Some are saying evangelical Christians should realize they have been defeated in recent political skirmishes and shut up. They’ve been too political for too long, they say. But Out of Ur says his experience hasn’t been dominated by politics.
“Given the lack of politics in my evangelical church experience, why do 75% of young non-Christians say evangelicals are ‘too political’? … Either my church engagement is wildly outside the norm, or perhaps evangelicals aren’t as devoted to political social engineering as the outside culture seems to believe we are.”
Even NPR’s Ira Glass thinks “what Christians really are is not being documented by the press.” But perception is deemed reality by most, if not all, of us, so how do we counter a politicized perception of who we are? (via Trevin Wax)
What you are seeing may be a case of the many being defined by the few. While most evangelicals may not be political activists, a strong contingent of conservative political activists are evangelical. Liberal activists see that subset as representative of all evangelicals.
Yes, and news-people seem to see things through political lenses. True charity doesn’t make much sense to them.
But I remember a story told by one of those surveyed in the book UnChristian. She said she went to a women’s breakfast with a Christian friend and the topic of abortion came up (I don’t remember the context). The unbeliever told a story of another friend who struggled with and finally decided to have an abortion, saying she empathized with her friend because it was a very difficult decision. The table of Christian women turned on her and tried to press her to agree that abortion was wrong, showing no sympathy for the struggle. The woman said she was actually looking for empathy herself, because she had done the same thing, but the conversation turned to the political point and left the people behind. That was a reason she gave for saying Christians were too political.
Here we see a confusion of the political and the moral. The political issue is to decide how the government’s laws should treat abortion. The moral issue is whether abortion is right or wrong. It also touches on the incursion of the world’s philosophy of relativism into the church.
From the woman’s perspective, the big issue was her happiness. She thought she deserved pity because her happiness was interrupted by having to struggle with a moral dilemma. Proverbs 16:2 and 21:2 tell us that every person considers their way right. When the group challenged the rightness of the way she had chosen rather then consoling her for the difficulty of choosing, she called it politicizing the issue. According to the world’s philosophy of relativism, either way she chose would have been right for her. In many ways, the issue at hand becomes a red herring distracting us from the deeper issues of faith and life.
Inherent in the repentance and faith that every Christian is called to is the recognition that in God’s economy, personal happiness/comfort/pleasure is not always the highest goal. That is why Fanny Crosby could praise God for her blindness and Alexander Solzhenitsyn could say, “Bless you prison.”
Sure, but argument won’t get her to see your point. Empathy will, at least as a first step. I suppose if someone made this contrast between moral and political in a loving way to her, she could have accepted it, but I take it they did not.
My theory is that certain circles are so emphatic about legislating their morality that they see any form of morality as a political position. They wish to make everything they dislike illegal so they assume that we will attempt to make sin illegal.
A person who understand the difference between a moral and a civil code will therefore find a lack of politics in the church while those who project their political aspirations on Christians see politics everywhere.