well, what you realize is that you are engaging in politics, you just don't know it, you don't call it that. When you're negotiating with your spouse about how we're gonna do this, and when we're, you know, it's, you bring up an interesting example. When my wife and I travel, it's, you know, I wanna get on the road and I wanna go as far as we possibly can with no stops, but she wants to stop to get coffee, to get lunch, to go shopping. Are we going to sit down for lunch or just do a drive-thru?

Yeah.

That's the intention every time, right? And just like, you know, we make jokes about politicians, you know, today, but in my mind, when I'm making those, I'm thinking about how many brownie points I got in my back pocket for, you know, how long can I convince my wife to drive without stopping for coffee?

Absolutely. Why do some people think that Christians shouldn't be involved in politics?

Yeah, I think people think that because politics gets such a bad rap. Unfortunately, we live in a broken world. Human beings are all sinners. The Bible tells us this. And so we do see some very bad examples of human beings trying to work together. Unfortunately, I think we look at those who are our leaders, even in this country, the United States of America. And we see some poor examples. We see some people who are, you know, who are bullies, who are, who say some terrible things on the news, who do some bartering that is maybe corrupt.

We see some scandal stories in the news. You know, we just see some really poor examples. I think that gives it a really bad name. Yeah. The hard thing is you see this on either side of the aisle that it almost seems like no one's immune Yeah, this and so it can seem like this thing as a whole is evil But that's really not the case. You know, there are some pretty good things that can come from from politics, right? Yeah, I think it's like anything else in the human experience. It's it's broken by sin, you know We yeah, it's not the thing itself. That is evil. It's we human beings are corrupted and fallen.

Yeah.

And we can, so we, you know, politics is a thing that can be used for good according to God's purposes or it can be used for bad following our sinful nature.

Yeah.

Kind of like the internet in some sense.

Yeah.

There are immense evil that can come from it, but there are also immense good things that can come from it. And the ideas that have been shared, um, you know, Christians have been able to share over, over borders and over, um, ways that they would never be able to. Um, there are great things that can come from politics too. Yeah, can Christians become too involved in politics?

Absolutely, and there's been plenty of... what's interesting is, you know, in society we're always swinging on a pendulum. I think a generation or two ago the accusation was that evangelical Christians were too involved in politics, and I think today that's how we got to kind of where we are with so many people saying, well, Christians shouldn't have anything to do at all with politics. And so many Christians have accepted that and retreated and said, yep, that's right. Politics is just this hands-off thing that we as Christians, we have nothing to do with.

We do church, we do other stuff, we don't get involved in politics. I think that's been kind of a generational swing. But you can get too involved, you can get to the point where you see politics as the solution to everything. You know, I think in some ways it's a, you know, we as Christians believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that Jesus came to live and die and rise to save us from sin and death, that that is our core message, that our core mission and purpose is to make disciples of Jesus by sharing that gospel with them, by them coming to follow Jesus and grow as His disciples.

You know, so we can get sidetracked and think that actually our mission is not making disciples of Jesus, but our mission is to sort of transform society.

Yeah.

And that would be a mistake, but it would also be, so, but I'll quickly say it'd also be a mistake to think that when you make disciples of Jesus, that that wouldn't transform society.

Correct. Yeah.

So you can, yeah, you can get too, you can have your mind too focused on politics, but again, like we're talking about, you can also sort of retreat from something that we really shouldn't. Yeah, you're talking about the danger of maybe seeing politics as the answer to everything.

Are there parallels right now in our culture between kind of that value system of kind of seeing that as the solution for all of our problems and maybe like the state of Israel when they were choosing a king? Hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, you think back to, back to first and second Samuel, when you've got the prophets and the judges leading, yes, Samuel leading the nation of Israel, but ultimately God is leading the nation of Israel. And then the people say we want a king like all the other nations. Yeah. Yeah. They've said, we want to look like the rest of the world. They've said,

we want to put our hope not in God, but in a man. And unfortunately, some Christians, we can do that. We have a tendency to make idols. And we can make that idol out of a politician. We can think that this or that politician is gonna save the country, is gonna save the world, is gonna save my life, make my life so much better. They do have an impact on the future of our country, of our individual lives, of our communities. But the ultimate hope is always Jesus. That's the ultimate hope. He's our ultimate savior.

He's our ultimate king. Yeah, that's right. And I think that's what went wrong with the Israel in 1 and 2 Samuel. They wanted a human king and God was saying, hey, I'm your king already. It's not that you need a different kind of king, it's that you need to reorient your life around me.

So for Christians, I guess what's the danger of putting all of our eggs in one basket and thinking that a human leader could be good for us. So many, so many we could talk about. Yeah, yeah, I mean, number one, it's idolatry, right? It's a violation of God's command to worship him only as our king, our ultimate hope, our savior.

