The Socio-Political Pulpit: What Are Christians Really About?
“Today’s Christian pulpit is far too often preoccupied with other things than your life’s journey.”
Another perspective an older minister can offer the present generation of both Christian ministers and laypersons concerns their experience, and perhaps their unstudied acceptance, of the technological revolution. My perspective is shaped by the fact that, at least in regard to modern technology, I began my ministry in one world and ended it in another.
Many things about human life—the most fundamental and important things—are ageless and changeless. They are today as they have always been. But modern life is different in certain ways, and some of those differences have had profound consequences. People have always been creatures of their time in certain respects, but former generations of human beings have never been creatures of the time we are living in today. The constant, distracting, and demanding barrage of information (however trivial), of opinion (however unsupported by serious, careful, and honest argument), of imperative (however indifferent to the host of our other serious obligations), even of the daily warnings of looming cataclysms, is a unique feature of modern life. The noise never lets up. It reaches us on our computers, our car radios, our televisions, even on our earbuds when we are jogging.
We welcome this incessant interruption of our thinking life. Indeed, in our reading and listening, we devote hours to it. It draws us in, stokes our emotions, but especially and profoundly wastes our time. We forget that most of this clatter will be forgotten tomorrow or the next day or week or month. It will, by then, be replaced by another set of urgent communications to command our attention, which, in turn, will be soon replaced themselves, and so on. And so it is that all of this takes up more and more of our brain space, leaving us less and less to devote to what matters most for both time and eternity.
What is your life, after all? Politics? Climate Change? The success of your investment portfolio? The fortunes of your favorite team? Perhaps in some minor way such things affect our lives and may properly do so. But, no; these things and a thousand others like them are no more your life than today’s weather. Your life is a brief but fateful journey from this world to the next. Its consequences are momentous beyond the power of words to describe. And every day is either forward or backward progress. The day is coming, sooner than you think, when your life will be done; and a great many things you think far too much about now will be of absolutely no interest to you then. Your life, everyone’s life, matters precisely because it is that journey, because it has that destination, no matter the next election, no matter the looming recession, no matter that your team is tanking, and no matter the climate. When you die you will leave all of that behind as if it never were.
But today’s Christian pulpit is far too often preoccupied with other things than your life’s journey. In many American evangelical churches, even in some of our PCA pulpits, Charles Murray, the brilliant social observer of American culture, is quoted more often than Augustine, Luther, Calvin, or the other masters of the Christian faith and life. Current events get a great deal of attention, especially the so-called culture war. Christians come to church and get more attention to the same things they have been hearing about all week long, the only difference being that the subjects are given a Christian gloss, interpretation, or commentary. We are thinking a great deal about Critical Race Theory, about gender identity, about homosexuality, not because these are major themes in Holy Scripture, but because they are the pressing issues of our American politics and because they are the litmus test of our conservative bona fides. Don’t mistake me. These matters are not unimportant. They can have profound human consequences. The prophets certainly paid attention to social injustice, though almost always as an indication of the condition of the heart, of a failure to grasp the grace of God.
“The climate may indeed be changing, but hell and heaven loom before us as they always have.”
It should be absolutely clear to everyone, in the church and outside of her, that such things are not what Christians are about, hardly the great interests of our lives, or the heart and soul of our faith in Jesus Christ. They should be a relatively minor part of our discourse and our activity. CRT isn’t what takes people to hell and insisting on sex-specific bathrooms won’t take them to heaven. But a great many Americans think, and have reason to think, that this must be what Christians think. Racism is a terrible sin, to be sure, and should be repudiated root and branch by every Christian—not only spoken against but overcome in our behavior. But its greatest significance is precisely that it is a sin against God, a sin of which we are all guilty in various ways, a sin that condemns men and women to hell, and a sin from which only Christ can deliver us.
Think of both the Lord Christ and his Apostle Paul. Think of all the socio-political questions of their day. Think of how much they could have said in critique of their cultures. The Jews were a subject people, with the boot of a great empire on their neck. Greco-Roman culture was inherently and cruelly unjust. Most people lived at the beck and call of a relative few. The gap between the wealthy and the poor makes that of the United States in the 21st century look like no gap at all. The entire economic structure of that world depended upon slavery. The exposure of infants was commonplace. Women fared far more poorly than men. The law could be and usually was bought and paid for. Punishment usually didn’t fit the crime. There was wickedness, injustice, and human misery everywhere one looked. But neither the Lord nor Paul featured much of this in their preaching and their teaching. For them it was the way of salvation, it was sin and righteousness, it was the cross, it was the calling to a holy life, it was the prospect of damnation or the world of endless joy. These things dominated their message. Indeed, modern Christians can resent this fact. They wonder why Paul didn’t make more of an issue of slavery, or the oppression of women, or the systematic injustice of economic life in their times.
But the fact is both the Lord and his Apostles had bigger fish to fry, more urgent business to attend to. And if they had, we do as well. The climate may indeed be changing, but hell and heaven loom before us as they always have; people are leaving this world for those places every moment of every day. It will be a terrible and costly failure if we are not taking those tremendous realities to heart because we are spending so much time thinking about the weather. What is more, it is precisely the Christian whose inner life, whose attitudes, whose convictions, and whose preoccupations are dominated by the great themes of biblical revelation who will both think and speak most helpfully about CRT and gender dysphoria. It remains as true today as it was in the Lord’s day: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul.” It has been often said that the main thing in life is to keep the main thing in life the main thing in life. The American church is in some real peril of failing to do this.
