Are politically active Christians good for society?

A guest essay for The Dispatch and a highlight of the great work Southern Baptists are doing to help their neighbors

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Are you exhausted by the election yet? A couple weeks to go and it will be all over . . . until the midterms . . . and then the 2028 primary. Not to mention important local and state elections in between. Maybe you are weary of it all, the text messages, the grainy, ominous- sounding commercials, and the back and forth insults. I did think Trump’s serving at a McDonalds was as brilliant move, regardless of how you feel about him.

I do think we should be grateful in the midst of all of this. Let’s remember few people in human history have had a say in who rules over them. We might wish we had more say. We might wish our perspective had more influence. But I’m reminded that nobody in North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China are complaining about partisanship. They’d love to have the opportunity, like we have, to complain about politics. But I digress.

I was in The Dispatch this Sunday with a counter-intuitive take than you’ll often hear in media outlets and even among some Christian voices. I think the presence of Christians in politics is a net good. Here’s an excerpt:

But the question remains: Are politically engaged Christians good for American society, and is our involvement good for those who don’t share our faith? There is no question that both in history and in contemporary society, there are always examples of Christians who engage in clumsy or malevolent ways.  Still, for every rare partisan in a pulpit, you have genuine American heroes whose faith drove them to the public square to eradicate evil.

Consider what you’d lose if you removed all Christians from politics. You’d not have Martin Luther King’s drive for justice, nor William Wilberforce’s lifelong fight against the British slave trade, nor Susan B. Anthony’s crusade for woman’s suffrage. A public life shorn of Christian witness would mean no hospitals, no care for immigrants, no policies such as PEPFAR, which arguably saved tens of millions of lives in Africa. What’s more, as Father Richard John Neuhaus observed 40 years ago in his timeless book The Naked Public Square, the receding of Christianity from public discourse will only leave a vacuum that other ideologies will fill.

The Founders understood that the American experiment in ordered liberty is enriched by robust Christianity. John Adams, a Unitarian, observed in a letter to his wife, Abigail, that, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington concurred, writing, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Their successors, from Lincoln to FDR to Harry Truman expressed similar sentiments. They weren’t arguing for a state church, but for a robust religious culture in which people of faith participate in the life of the republic.

But what of politics in the present moment? Some observers have noted that the discourse has gotten courser even as church attendance in America has significantly declined. Derek Thompson, for instance, lamented the loss of shared community in America in a widely discussed piece for The Atlantic. “America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement,” Thompson, a religious agnostic, wrote. “Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone.” This is probably why our politics today feels more existential and fervent. People have not stopped worshiping, they’ve merely chosen a new object of veneration.

What’s more, the most significant recent decline in church attendance is happening on the right. The book The Great DeChurching, which studied the decline of church attendance over the last 25 years, highlights the way right-leaning, working class populations have dechurched. Sociologist Ryan Burge asserts: “The people who are the most likely to go to church this Sunday are people with a postgraduate degree. People who are least likely are those without a high school diploma.” It is this cohort that has formed much of the new base of the Republican Party. Many still hold on to symbols of Christianity, but they lack the formative weekly rituals of church life.  Thus the rhythms of partisanship fill that spiritual and communal void.

The changing electoral map has often thrust conservative churchgoing evangelicals and Catholics into an uneasy political coalition and has changed the nature of the discourse on the right. French conservative Pascal-Emanuel Gobry observes, “Trump’s rise heralds a deeper and, I believe, more significant way in which the American right — indeed, American society at large — has become more ‘European’: secularism.” As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat once said, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Often political observers find it hard to distinguish these two cohorts, confusing mostly pietistic church-attending evangelicals with the worst expressions of politics and faith found, for example, on January 6. Politics-as-god is bad when the left does it with its totalizing statism, and it is bad when the right does it with its version.

This is why we need more, not fewer, people for whom politics is important, but not ultimate, where allegiances to party and candidate are subordinated to something transcendent. Partaking  in the weekly rituals of prayer, Bible study, and face-to-face community fellowship brings focus and realism to our public life. Hearing, weekly, that the most powerful leaders in this world have an expiration date, that there is a higher kingdom that demands our ultimate allegiance keeps us from seeing every turn in the news cycle as existential. We engage, but with the hope of a people who believe that Christ “has overcome the world.” Imagine more folks with this heavenly perspective, who have intentionally cultivated virtue, actively voting in our presidential primaries, as a balance to the tiny percentage who actually show up to nominate major party candidates. Imagine more folks who, with a distinctive way of being, are guided by the wisdom of 1 Peter 2:17, where the apostle helps Christians rightly order our heavenly priorities and our earthly commitments: “Honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the King.”

You can read the whole thing here.

And then I had the chance to write up a short piece for a new outlet called The Remnant News on the great work of SBC Disaster Relief:

You may not have realized it, but the third largest relief organization boasting more volunteers than the Red Cross and Salvation Army is none other than The Southern Baptist Convention’s Disaster Relief, or as it is often called, Send Relief. 

Whether there is media coverage of natural disasters or not, regardless of the scale, you will find faithful Southern Baptist volunteers hailing from 45,000 churches around the United States donning yellow shirts and mobilizing to the affected area.  With the two Hurricanes, Milton and Helene, the SBC has thousands of men and women on the ground in western North Carolina, Georgia, east Tennessee, and Florida. 

Organized through a partnership between local churches, local Baptist associations, local state conventions, and the national entity, The North American Mission Board, Send Relief organizes and sends volunteers to feed thousands of meals, chop and remove fallen trees, mud out flooded homes, and  other necessary tasks. Throughout it all, each volunteer wears a yellow shirt, a smile, and the love of Christ. 

According to Baptist Press, the Helene response alone has seen 726,000 meals served, 127,000 volunteer hours, and 1,361 job requests completed, along with 96 professions of faith in Christ. Church volunteers go through local training and background checks in their communities before deploying. 

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams mobilize and prepare well in advance of a hurricane’s landfall. According to one report about the preparations for Hurricane Milton in Florida, “mobile kitchens [were] on alert with teams from Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texans on Mission ready to partner with The Salvation Army and American Red Cross to provide hot meals to survivors after Milton hits Florida.”

The SBC began mobilizing in earnest to respond to natural disasters over a century ago. In 1968, a group of Texas Baptists gathered volunteers and supplies to help victims of Hurricane Beulah. Over the decades this grew and became more organized. One of the most important things Southern Baptists provide are mobile kitchens, showers, and laundry units to areas without water, power, and basic necessities. They also maintain warehouses stocked with supplies like water, chainsaws, boxed food, etc. 

The response of Southern Baptists is so effective, it has been lauded by both President Trump and President Biden, who recently toured the devastation in North Carolina and met with local Baptist leaders. 

You can read it all here.

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