Russell Moore, above, is the new chief editor of Christianity Today, and formerly the head of the Ethics Committee of the Southern Baptist Church. I had a chance to meet with him and get to know him at our John Wesley Fellows meeting at the Museum of the Bible in January, and he impressed me as a devout Christian through and through. Here he is commending this pastor in Charlotte for calling out the total misuse of the Bible to support a very partisan political campaign, one Jesus himself would have never endorsed. This is not about taking a Democratic side vs. a Republican side. This is about taking a Biblical side against all sorts of idolatry and immorality from whichever political candidate is serving those things up. The reason so many Christians are confused about these things is they have merged their nationalistic fervor with their Christian commitments to produce a mess of pottage, as the Bible says. And part of the reason for that is they are Biblically illiterate— they’ve never really seriously studied what the Bible says about idolatry and immorality. Let me give you an illustration.
I have no patience at all with those Christians who want to call abortion health care, when 98% of the time it is not. I have no patience with those who treat the unborn child as if it wasn’t a person. It is not merely a potential human life, it is a human life with unrealized potential. I recognize in a fallen world sometimes lesser of two evil choices have to be made, and that occasionally includes abortion when the life of the mother is in danger, or there is a rape of a young girl, or she is a victim of incest. But abortion is indeed taking the life of another human being, and that child’s right to life must be a higher priority to someone’s right to choose, especially when that same person chose before hand to have sex, often unprotected sex, knowing full well they could get pregnant. And where oh where is the man’s right to have at least a secondary say about what happens to a child he has helped father? This whole discussion is so badly messed up and unChristian it’s hard to believe. And just as messed up is this attempt to amalgamate the Bible with a particular political party or candidate. This is not what Jesus would do—- he would call all such candidates who make that attempt HYPOCRITES, which in the Greek literally means a person who is an actor, who is playing a role for personal gain.
Another reason for confusion is the mistaking of the principles of a secular democracy for Biblical principles. For example in a proper democracy issues are and should be decided by majority vote. If the majority of the nation supports a right to have gay marriage, and the Supreme Court says that can be legal, then that is the decision of the nation, whether many Christians agree are not. The truth of the Gospel is not decided by majority vote. That TRUTH was decided by God through revelation, and it is not a matter of personal opinion, and no it’s not about ‘my truth’ vs. ‘your truth’. There is just ‘the Truth’ about such matters.
So if Christians live in a secular democracy as we do (and NO our country was not founded on strictly Christian principles– Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were no Christians, and the Puritans did not write the Constitution or the Bill of Rights which really should have been accompanied with a Bill of Responsibilities) then Christians have to learn to live with some inconsistencies in the country that are contrary to their personal beliefs. If they want the law to change, then they have to persuade the majority of people to change their beliefs, not try to legislate Christianity into existence against the will of the majority of U.S. citizens. Again, that’s how a democracy is supposed to work. See the recent book reviewed on this blog by N.T Wright and Michael Bird on Jesus and the Powers.
Even if one thinks this coming national election is a matter of choosing between two bad options, one still has a moral obligation as a citizen after prayerful consideration to vote for the lesser of two evils, because if you don’t, if you sit out the election, you are partially responsible for the greater of two evils winning. And that surely can’t be a Christian thing to do. To not decide is to decide against the better option.
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