This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
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Here, with a few additional paragraphs, I reprint a blog I wrote a few weeks ago, declaring that mixing the church and politics carries huge risks – risks not worth running despite many who call themselves “Christians” becoming more and more political, including even with violent intentions.
I write because doing so, for me, is a way to think through issues. Rating myself, I think this was one of the best blogs I have written in the recent past, so, without apology, I repeat it, despite its length.
The additional paragraphs are drawn from a blog written by David French, an American political commentator, a theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases. A fellow at the National Review Institute and a staff writer for National Review from 2015 to 2019, French currently serves as senior editor of The Dispatch.
Here is what he wrote:
“Let me put it another way. I’m old enough to remember the words and expressed beliefs of even some of the most enthusiastic Trumpist Evangelicals before they supported Trump, and this much I know: If I’d told them in December 2014 that white Evangelicals would shortly vote in overwhelming numbers for a thrice-married man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, appeared in a Playboy movie, paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star, and was facing multiple corroborated claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, they’d say that only Democrats were that hypocritical.
“Then, if I followed that up by saying that a disproportionate number of that same evangelical community would shun pre-vaccine mask-wearing and social distancing in the midst of a deadly pandemic that would claim hundreds of thousands of American lives and then disproportionately reject life-saving vaccines, they’d think I was an anti-Christian bigot.
“If I capped off my prophecy by noting that white evangelicals would be far more likely than virtually any other American community to embrace wild election conspiracy theories and then a subset of that community would literally storm the Capitol with prayers on their lips, then their assessment of me would be clinched. They’d think I’d simply lost my mind.
“This is not the result you’d expect from a community whose politics is centered on biblical justice. It is the result you’d expect from a community disproportionately shaped by the history, culture, and traditions of the white American South.”
Appearing below is my original blog.
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Back when I served in a leadership capacity as a Governing Board member at Salem Alliance Church here in Salem, Oregon, we made a critical decision.
It was this: We declined to allow politics to infect the church. Rather, we contended, church should be about God and the role of his son, Jesus, in our lives.
It should not be about politics.
Put another way, we declined to allow the church to become just another political organization, thus perverting its real purpose.
Peter Wehner, writing for Atlantic Magazine, produced an excellent piece on the subject of the evangelical church and its erosion into politics. The article appeared under this headline:
THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH IS BREAKING APART: Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church
Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, often for Atlantic Magazine. He also is the author of a book, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
Here is the way he started his piece:
“The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 per cent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.
“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church.”
Why?
Apparently, church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.
Beyond the election, the church’s pastor had been accused of proposing “wokeness” and pushing a “social justice agenda” from the left of center. Not clear whether the pastor did or didn’t do this, but the allegation was enough to bring down the church.
According to Wehner’s report, what happened in this church is happening all over the evangelical world. The account above simply serves as an anecdote to describe an infection – the church becoming political.
For my part, at Salem Alliance, now about 20 years ago, my colleagues and I experienced advocacy for political activity. In one case, we faced a demand to give sermons against abortion from a right-side political point-of-view. In another case, we were asked to develop a list of positions on political issues for the church to espouse.
We did neither.
Now, surely, when it comes to an issue such as abortion, there is scriptural advice on the subject, but we preferred to allow that advice to be individual in nature, not a collective admonition on one side or the other.
At any rate, buoyed by Wehner’s article, I developed list of what ails churches today when political action becomes an overriding objective, not honoring Jesus. [The quote marks below indicate that I drew material from Wehner’s article, though I did not necessarily use the individual names of sources to whom he talked, believing it was enough to attribute words to Wehner. He serves credit for sparking my thinking.]
AGGRESSIVE POLITICS FOMENTED BY THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT: The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches. The religious right is to blame for much of the intrusion.
“The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has placed religious communities under extraordinary strain. Everyone in America has felt its effects; for many Christians, it’s been a bar to gathering and worshipping together, sharing communion and performing baptisms, and saying common prayers and participating in rituals and liturgy. Not being in community destabilized what has long been a core sense of Christian identity.
“But there’s more to the fractures than just COVID-19. After all, many of the forces that are splitting churches were in motion well before the pandemic hit. The pandemic exposed and exacerbated weaknesses and vulnerabilities, habits of mind and heart, that already existed.”
The root of the discord, Wehner writes, lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of culture and politics. Churches become repositories, not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are made sacred.
THEN CAME DONALD TRUMP: The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian when, in fact, they were not.
Then came Trump.
What he did – and wants to continue to do – is to advocate hatred and resentment as the best approach, including for many who profess to be Christians. For these people, Trump is close to a god.
“The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump have come to see a gospel of hatred, resentment, vilification, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity.”
THE CHURCH AS ENTERTAINMENT, NOT BIBLE TEACHING: On another side, many churches aren’t interested in Biblical teaching at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate.
Further, many people rely on the media as source for teaching. They consume media, or rather the media consumes them, and Biblical teaching ends up in second place.
“When people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities,” Wehner says, “there are consequences.
“What the media want is engagement, and, for purveyors of media messages, engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred. And so, hatred migrates into the church, which doesn’t always have the resources to resist it.”
Teaching people how to think biblically would help, as well as teaching people how to disagree with one another according to Biblical standards, Wehner writes. There is a lot of disagreement in the New Testament, and it gives us a template for how to listen to each other to understand rather than just to argue. Note the word listen.
FOCUSING ON POLITICS PROMPTS CHURCHES TO ILLUSTRATE THE SAME TRAIT THAT MARKS POLITICS – LACK OF CIVIILITY: Many Christians are not inclined to heed calls for civility. They feel that everything they value is under assault, and that they need to fight to protect it.
Trump made aggressive name-calling, cruelty and derogation the norm. Through him, we saw the once-shocking seem routine; we saw anything short of personal cruelty to be a sign of weakness.
THE ROLE OF THE SOUTH: And then there is a regional component to the crisis of evangelical Christianity.
Some of the distinctive cultural forms present in the American South—masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism—have spread to other parts of the country and, in fact, to the church.
Look only so far as the dissension Trump spread in Charlottesville and in the January 6 insurrection. Many of those involved came from churches to do Trump’s bidding.
IT’S TIME FOR THE CHURCH TO RECLAIM JESUS: Jesus now has to be reclaimed from “His” church, from those who pretend to speak most authoritatively in his name, but don’t.
Too many Christians resist Jesus’ call radically to rethink attitudes toward power, ourselves, and others, especially the poor and down-trodden, including immigrants.
“Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan—unlike Jesus’s barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the “holiness code,” with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath—many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness.
“For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who He really was. “
Even as politics threatens the church, it also is important to note countless acts of kindness, generosity, and self-giving love that are performed every day by people precisely because they are Christians and, in fact, are part of a church. Their lives have been changed, and in some cases transformed, by their faith.
So, all is not lost for churches and for their real members.
Here in Salem, for example, I see kindness and generosity in the way many individuals have rallied around refugees, including recent ones from Afghanistan who are being re-settled in Salem.
Wehner concludes: “Something has gone amiss. The Jesus of the Gospels—the Jesus who won their hearts, and who long ago won mine—needs to be reclaimed.”
Perspective from the 19th Hole 