Zachary Peters

A small tangent about the church and politics: One particular development in the United States is the idea — loosely based on the secularization of the separation of church and state — that your faith or religion is a private matter with no place in the public square. The thinking is that what you believe about God is private to you, kept in your home or private spaces. Religious liberty, then, is seen as a largely private matter and not a public one, based on an incorrect assumption about the separation of church and state.

There are two issues with this.

The first, which I don’t have time to go into detail about, is a misunderstanding about what the separation of church and state actually was and should be: a protection for churches from the state, not the inverse, which is what many would like it to be.

The second issue isn’t complex to understand, but it’s something we don’t often consider. In the case of Christianity in particular, one’s personal faith is not designed to stay personal and private. In fact, one of the core tenets of Christianity is the command to share, evangelize, and proclaim what we believe on a personal level to a public level. That’s not a new development in Christianity. It’s been there from the very beginning, and the vast majority of the Christian founders of our nation — those who framed the separation of church and state — would have understood this, not just intrinsically but in practical terms. Many of them lived it.

Why this matters to me is that I often see pastors and Christians called out for being political, as if there is some sort of permanent division between someone’s spirituality and their political life. By the very nature of what Christianity is, someone’s faith will bleed over into their political life. To say the church should stay out of politics is like saying it should stay out of the public sphere. Even more confounding is the irrationality of it: it’s like saying your Christian belief starts with you and ends with you and cannot be shared by you, which, as we have already talked about, goes against the very nature of what a Christian believes in the first place. Based on a broken understanding of the separation of church and state — and, more likely, an annoyance stemming from intellectual disagreement — churches and Christians alike are asked to do something that is in direct conflict with the basics of what they believe.

Politics is not some evil word or sphere devoid of human personality or human experience. Politics is just a word we’ve come up with to describe something particular to the human experience. Since the very beginning, we have attempted to live together with often competing ideas about what is best for any given situation. That is politics.

I do not make a habit of being blunt or blatantly political when I preach. I am not endorsing a political party or a political figure in the common usage of those terms. And yet, when I am preaching about God’s holiness and the call to holiness in our own lives, that will be a political message because it impacts those involved in politics. When I preach on the Sermon on the Mount, those great lessons and examples laid out by Jesus are political because they impact how we live, act, and think. When you look at the book of Acts, in particular, as you watch Paul walk through these various areas, we see his teachings about Jesus have a direct impact on the political attitudes of those involved.

I just think it’s naïve and maybe even a little disingenuous to tell Christians that their beliefs are okay if they’re kept to themselves, when in fact that stands in contrast to the calling of Christ in each individual Christian’s life.

Again, as a matter of order and decorum, I don’t think I will ever be overtly political from the pulpit. But every time I delve into God’s Word and seek to teach from it, it will undoubtedly make a political impact — because politics is not just an isolated sphere; it is a way that humans organize and interact with one another. Who Jesus is, what He taught, and who He wants us to be will impact how we behave politically. There’s no way around it, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it — no more so than someone who is religiously atheistic letting that impact their politics.

Be encouraged, as Christians and as members of a holy church, that you were designed to let the gospel impact your life — not just on a private level but on a public level. Which means there is absolutely nothing wrong with Jesus getting tangled up with your politics. In fact, we definitely need some Jesus in our politics.