Right Evangelical Politics - American Reformer

Evangelicals Ought to Engage in Politics Rightly

In the American political milieu, and especially so in this chaotic and acrimonious election season, this means our politics will inevitably and unreservedly be right-wing.

To evangelicals accustomed to thinking about politics through the lens of evangelism, I suspect this is already an uncomfortable conclusion to draw. It grates against their sensibilities to explicitly align ourselves to a political side. This risks compromising our witness, they might say. It seems partisan, and therefore unnecessarily divisive, or perhaps even idolatrous — keeping those with left-wing politics from the gospel. Jesus, they aver, is neither right nor left, neither Republican nor Democrat.

These instinctual reactions from some are misplaced, however, and evince a muddled understanding of politics and our Christian responsibilities therein. Evangelicals would do well this election season to reconsider, from the ground up and without drawing a priori conclusions, how we engage in politics.

Our conclusion from the outset, we will see, follows from a sober assessment of the American political landscape and two principles for political participation that evangelicals can broadly and confidently affirm. The first pertains to political priorities and the second pertains to political engagement.

Perspicuous Priorities

Our first principle follows from a relatively anodyne observation: not all political issues are equally important. We should prioritize certain issues over other issues. The pertinent question is: how so? Our first principle — the Principle of Perspicuous Priorities — is this:

The clearer a particular political issue is addressed in the Bible, and the more sharply the issue is contested in our political milieu, the more central it ought to be to our politics.

The Protestant reformers, in contravening papal claims to ultimate authority in scriptural interpretation, affirmed the perspicuity of scripture. That is, that scripture is essentially clear in communicating the essentials regarding God’s character, the nature of salvation, and God’s good design for human flourishing. As a method of interpreting scripture, it is wise therefore for us to read what is unclear in light of what is clear, and to hold that which is clear most central to our theological commitments.

So too with our political commitments. We should understand what is clearly affirmed in scripture and seek to orient our political priorities accordingly. Of course, we do not expect the Bible to give us precise policy prescriptions to our particular moment, but it does give us principles by which to structure our political thinking.

In another era, applying a biblical perspective to politics would require more sophisticated and prudential considerations. When our politics stem from shared moral — indeed religious — presuppositions, the issues over which we divide are much more like in house, familial conflicts. Political debates are less about our fundamental worldview and more about the implications of our worldview.

Not so in our current political milieu. Our political divisions are increasingly sharp and our discourse increasingly acrimonious because the issues over which we divide are far more fundamental, far more anthropological. They cut straight to our understanding of what it means to be human.

Because these issues are so foundational, and because biblical anthropology is so rich, there are little to no degrees of freedom between our most contested issues and the clear, plain teaching of scripture. So what does this mean for our modern politics?

First, this means protecting and promoting human life and dignity from the moment of conception until natural death.

The political left-wing rejects this in favor of autonomous individualism. This manifests in a strident, overtly glorifying advocacy for abortion. Limitations of any kind are not countenanced. Long gone are the days of abortion being lamentable; the killing of millions of our children each year must be celebrated as a positive, liberating good that ought to be funded with taxpayer money. Public opponents of the abortion regime are persecuted and prosecuted. In our current election cycle, indeed, abortion is the primary campaign theme for the political left.

Second, this means protecting and promoting God’s good design for marriage and sexuality.

Men and women are different, complementary, and decidedly not interchangeable. Marriage is the lifelong monogamous union between one man and one woman, oriented towards the generation and education of children. Espousing this good, normative foundation for society is instinctually chastised and vituperated by the political left-wing, who promote in its stead — from the highest levels of government — a panoply of pornographic, rainbow-colored perversions. Transvestism and gender confusion are institutionalized in policy that prevents Christian adoption, undercuts parental authority, and enables child castration.

Lest we confuse this for the views of a fringe cohort, these are the institutional positions of the Democratic Party and its current presidential candidate. These are overt repudiations of what evangelicals believe and what scripture clearly teaches. These issues — the anthropological issues — must be central to our politics. Of course, there are many other issues to which we must apply a biblical perspective, and which matter a great deal.

We might find lawless immigration, foreign interventionism, politically-motivated law-fare, or administrative rot to be supremely important — and so they are, and so are others. The observation we are making is not that these are unimportant, but that in forming our perspectives, there are few others that are quite so basic as proper anthropology.

