Welcome To The Church Of The Ballot

I have written repeatedly over the past year that political idolatry, the shameless subcontracting of the faith to the Republican Party is harming the work of the church. So here we are post election with Christians excommunicating other Christians for their political beliefs, a power they do not possess, nor even deserve. 

 Here’s a thought. What if Christian values as embodied in scripture were never intended for unbelievers, but were instead guidelines to living for anyone calling themselves Christ followers.  After all, Paul’s letters were always addressed to errant churches, not unbelievers. Our responsibility to unbelievers was not to enforce our values on them but to carry the message of salvation to them, and once they had embraced Christ they would then embrace Christian values.

The church today has gotten that process completely backwards. We’ve abandoned witness for legislation. Failing to change an unbelievers heart,  we no longer “shake the dust off our feet” and move on to the next prospect. No, we stay and beat them over the head with legislation, a process Jesus did not endorse. And the results of this patently unscriptural behavior have been disastrous. The church is in decline, and as our political efforts have met stiff resistance we’ve assumed the role of victims, and victims never recover. 

As long as we’re victims we can blame others for our troubles, we never have to look at ourselves and take responsibility for our situation. We can cry persecution while living in the freest country in history for religious expression, we can blame electoral losses on other Christians who do not agree with our politics, we can blame Hollywood, democrats, dark skinned freeloaders, any number of boogeymen just so long as we don’t have to look at ourselves. 

So we become sowers of confusion and discord. We reflect hate to the very people Jesus commanded us to love, and the church declines into irrelevance.  Welcome to the Church Of The Ballot.