As a pastor, I often struggle with knowing when and how to speak about politics.
On one hand, the Christian worldview has ramifications for how we see everything in our lives, which certainly includes which approaches to governing people are the most just and helpful. Furthermore, Christian obedience requires that we stand up for truth, justice and compassion, so when we see groups in our society suffering unjustly, we have to speak out.
On the other hand, we know that the church has been given a specific mission, and getting mired in the secondary questions of politics can divert our mission and mute our witness.
I am asked often to make public statements or sign specific petitions regarding political policies. The requests sometimes come from the left, sometimes from the right. And the issues constantly change. We never back away from teaching truth, of course, but when should the church make overtly political statements in response to current events?
Let me suggest two biblical truths we must hold in tension, and then suggest two questions that can serve as a guide for when to speak.
1. There is a time when we must speak.
The Scriptures are full of admonitions for God’s people to rebuke evil, sometimes with stinging specificity. Read through the prophets, and you hear God calling out injustices of all kinds—toward children, toward women, toward the outcast, the poor, the voiceless. The prophets trumpet a call for God’s justice, and justice always carries a political element. Men like William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King, Jr. frequently quoted from prophetic books like Amos to inspire our society to turn to justice.
In the New Testament, John the Baptist preached a “baptism of repentance,” complete with specific accusations about the ways that God’s people—and the local rulers—were disobedient to God’s Law. He called out injustices carried out by soldiers and rebuked Herod for sleeping with his brother’s wife. That latter decision eventually led to John’s death.
If John were around today, I imagine that a lot of Christians would have told him to keep quiet. Stick to the church stuff, John. Stop commenting on public sexuality. What was Jesus’ assessment of John’s ministry? He called him the greatest prophet who ever lived.
The church has often failed to speak as directly and specifically as we should in the political realm. Dietrich Bonhoeffer learned this in Germany in the 1930s. The church there was content to simply say, “Discrimination is wrong,” a statement that the Nazi Party would allow. But Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church knew that obedience required them to take another step, getting their hands dirty by saying, “We must oppose the Nazis.” Like John the Baptist, he paid for it with his life.
In the 1850s, many Christian churches were reluctant to say anything specifically about slavery, even though they opposed the practice. Again in the 1960s, far too many churches stayed silent when they should have offered their hand—and their voice—to the Civil Rights movement. Both of those instances are embarrassments to the church today.
2. There is a time when speaking diverts us from our mission and dilutes our witness.
There is a ditch on the other side of this path, too. In our attempts to apply Scripture to our political situation, we run the risk of getting mired in areas outside our God-given scope.
The ministry of Jesus provides us with a helpful example. In Luke 12:13-14, when asked a specific social justice question (“My brother stole money from me!”), Jesus refuses to adjudicate: “Who made me a judge over you?” It’s not because he didn’t care about justice, or because he wouldn’t have been able to offer wise counsel. Rather, he didn’t want his kingdom to be too identified or tangled up in world affairs. So he avoided giving an opinion on this particular case, and instead preached a sermon on greed (Luke 12:15–21).
Elsewhere, we see Jesus, at the peak of his popularity, retreating when people wanted to make him a political king on the platform of solving world hunger (John 6:1-15).
The same pattern runs through the lives of the apostles. Paul, for instance, spent very little time arbitrating the various social ills plaguing the Roman Empire (of which there were many), focusing instead on spreading the gospel and planting churches.
There are times when we have to connect virtue with policy. But far too often, the temptation for the institutional church is to speak too specifically into areas outside the scope of our mission. Policy choices always seem so clear in the moment, but often the benefit of a little distance makes us wish we had not tied the church’s authority to specific policy prescriptions.
Let me share a personal example. Back in 2003, I was on a Southern Baptist Convention committee that wanted to make a public statement about the Iraq war. At the time, the mood in our country was hawkish. Nearly everyone was in favor of our military involvement in the Middle East—Republican and Democrat alike. This committee decided to vote to endorse the war, a decision that, at the time, would have been completely uncontroversial.
Though at the time I was personally in support of the war, I argued that the institutional church didn’t have any business weighing in on the strategic value of a particular military engagement (except in extreme circumstances). I suggested we make a general statement about our belief in “just war,” and urge our leaders to use wisdom, compassion and restraint. Another man on the committee argued that if we didn’t connect our virtue with policy, our witness would be anemic.
In the end, I caved. Well, sort of. I didn’t vote in support of the statement, but I was too cowardly to vote against it. It passed 8-0, with one abstention.
I think of that experience often. It is precisely when the groundswell of emotion in our country is loudest that the church is most tempted to cross the line and become a political entity. But where there is not a direct line between a biblical moral judgment and a specific policy prescription, the church generally should not make an official statement.
Even individual believers should exercise a healthy amount of humility here, recognizing that they are shaped by their own particular cultural milieu, and that other conscientious Christians may parse current issues differently. But let’s definitely be hesitant to tying the church’s name to a particular policy when there is not a clear biblical prescription. We may be wrong about policy, but we aren’t wrong about the gospel, and we don’t want our opinions on the former to prevent people from hearing the latter.
How should we discern when to speak and when not to?
First, we need to understand the distinction between the church as an organization and the church as an organism.