So, you know, get the problems in the heart, the problems in the spiritual realm. But also, if you wanna just even talk about some of the practical problems with that. There's many. One is that that human leader will always fail you. He's not Jesus. She's not Jesus. They're not going to be perfect. So there's that. There's also just, I think even of how in some ways this is sort of a uniquely American conversation, I think of, or Western conversation, I think of people in other countries like China or other places or even Islamic countries where Christians are under persecution. I don't think that they're so tempted to put their hope in a political figure because they have no voice in the political system. I think it's a uniquely us kind of problem that we would put our hope in that person because the church's mission transcends that. The church's mission is not just for countries where Christians have a political voice. The church's mission happens underground, it happens you know out in the bush, it happens wherever it's been making disciples of Jesus. Now again, disciples of Jesus have a role to play. You know when they have a voice in in the political process then they need to use it, but that's not the totality of our mission. Yeah, so where's that line between putting too much faith in a leader and yet still having some responsibility and being a part of this political system that we're a part of? Yeah, the way I said it in that sermon was that Christians have to have their mind completely focused on our primary calling, which is make disciples of Jesus, but also realize its implications in a political world. So we've already talked about how our world is political, whether we like it or not.

We live in a world, politics is part of it. And so we have to realize that there are implications for how Christians will live. I'm a Christian, and if I'm gonna say, as a disciple of Jesus, I gotta take this book, the Bible, and I've gotta go live it out in the world, I can't say, well, there's a part of this world where I'm just gonna refrain and withdraw. So, yeah, you're trying to run that balance of, I don't want to make a god out of politics or any certain politician. Political change is not the be all, end all.

You know, Christians can flourish in a country or in a situation where they are persecuted, where they have no voice, where they're oppressed. But where we have the opportunity, we don't want to choose that. That's not the goal.

Where we have the voice, we want to take scripture because it's God's blueprint for how human society should work. It's the best thing for human beings. God's laws aren't arbitrary. They're what's best for human beings. Wherever we have a chance to use a voice, we want to take God's word and use it and speak it into that public square. We shouldn't neglect our opportunity to see human flourishing and we shouldn't be voting against or voting for Human suffering when we have the opportunity to do so Yeah, so maybe so as you're asking about the line, you know, it's hard to nail down exactly where that is But maybe some symptoms, you know, if you're looking at yourself, and if you've gone too far one way or the other You know I think a healthy place to be would be that you're you know in you're at least loosely in tune with the news and what's going on in the world around you, and you are going to your knees and praying about it, but you're not laying awake at night crying about it. I mean, there are certain situations where it does lead us to tears

because of the state of our world around us. But I'm saying, if you find yourself each night at such a level of anxiety, after watching the evening news or something, then maybe you have made a God out of politics or the leaders in this world.

On the flip side, if you say, I'm never gonna watch the news, I'm not gonna vote, I'm not gonna even know who's running for office, then you're probably failing to engage in a part of this world as a Christian that you should be.

Yeah, because there's a level of, there's a difference between having such great anxiety over something. I think that's a cause of us not seeing how sovereign God really is. And yet at the same time, it's probably not helpful for us to say, oh, God's sovereign, I don't really need to do anything, I don't really need to participate in any of this. That's probably two not good ends of the spectrum there. Right, somewhere in the middle where you're paying attention, where you care,

you have a heart for your community, your society, and yet you also just have total rest in the control and sovereignty of God and know that, hey, we're called to be faithful, we're called to do what we can, but ultimately it's not in our hands, not in our control.

Yeah, maybe it comes back to a heart posture in approaching it. Maybe there's not a clear line, but if our heart is saying, hey, I'm joyful that I get to participate in this because this is one way I get to act out my Christian ethics and trying to see human flourishing. That's a great thing. But if we're seeing it as this is the way that we're gonna save people or we're gonna see people transformed,

that might be an unhealthy heart posture.

Yeah, yeah. John, this is maybe a tougher question, but is it sinful to vote for a pro-choice candidate?

Yeah. I don't think it's a tough question, but I do want to explain it well as I give the answer.

So when we say pro-choice, just to be clear, we are talking about pro-abortion. Pro-choice is the moniker that they've chosen to kind of – that's how they want to brand their position. What we're talking about is pro-abortion, pro-killing of a unborn child in the womb. And so we as Christians, we believe human life is made in the image of God. We believe that life begins at conception. And so, yeah, we believe that abortion is the ending of a human life. Now, there is forgiveness in the cross of Jesus for those who have participated in abortion.

