10 Truths About Christians And Politics

Coral Ridge Ministries
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH #7 - Retreat or Rule: Neither Is an Option

When it comes to civic engagement, Christians face two temptations. One is to retreat into the safe confines of our stained-glass ghettos, where we can focus on worship, prayer, and Bible study. The other, widely practiced in past centuries, is to become the church militant and seek to establish Christ’s kingdom by force—to use the sword of the state to extend God’s rule into human hearts.

But neither “escape religion” nor “power religion,” to use American Vision president Gary DeMar’s terms, meets the standard set out in God’s Word. It is just as wrong to privatize one’s faith as it is to politicize it. Both have been tried. Both miss the mark.

From Faith to Force
The early church endured nearly 300 years of bloody persecution until 313 A.D., when Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. No more were Christians to be arrested, tortured, and executed. Suddenly, Christianity was legal and had the favor of friends in high places. However, that favor came at a cost. “The church, after Constantine, adopted Roman methods of rule and began to see the state as an ally,” writes Benjamin Hart, author of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty. “Instead of proselytizing to make converts, it began an attempt to force belief.” Unfortunately, this is the template for church-state relations that was largely followed until the Pilgrims came ashore in 1620.

When Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion in 380 A.D., he required all civic officials to adopt the Christian faith. A short five years later, a bishop from Spain became the first victim of the new state religion when he was tortured and decapitated for straying into Gnosticism. Even Augustine, a hero to many in the church, was willing, after much struggle, to use the power of the state to punish heretics. Charles Colson, author of Kingdoms in Conflict, writes that the Byzantine Empire functioned as a theocracy, with “the church serving as its department of spiritual affairs.” Charlemagne, whose empire contained much of what is now Western Europe, combined the church and state in 800 A.D. Only 44 years later, Charles the Bald inaugurated the Inquisitions to insure faithfulness to church teaching.

Martin Luther: No to Church-State Marriage
This marriage of church and state, which had led to such horrible abuses, was rejected by Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reformation. Luther stated the principle in his usual forthright manner:
The temporal lords want to rule the church, and, conversely, the theologians want to play the lord in the town hall. Under the papacy, mixing the two was considered ruling well, and it is still so considered. But in reality this is ruling very badly. . . .

Nevertheless, it was not until Reformation principles, grounded in Scripture, took root and blossomed in America that the pattern of uneasy alliance between church and state came to an end. “By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church,” writes Colson, “the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine.”

Problems With Pietism
The opposite extreme, pietism, avoids all political involvement and seeks to engage exclusively in the pursuit of personal spiritual growth and the disciplines of prayer, Bible study, worship, and evangelism. This was the option initially chosen by Jerry Falwell who, as noted in the Introduction, was apolitical early in his ministry. While he later reversed himself, Falwell believed in 1965 that “preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.... Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. The gospel does not clean up the outside, but rather regenerates the inside.”

Pietism can be traced back to Jacob Spener, a church leader in the seventeenth century. He reacted against the cold religious formalism he saw in the German Lutheran church of his day by focusing on the disciplines of personal spirituality. But Spener’s “healthy protest” soon decayed, according to Francis Schaeffer, into an outlook that sharply divided the “spiritual” from the “material” world. “The totality of human existence was not afforded a proper place,” wrote Schaeffer. “In particular, it neglected the intellectual dimension of Christianity.”

D. James Kennedy has suggested that true Christianity is, in its effect, like a hurricane—with a warm, calm center and powerful swirling winds just beyond its core. Pietism, he said, is that warm center without the swirling winds that make a cultural impact. The result is cultural irrelevance and inattention to broader cultural shifts. Francis Schaeffer also points out that a pietistic orientation caused Christians to be slow to understand the modern shift from a Reformation-based to a humanist culture. Law professor Harold Berman shares the analysis of both Drs. Schaeffer and Kennedy, stating that, “… though religion is flourishing in America, it is increasingly a ‘privatized’ religion, with little in it that can overcome the forces of strife and disorder in society.”

Lesson From Nazi Germany
The dangers posed by pietism are illustrated by events in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. When Hitler moved quickly, after seizing power, to bend the church to his purposes, a small group of evangelicals resisted, but most evangelicals had little stomach for the fight. Under the influence of pietism, they “wanted to retreat into the sacristy.” Historian J.S. Conway writes:
Both their sense of loyalty to established power and their theological leanings, strongly influenced by the Pietistic tradition, inclined them towards a purely “spiritual” ministry, concerned only with individualistic salvation and ethics, and a readiness to obey the government’s orders under all circumstances.

German evangelicals were largely silent on Nazi policy toward Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables.” Some evangelicals, led by Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, mounted resistance, but there were too few willing to join them to stem the tide of evil that engulfed Germany and swept the civilized world into its vortex.

God’s Mandate: “Have Dominion”
Pietism not only leads to cultural irrelevance, it is also a rejection of God’s command to our first parents to “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). This Cultural Mandate from God does not divide the spiritual from the material. Instead, as Dr. Kennedy points out, “Man is to have dominion over all of the earth; he is to take all of the potentialities and possibilities of every phase of this world, and he is to culture it, improve it, and offer it all to God.”

No area of life, including government and politics, is exempt from God’s command to “fill the earth and subdue it.” Political questions are not beyond the scope of God’s rule. They are addressed in Scripture, and Christians are called to exercise proper dominion in this arena just as much as in any other area of life—not that it will be easy. As we will see in the next chapter, John Knox found himself an unwelcome guest in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots. Yet this did not stop him from speaking biblical truth to her, even in the face of the temporal power that she held.