Many earnest Christians want their church to have nothing to do with anything that could be considered political.
They are concerned that for the church to engage with any such issue is to dilute the gospel, to divide and distract the faithful. I emphatically disagree, and here’s why.
False religions and false gods are constantly being pushed upon Americans. They are aggressive and relentless, driven to dominate. Consider three of the most prominent ones:
* One, utopia for all mankind through politics and economics, the idolatry of the Tower of Babel, the golden calf.
* Two, sin and righteousness assigned racially, not individually, immutable and irredeemable.
* Three, sexual self-expression as the ultimate human good, denying fathers and mothers and children as made in God’s image and governed by God’s morality, brutally negating the body itself and life itself.
These are the false religions of the 21st century. They are permanently on offense and intolerant of any dissent. To say they are not religious but political, hence off limits to the church, is to erroneously concede the essential point.
They in fact serve an opposite and very jealous deity from the biblical God whom we serve, making them inherently religious—and implacable enemies to us. Their approach is not live and let live, it is rule or ruin.
They never take a day off. They never yield an inch. They recognize no boundaries or reciprocity or fair play. They suffer from no self-doubt. Their ultimatum to Christians is submit or else.
Endgame
Menaced by this fierce onslaught, what are Christians to do?
The church that goes into a defensive crouch, vowing to “stay out of politics,” fulfills neither the duty to witness for its Lord nor the duty to shepherd his flock. Indeed it disregards self-preservation.
As someone has wisely said, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. The endgame of the false gods is to bring it about that the body of Christ, one congregation at a time, either complies or closes down. Which will happen unless the church starts to engage.
The pandemic lockdowns, singling out houses of worship with special animosity, were a preview of what is to come if Christians do not begin to wake up, take a stand, and fight back. Loving our enemy every step of the way, of course. (And I mean that.)
To realize how long the false religions have been at it, and how relentlessly they go at it, should alarm us like a fire bell in the night.
Whether in the utopian, the racial, or the sexual version (and there are also environmental and medical versions we haven’t even talked about here), they have a 50- to 100-year head start on us, and they continue pressing in, 24/7/365.
They go after our children starting in kindergarten or younger. They saturate the schools, the corporations, the government, the military, mass media, social media, entertainment, academia.
Their aim is not simply to monopolize the public square, which would be bad enough; they seek to subvert souls.
‘This is Mine’
Ask yourself how the church of Jesus Christ can possibly shrug and say it has no quarrel with a global force that seeks to subvert souls and is doing so by the millions. How on earth?
Yet most pastors and most congregations are unwilling to rouse themselves and do battle against this deadly menace for even one hour, one day a week. Why on earth?
And I speak merely of fighting on defense, rebutting lies with truth. Shouldn’t we actually be fighting on offense as well?
In the 1800s there were men of God like Abraham Kuyper bold enough to preach that there is not one square inch of creation over which Jesus does not proclaim, “This is mine.”
In the 1900s there were men of God like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis militant enough to liken the coming of Jesus to an invasion by the rightful king returning to reclaim his realm, the whole world, from occupying usurpers.
What then is to be said of us in 2021, here in our defensive crouch, meekly hoping that the merciless armies of Moloch will leave us alone if we leave them alone? Surely this isn’t the best we can do, church!
Until Christ returns, we are commanded to render to Caesar what is his and to God what is His. But if Christians supinely let Caesar arbitrate what is to be rendered both of them, he owns us. We become his slaves. To that yoke we must never submit. Never.