One afternoon in 2004, while in a group interview in a random office park in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, hoping to land a much-coveted security gig for the Buick Open, my Samsung flip phone vibrated in my pocket. On the other end of the call was a family friend who was involved in local politics.
“I have a job for you, if you want it,” she said.
The job, as it turned out, was working for the National Committee of one of the two major political parties vying for the Oval Office that November. “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” she said. Without hesitation, I forfeited my chance to meet Tiger Woods and left the group interview. Within just a few days, I was in Washington D.C. for training and hit the ground running, delaying my plans to attend Bible College that fall and instead focusing on entering the fray of the “most important election of our lifetime.”
Since 2004, we’ve lived through what seems to be a never-ending succession of “most important election in our lifetime” seasons, bookended by more than one apocalyptic world event. Twenty years later, here we are again wading through a sea of charged political speech, each side promising utopia if one person wins and Armageddon if the other person wins.
While it’s likely that neither purgatory nor Promised Land await us on the other side of November, the increasingly hostile and divisive political discourse has a profoundly corrosive effect on us. Many pastors see this most acutely as they seek to lead their congregations in and through the election season.
So what does it look like to be a faithful Jesus-shaped people in the quagmire of partisan politics? While by no means exhaustive, I want to offer several principles to consider for local churches, and their leaders, to not only survive, but thrive in this highly contentious election season.
1. Prioritize Culture Care Over Culture War.
Many Christians have unwittingly elevated the partisans and pundits of the day to speak as prophets to their souls, seeing “winning” the culture wars as a mission critical priority for the local church. Consequently, many are tempted to view “culture” (i.e., American society) as a battleground of ideas—a battleground that supposedly poses an existential threat to the survival of the Christian faith.
But when we confuse winning culture wars with the mission of God, we allow God’s mission to redeem and transform people and human societies to be hijacked by a mission of survival and preservation of a way of life against those very people God seeks to reconcile to himself. People far from God become enemies instead of neighbors. To borrow from the words of the brother of Jesus: My brothers and sisters, these things should not be so (Jas. 3:10).
Makoto Fujimura is credited with coining the term “culture care,” which he defines as, “Provid[ing] care for our culture’s ‘soul.’”1 It is a redemptive posture toward culture. Culture is an agenda-neutral space, but it is a space upon which we all have an effect. We can either add to its hostility, to the fear, to the other-izing. Or we can, like Jesus, view it as a space to nurture toward a more excellent way, providing fertile soil for the Holy Spirit to transform both our society and the people within it.
2. Consider the Church
Far too frequently, we fail to distinguish between country and Kingdom. We too often neglect to see ourselves as ambassadors of a King sent to this land and charged with upholding the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven (c.f., 2 Cor. 5:20). An ambassador whose priorities and interests have been hijacked by the land to which they’ve been called is ambassador who is unfit to serve.
The Church has endured for centuries and spans countless cultures, people groups, traditions, and national boundaries. We would do well to not only consider this in a conceptual sense but also seek to welcome the perspectives and wisdom of the global body of believers into our churches and into our own personal lives. The perspective of faithful Christians from other cultures and other traditions has a way of positively shaping the rough edges of our own worldview and can prevent us from getting hoodwinked by pundits peddling nonsense about existential threats to Christianity in the United States.
1 Fujimura, Makoto, “Culture Care” (IVP, 2017), 22.
