First Baptist Church of…the Republic?

Over at the White Horse Inn, there is a good article on the Church and politics called, No Nation Under God, that I’ve included in my Google Shared Items Page and I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

In this article, Pastor Jason Stellman discusses the way in which the political process has infiltrated the Church, closely aligning a heavenly citizenship with our earthly one.  Stellman argues that this is a marriage we must reject and, instead, focus on what is of eternal value, for the overall good of this life and the next:

American Christians need to remember something that we so easily forget, and that is that our true homeland is an eternal, heavenly one whose allure cannot be compromised by the goings-on of the culture war. It is remarkable that, for all the passionate Christian devotees of right-wingers like Glenn Beck or lefties like Jim Wallis, there are very few evangelicals in this country who can articulate the doctrine of justification in a coherent and biblical way. In other words, we Christians seem to have sacrificed the one thing that makes us unique—the gospel—on the altar of some baptized political ideology for which the divine Son of God isn’t even necessary.

For a long time now, I’ve been voicing concerns about how the Church is supposed to be positioned to speak to ALL of culture, not from a right or left perspective, but a BIBLICAL one.  Unfortunately, Evangelicals have allowed (or designed?) the Church to act as a religious arm of the Republican Party, thus relegating us to little more than just another special interest group. Don’t get me wrong, the left is trying to do the exact same thing, they’ve just not mastered the process yet.

My position is that we must divorce ourselves, as a Body, from the political process.  That is not to say we back away from the ISSUES that drive the political process, but rather that we approach them not from a partisan position, but a biblical one.  Speak the TRUTH of an issue and if it lines up with the agenda of the Right, fine.  If it aligns itself with the Left, so be it.  I prefer to act in such a Christ-honoring, biblically-focused way that we’re not aligning ourselves with them…but they are lining up with us!  The Church must no longer be enslaved by political zealots of any party.