A Selective Bible and a Politicized Faith

There is a version of American Christianity that has become so intertwined with a political party that it is difficult to tell where the faith ends and the platform begins. This is not a new observation. Scholars, pastors, and disillusioned churchgoers have been making it for years. But what strikes me is not the observation itself. It is how rarely we stop to ask what we have actually lost in the exchange.

I want to be careful here. I am not writing to tell Christians how to vote. I am not making the argument that one party is godly and the other is not. I am making a different argument, and I think it is the more serious one: when the church subordinates the whole counsel of Scripture to a political coalition, it stops being the church and starts being a lobbying arm. And that is a problem regardless of which direction the subordination runs.

The Conference That Stayed With Me

A few years ago I attended Together for the Gospel, a conference that draws some of the most respected voices in Reformed evangelical preaching. These are men who take the text seriously, who pride themselves on expository rigor, on not flinching from hard passages. I was there expecting to be challenged. I was not expecting to see what I saw.

David Platt, a prominent Baptist preacher, took the stage and preached on racial discrimination. He argued, carefully and from Scripture, that this was not a peripheral issue but one with genuine gospel weight. The response in the conference app's chat board was immediate and sharp. A significant number of the attendees, mostly white middle-class pastors, pushed back hard. Some said flatly that racial justice was not a gospel issue. That it did not belong on that stage.

I have turned that moment over in my mind many times since. These were not men who dismiss the Bible. They were men who build their entire identity around taking it seriously. So how does a room full of expository preachers hear a sermon rooted in Scripture and conclude it has nothing to do with the gospel?

The answer, I think, is a selective canon.

The Bible We Read and the One We Skip

We have developed, largely without noticing it, a habit of treating certain biblical themes as essential and others as optional. Sexual ethics: essential. Abortion: essential. Care for the poor: a nice sentiment, perhaps, but not something we build platforms around. Justice for the marginalized: the language of the other side.

But this is not the Bible's own ordering of priorities. Run a concordance. Count the passages. The Hebrew prophets return again and again to the question of how a society treats its most vulnerable members. Amos thunders against those who trample the poor. Micah asks what God requires and answers with justice, mercy, and humility. Isaiah 58 tears apart religious performance and demands instead that people loose the chains of injustice, share food with the hungry, and shelter the wandering poor. Jesus opens his public ministry in Luke 4 by quoting Isaiah directly. The poor, the prisoner, the blind, the oppressed. That was his announcement.

This is not liberal theology. It is just the text.

The earliest Christians understood this passionately. The thing that distinguished them in the Roman world was not their opposition to Rome's sexual culture, though that was real. It was that they shared meals across class lines. They cared for the sick when the healthy fled. They did not expose unwanted infants. They buried strangers. Pagan observers looked at these people and could not fully explain them, because what they were doing did not make social or economic sense. That was the testimony.

What We've Traded

I am not naive about the issues that drive evangelical political alignment. The sanctity of unborn life is a serious moral concern. The definition of marriage has genuine theological weight. I understand why Christians feel that these are stakes worth voting around.

But here is what I want to press on: in making those issues the whole of our political theology, we have had to go quiet on a great deal else. We have had to look past policies that concentrate wealth upward and leave working families exposed. We have had to minimize the specific, documented, ongoing harm done to Black and brown communities in ways that the prophetic tradition would not minimize. We have had to treat the immigrant and the refugee as political liabilities rather than as the strangers we are commanded, repeatedly, to welcome.

And when a preacher gets up at a Christian conference and tries to bring those things into the room, the room pushes back. That is the moment you know the political alliance has gone too far. It has started editing the Bible.

The Mirror-Image Error

I want to say plainly that the answer here is not an over-politicized progressive church. That version of the problem exists too, and it is just as damaging. When the gospel becomes a delivery vehicle for any party's agenda, left or right, it stops being the gospel. It becomes something smaller.

The prophetic tradition is not liberal or conservative. It is inconvenient to everyone, at different points, which is exactly what you would expect from a word that comes from outside our political arrangements entirely. A church that is truly formed by Scripture will protect unborn life and welcome refugees. It will defend the dignity of marriage and refuse to scapegoat gay people. It will insist on civic order and insist with equal force that civic order be applied without racial double standards. It will make people on both sides of the aisle uncomfortable, and that discomfort is not a bug. It is the point.

What We're Really Talking About

At the end of it, this is a question about what the gospel actually is. If it is primarily a voter registration card, we have already lost something essential. If it is the announcement that the kingdom of God has broken into human history and is reordering everything, including our politics, then it cannot be domesticated by any party.

The early church did not win the ancient world by being reliably aligned with any political faction. They won it by being inexplicably, uncomfortably good to people that the world had already written off. That was the argument. That was the evidence.

I am not sure we are making that argument anymore. But I think we could. And I think it starts by picking up the whole Bible again, not just the parts that fit on a bumper sticker.