Therefore, because biblical anthropology redounds to human flourishing, the left-wing’s repudiation is decidedly anti-human and evangelicals cannot support it. Evangelicals must reject the left.

Effective Engagement

Our second principle acknowledges that evangelicals ought to be engaged in politics and, because we seek to live excellently unto the glory of God, and excellence seeks effectiveness, we ought to do so effectively. Our second principle — the Principle of Effective Engagement — is this:

Evangelicals are called to engage in politics wisely and, to the extent that we can, effectively.

Politics pertains to public action taken towards communal ends. Because the kingdom of God is inexorably public — it is of no use to put the light under a basket, as Jesus taught — our faith will inevitably have political implications. Moreover, while Jesus’ command to love our neighbors is often misused in political contexts, we mustn’t discard the principle for its abuses. Because we are called to love our neighbors, and politics shapes the environment in which we and our neighbors live, evangelicals should be politically engaged.

Engagement, of course, is necessary but insufficient as a rule. If we engage, but only in such a manner that is morally upright yet ineffective, then we may have been faithful in our comportment and loved our neighbor in spirit, but we have not loved them in practice. Evangelicals stand on the truth of scripture and of God’s creation order, which redound to human flourishing. When we implement policies that are clearly aligned as such, then we are improving civil society. We cannot improve civil society, however, if we are never effective in achieving our political ends. The goal of our political engagement is achieving political wins that honor and glorify God.

How should we seek effectiveness in our modern politics? A few weeks ago — an eternity on the political timeline of late — Republicans substantially revised their party platform to remove support for a national right to life amendment and other pro-life protections, in favor of a moderated stance declaiming late-term abortions and leaving the issue to the states. Evangelicals, rightly so, denounced the revisions.

In an effort to address evangelicals and other social conservatives concerned with the platform changes, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance offered: “as long as I am part of this administration, social conservatives will always have a seat at the table.” Many prominent evangelicals sneered at this gesture from Vance — just a seat at the table! — as being paltry and insulting.

The impulse driving this reaction is understandable — maybe even righteous — yet misguided. While the GOP’s moderation is lamentable, and we ought to fight against it, we are being dense if we do not still recognize a yawning chasm between the two parties. Moreover, we do not need to understand Vance’s deeply held convictions on our political priorities, or even lack thereof, to rightly discern how to engage.

This brings us to our final point: if evangelicals are to be effective in our political engagement and are to accomplish our political goals, we will have to apply political pressure where it is most likely to generate policy wins. In our political environment, this is unmistakably on the right and with the Republican Party.

The Republican Party is offering a seat at the table; the Democratic Party is not. The former is amenable to political pressure; the latter is not.

We need not endorse the entirety of the Republican Party — a motley coalition by necessity — nor be gullible believers in the promises of politicians to understand this. We merely need to understand transactional incentives. The Democratic coalition is diametrically opposed to our priorities, while the Republican coalition is not. We cannot achieve political wins allying with the Democrats, but we might achieve political wins allying with the Republicans.

Conclusion

Let’s address a couple anticipated objections to close.

In our current political climate, there are many who use liberally — double entendre intended — the term partisan as a pejorative and will be tempted to do so in response to the argument outlined here. If so, this would be either manipulative or obtuse. Though we conclude that evangelical politics are rightly right-wing and ought to manifest in Republican Party engagement, we come to this conclusion by reasoning from principles to prudential application by assessing our current political landscape — far from unthinking fealty to politician or party.

More sophisticated critics might say the argument above is reductive — that the argument only addresses a narrow range of issues. Surely there is more liberty if we expand our scope. This is a cleverer critique because indeed we have focused primarily on the anthropological issues. But our argument is not meant to comprehensively address all of politics, but to orient our politics based on our clear biblical commitments and the fundamental issues of the day. Focusing on priorities has a clarifying effect and, as we have argued, it is sufficient to draw clear conclusions. Moreover, in order to support the left one would need to ignore or reject the left’s anti-human positions, which are in clear contravention of scripture.

We thus conclude where we began: in our modern political milieu, evangelicals ought to be self-consciously right-wing. We should reject the left-wing on principle — based on their clear rejection of biblical anthropology — and ally with the right-wing on prudence, as a vehicle for effecting actual political wins.

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