How do we follow Jesus in election season?
I’ll never forget when my undocumented friend told me: “I can’t vote, so I need you to. My life depends on it.”
Or, my Palestinian friend said: “Why do your people think I’m a terrorist?”
Or sitting with our neighbor in Tijuana after they were deported and separated from their five kids.
Praying with and for each of these people was good, but is that the end of our Christian responsibility? What might praying for our neighbors AND leveraging our influence/votes to change the systems harming them look like?
As I grew weary (and deeply concerned) over the state of evangelicals and politics about a decade ago, these questions kept me up at night. So much so that in 2020, I started a PhD in researching the history of evangelical politics in search of a “post-evangelical political ethic.” In other words, it is a path to follow Jesus with our lives and votes that could better contribute to healing society in ways reflective of the values of the kingdom of God.
I’ll never forget when my undocumented friend told me: “I can’t vote, so I need you to. My life depends on it.”
Or, my Palestinian friend said: “Why do your people think I’m a terrorist?”
Or sitting with our neighbor in Tijuana after they were deported and separated from their five kids.
Praying with and for each of these people was good, but is that the end of our Christian responsibility? What might praying for our neighbors AND leveraging our influence/votes to change the systems harming them look like?
As I grew weary (and deeply concerned) over the state of evangelicals and politics about a decade ago, these questions kept me up at night. So much so that in 2020, I started a PhD in researching the history of evangelical politics in search of a “post-evangelical political ethic.” In other words, it is a path to follow Jesus with our lives and votes that could better contribute to healing society in ways reflective of the values of the kingdom of God.
Right before the 2020 election and alongside my colleagues (then with Global Immersion), I put together my preliminary findings in this concise (20 minutes) and accessible teaching called “Conflicted Allegiance: Following Jesus in Election Season.” We are making it available again here if it’d be helpful for you and/or your community as you discern how to show up in your relationships and the voting booth over the next few months. I’ll be working with churches this fall on these topics if you want to learn more.
The teaching outlines two primary ways evangelicals have engaged in politics in the United States. The first associates the mission of the U.S. with the mission of God, creating idolatrous forms of Christian Nationalism. The second avoids politics altogether, viewing the “gospel” as only about personal salvation, where churches say things like, “We don’t talk about politics, we just talk about Jesus.”
The way forward is a Conflicted Allegiance that liberates us to unapologetically live out the values of the kingdom of God while continually discerning our constructive engagement with, support of, and participation in the U.S. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr, a Conflicted Allegiance reminds us that the Church is meant to be the soul, not the surrogate of the State.
Politics can be defined as the ordering of society. In that sense, everything about Jesus was political in that he sought to order society in light of the Kingdom of God.
Bishop Desmond Tutu said it best, “I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, 'Now, is that political or social?' He said, 'I feed you.' Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.”
As followers of Jesus seeking to engage this election season with hope and healing, may we learn from our past failures and pursue a better way of leveraging our influence for the sake of those often pushed to the margins of our society. For it is there that love lives.