So if that's you, my encouragement is to turn to Jesus and to not just walk away full of guilt and shape, but to turn to Jesus. So one of the other things I'll say is that when I think of a leader and I think of, you know, one of the things I've said before is when you're evaluating a leader, you're talking about their character, their competence, and their policies. And I would say while in the political sphere, because it's a fallen, broken world, because we're not voting for Jesus, we're not even necessarily voting for Christians. I think actually policies is probably the most important

characteristic to look at. And so, yeah, I would say that being pro-abortion is actually a disqualifying policy to have for a politician. If somebody says that I am for the ending of babies' lives in the womb, then to me, I think that's just, you've disqualified yourself as a leader.

So I would say, yeah, Christians who support a pro-choice, pro-abortion candidate, yeah, I would say you're outside of God's design. That's not, we're not for that.

A follow-up on this, and something that I've seen in the news over the years is that politicians who typically are part of the Catholic Church who are pro-abortion end up becoming, like the church will tell them that they cannot participate in communion. If there was a pro-choice candidate here at our church, would we do something similar? We would. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that would be a church discipline issue. I think that's an important way that the church can stand on its witness. Number one, it's healthy for that individual believer, and that's the first reason we do it, right, is because we love them, we care about them. Our job as elders and pastors is to shepherd them, and so we'd wanna talk to them about the seriousness of what they're doing and challenge them to repent. But also, it's a way for the church to be consistent with its witness.

Yeah, yeah.

That's great. Switching topics, over the years, there have been a lot of politicians who have come out in favor of policies or systems of government like communism or socialism, what are the dangers in in those thoughts and in those the systems of government here in America? That's a great question. So I think one of the things you got to realize that at the root of communism is a philosophy called Marxism. So I think you got to do some study there and think about what you're really getting into when you're getting into that. You're actually, you're not looking at just sort of a surface-level system for how to run or operate a government. You're really talking about a philosophy of values and beliefs and about, you know, moral absolutes and things like that and about how to classify the world oppressed and oppressor, you know, that kind of stuff. So you got to think about the philosophy. That's one thing. But another thing I would say is that we as Christians, I'm a big believer in this, on the one hand we're idealists because we have the Bible and so we believe so firmly in the principles and the ideals that the Bible tells us, but I also think we have to be really practical people and that we have to look at the consequences of ideas. And so if you go into history and you look at countries that have tried to implement communism and you look at how that's gone, you have to reckon with those consequences. And so when you look at regimes like under Mao in China, when you look at like Soviet Russia, when you look at Cambodia under the Khan Rouge, you just, you gotta look at some of the examples, look at how many people die either by being executed by their government or by starvation or poor conditions or whatever it was. You know, this is all research that you could do on your own and just kind of, you know, check out what have been the results in countries that have tried to implement communism. And when you realize the amount of death and suffering that it's created, I think as Christians, we just got to go, well, man, that's bad for the world. Yeah.

So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're saying, well, but it poses such a great idea of equality and things like that, that, you know, if that sounds attractive to you, I get it. You got to understand philosophically what that is, is utopianism. It's saying we can create a perfect society as human beings ourself.

And as Christians, we know that's not true. Society will only be perfect when Jesus comes back. So, yeah, at a philosophical and a practical level, we've got problems. Yeah, because it seems like sharing like communism, like we can all share. We can all just get along. Right. Yeah, that's the thing.

It sounds wonderful. We are fallen, broken human beings.

Yeah.

Yeah. It also, you know, like the idea of those governments when they talk about their heydays, it's during this phase of revolution, and like that seems to be the high point of these systems. But at some point, the revolution has to stop. In fact, in most of those cases, they propagate,

they try to push forward and champion these radicals to overthrow these systems of government or systems of education, and these kind of radical people get in these places. And then when the whole system collapses and they institute communism or whatever, they actually kick those people out and put bureaucrats in there because a system can only handle so much revolution, which I always find so interesting to see those systems that are down with these bureaucrats and down with the institution and all that kind of stuff. And then all of a sudden, as soon as revolution takes over, back with the institution. Totally. I mean that's a rabbit show we could go down a long way. You can't live with perpetual revolution. It doesn't work that way.

Or if you have perpetual revolution, then you're going to constantly be cycling through different regimes and different systems, and that's not good for the people either.

At some point, someone has to grow crops for us to eat. Yeah, yeah, right.

We'll always be burning fields and revolution. Yeah, totally. Well, and even along those lines, many people have tried to say, wow, we don't know if communism works because it's never actually been implemented. Well, what you just said is the counterpoint to that. Well, many people have tried to implement it, and they only got so far through the process, and there's a reason for that. So you could say, well, the perfect communist country never existed. Well, you're right because it didn't work. It can't. Yeah, so I think that's an argument against communism, not for communism.

Yeah. How about in other countries where there might be Christians in communistic countries or socialistic countries. What would you say to those people who are in those types of situations or in those types of political systems? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can certainly be a faithful Christian living under those circumstances. It's going to be a challenging situation to live in. We've talked about some of the reasons why it's a challenging environment for human beings to live in.

