When We Mistake Our Team for the Kingdom

Christianity seems have a pattern of mixing politics and religion. We mistake country for Kingdom.

We build societies on Christian principles. We work hard to create communities that reflect our values. And because we're human, we develop blind spots, places where we fail to live up to what we profess. That's not surprising. What's troubling is what happens next: instead of examining those failures honestly, we either ignore them completely or worse, we defend them.

And here's where it gets really confusing: we often double down on our criticisms of the secular world around us at the exact moment we should be looking inward.

The Theater of Cultural Opposition

Nothing has made this clearer to me than watching how we respond to cultural moments we find offensive. We feel compelled to band together, to show force against what we perceive as an increasingly evil society. But our alternative isn't actually holiness—it's just a different celebrity, a different brand, a different team to cheer for.

We're not calling people toward transformation. We're just picking different cultural heroes and pretending that choice makes us righteous.

This isn't new, but it does seem to be intensifying. Our public discourse has become so polarized that civil conversation feels nearly impossible. Lines have been drawn. Teams have been picked. And loyalty to the team often matters more than truth.

The Standard We've Lost

Here's what troubles me most: we've somehow arrived at a place where we hold the watching world to a higher standard than we hold our own leaders and spokespeople.

We'll critique entertainers for moral failures while defending or excusing far worse behavior from those who claim to represent our values. We'll express outrage over cultural symbols we find offensive while remaining silent about cruelty, dishonesty, and pride among those we've aligned ourselves with.

How did we get here? How did we lose the ability to call out wrong when it's wearing our jersey?

When Reason Stops Working

Based on simple facts, a reasonable person should be able to see the inconsistency. But we've lost our grip on reason somewhere along the way. In its place, personal emotions and bias have blinded us to the reality right in front of us.

It's always hard to see our own wrongs. That's human nature. But that difficulty is exactly what should make us more cautious about judgment, not less. It should make us more willing to examine ourselves, not quicker to excuse our failures.

Maybe that's the real problem. We've forgotten that Christian witness begins with self-examination, not cultural warfare. We've forgotten that Jesus was far harder on religious people who thought they had it all figured out than he was on obvious sinners.

What We've Replaced the Gospel With

When Christianity loses the scandal of the Gospel, love your enemies, blessed are the poor, the last shall be first, take the log out of your own eye, we replace it with something more comfortable. We replace it with partisan certainty. Cultural allegiance. The satisfaction of being on the "right side."

We become a religion exactly like other religions: tribal, defensive, more concerned with winning than with truth.

This isn't faithfulness. It's just tribalism in religious clothing.

The Way Forward

So what do we do?

The answer is humility, though I know that's the hardest virtue to embrace. Moral superiority won't work. It's actually part of the problem. We need something more costly and more real.

Here are some practical steps, not because they're easy, but because they're necessary:

1. Practice self-examination before cultural criticism. Before you share that post denouncing some cultural evil, ask yourself: Am I holding my own community to this same standard? Have I been as quick to call out wrongs among "my people" as I am to point them out in others?

2. Choose consistency over convenience. If you believe in certain moral standards, apply them universally, especially to leaders and movements you support. If you wouldn't excuse behavior from your opponents, don't excuse it from your allies.

3. Resist the urge to perform. Much of our cultural engagement has become performative, we're signaling loyalty to our tribe more than we're actually pursuing truth or justice. Before you join a boycott or share outrage, ask: Is this actually about conviction, or is it about showing which team I'm on?

4. Remember who the enemy isn't. Our battle is not against flesh and blood. It’s not against entertainers, not against political opponents, not against people with different values. When we make cultural figures our enemies, we've already lost the plot.

5. Return to the scandal of the Gospel. Christianity is supposed to be strange. It's supposed to make us uncomfortable. If your version of Christian faith fits perfectly with your political tribe's talking points, something has gone wrong. The Gospel should challenge everyone, including (and especially) us.

6. Admit when you've been wrong. This is perhaps the hardest and most necessary step. Humility requires that we're willing to say "I was blind" instead of "they're worse." It means acknowledging when we've defended the indefensible or remained silent when we should have spoken.

A Different Kind of Witness

What would it look like if we became known not for our cultural boycotts or political allegiances, but for our unusual combination of conviction and humility? For holding ourselves to a higher standard than we hold others? For being quicker to confess our own failures than to condemn the world's?

That kind of witness would be genuinely countercultural. It might even look like the early church.

The path forward isn't through winning the culture war. It's through recovering what made Christianity compelling in the first place: a community of broken people who'd encountered grace, who knew they had no grounds for superiority, and who loved both truth and neighbor more than they loved being right.

That's the kind of Christianity the world might actually stop and notice.

Not because it's powerful, but because it's true.

What step could you take this week toward this kind of humility? What blind spot might you need to examine? I'm asking myself the same questions.