But yeah, I mean, you know, there are things that some Christians, you know, might even appreciate about their homeland living under that kind of a system. But then obviously there will be things that they don't appreciate about that. But that's the thing is that Christianity, the church, is not one nation. You know, in the New Testament, God's people, the church, is transnational. It doesn't belong to one nation.

It doesn't belong to one form of government. We're the original trans community, really. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, I don't know what to say to that. Clip that one and put it on social media. I'm ready. I'm ready for the comments. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, and that the church transcends all of those boundaries, make disciples of all nations. And so yeah, there are Christians being faithful and living in those settings and just trying to follow Jesus. And their mission is the same as ours. They probably don't have a political voice and that is what it is.

I think if you were on the other side of this and looking at America, I mean, there are plenty of things that you could criticize about our system that aren't very Christian. There are some pretty greed-filled motives in being a capitalistic society. There are a lot of good things about it, but there are also some things that we'd say, hey, I mean, I think we can be aware enough to say, let's stand on the gospel, and there are things that we can criticize about where we are.

And I think people who are living in communistic regimes would say the same thing, that there are some things that they would stand up if they're standing on the gospel, there's some pretty bad parts. And maybe there are some parts that champion the gospel, just like we would say that there are parts in our culture and our system that champion the gospel.

Yeah, yeah, I wanna be quick to say, yeah, democracy and constitutional representative republic, like the United States of America, we're not perfect. Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.

And I think that's, to me, that's why it is the best form of government is because it's coming from a philosophy that is really, has Christian roots, that it understands total depravity, that we are fallen, broken human beings, and that we're not gonna create a perfect form of government. We're just gonna do the best we can. So we think that this form of government accounts the best for human depravity itself. It's not perfect, it's broken, it's messed up, but it accounts the best for those negatives in human nature and tries to set us up to live well together.

Yeah, I think that's great. John, what would you say about human institutions and where Christians should put their investment or the majority of their investment when it comes to the institutions on earth? Yeah, so when I think of the institutions on earth, I think of the ones that the Bible talks about. I think about the family, the church, and the state.

Yeah.

The state meaning state, national, the government.

The government, yeah.

Yeah. You could add to that the individual, as we think about it from different perspectives. So Abraham Kuyper's spheres of sovereignty are kind of the things that we're talking about. So yeah, I think as Christians, the thing that we should be most invested in, to me, it's kind of a line of, I think, family is closest.

Yeah.

And then church would be next. And then state would be after that. So that's kind of how I think of it, is ranking them in that order. Now all of us, as we've been saying, you have to play a role in each. I think you don't want to negate any of them, but I would rank them in that order. Family, then church, then state.

But if we get those messed up, that can be really dangerous for those ones that should be prioritized, right?

Yeah, yeah. You can look at that so many different ways. As far as how we invest our own time and energy, yeah, if you're putting the state before your family or your church, I think you've got an issue. You've got an issue, actually, if you put the church even before your own family. So you have to choose not only between good and bad options, but between good and better options. So I think each of those can become a problem. To go down the line of the different spheres, another problem is when these spheres try to overlap each other, try to push into each other's territory, that can become a problem. Yeah, yeah, because we're talking about how do we most effectively and how do we faithfully make disciples, right?

Our first calling is to our family, right? If we're not discipling our children, we've done something terribly wrong there. Like that's our first calling and that's the level that's most important, right? We want to see our children love Jesus, worship Jesus.

And that second one is the church. And if we even just not just how much time we're investing into it, but I think the level of importance we give it. If we don't think that discipling or how we change the world is impacted by how we change, or how we disciple our children, or how we act as a church, I think we're gonna see some really bad consequences in society.

Yeah, bringing change by discipling our kids is maybe the best thing we can do for seeing change in our society as a whole. Yeah, I saw this parallel between two people at similar times, and one guy was a criminal. He had he had in and out of jail, and they traced his lineage 150 years out in the future.

And there's this other guy, Jonathan Edwards, and they traced his lineage out 150 years. And the criminal who, you know, really lived his life however he wanted and really saw no no regard for that. Like 95 percent of his lineage, 150 years later, were in and out of jail. And you look at Jonathan Edwards who was a very famous and respected pastor. You look at the people who came from in his lineage, you've got governors, vice presidents, Congress members, and then you look at like 95% of the people 150 years later in his lineage had doctorates or master's degrees or some sort of higher education.

And that doesn't always mean that they're good people, but it goes to show that the way you live your life today matters for society way down the line, and you can't be selfish in misprioritizing things in your life. Generational impact. Yeah. Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for the great conversation. Thanks everybody for listening. Do us a favor and follow on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. Subscribe to the newsletter, Resoundmedia.cc. Have an awesome week.