(You can read the first post in the Threads series here)
“I would rather walk alone knowing what I know now than walk with company in ignorance.”
A pastor told me the above quote as we were talking about their anxiety preparing for the Sunday service after Election Day. Elsewhere, a friend texted me asking if they should go to small group after a group member posted a political post on Facebook, worried the member would bring up politics as though there was only one Christian candidate in the race.
This is a larger issue I’ve noticed over the past several years as the so-called “Religious” Right has been emboldened and grown in power. In many of the churches I’ve attended since 2016 (which have been numerous), there’s been a sort of underground movement where left, central, and non-nationalistic right congregants have found one another in a Church culture increasingly hostile to “outsiders.” There has been an exceptional movement in many mainline Christian communities to fight against the “culture,” which is often packaged with not-so-subtle assumptions of a tribalized Christianity, in which a monolith group of people interpret scripture the same way and live accordingly. This has created for many people a culture of fear to speak against the Religious Right within their Christian communities. In a community in which all of life should be walked through together, politics have become a divisive taboo that threaten to and do divide us.
The bulk of the time in the bulk of the congregations I’ve been in or around, the dominant narrative has been that conservative values are of Christ and liberal values are of hell. In some minor congregations I’ve been, the inverse narrative has been true: conservative values are of hell and liberal values are of Christ.
These are backwards and dangerous ways to think about values. Instead, I urge you to consider that Christ is of Christ and the earth is of the earth. Oftentimes, pastors will preach from the pulpit that “we” follow the “values of heaven” instead of “the values of earth” and bank on you not catching that their endorsed values fall perfectly along a particular party line. It has become widespread throughout the Church to confuse the gospel for their culture.
If your pastor happens to mention following values of “heaven” and not of “earth” and those values just so happen to perfectly fall along party lines, it’s likely your own pastor has confused the gospel for their culture. Further, your pastor should, ideally, emphasize and embrace different Christian perspectives on controversial topics. As I instructed to a young man in my own community a few weeks ago, we do a disservice to ourselves and to our siblings when we assume disagreements are due to ignorance instead of understanding and interpretation. When we conceive of our own beliefs as intelligent and our opponents as unintelligent, we deny one another’s equitable access to God. This isn’t to say we can’t have convictions. Rather, this is to say that our convictions should be worked out on our own with fear and trembling rather than our convictions being focused on working out another’s faith with fear mongering and disingenuousness. We are all flawed and all correct and all learning and growing with God. When we center ourselves as children of God instead of as members of a political party, it becomes easier to disagree and those disagreements become less threatening to our unity in Christ. When we assume that others argue with the same careful consideration as us, both sides stand to gain wisdom and perspective from the other.
If someone in your church community feels the need to hide their beliefs in order to be accepted by their siblings, this is a major problem. As you go about the next few months and years, don’t bring politics into your Christian relationships if you lack the spiritual maturity to disagree without division. If you can muster it, though, I think there is much to be gained when two children of God who hold different ideas and interpretations work together to see how God reveals the Divine Self diversely. We can do hard things and have hard conversations when we think of one another primarily as misguided but genuinely pursuing image bearers of the king. I believe that God is tasked with imbuing God’s children with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and that we are called to lavish love and belonging to nothing sinners and saints. Be careful how you speak about political candidates in your relationships, ensuring that for you and your friends, politicians remain broken people and God remains God.
All if that said, don’t be surprised if you find yourself alone in church. The road that leads to life is narrow and you often have to walk it alone. In Jesus’ day, it was the religious more often than the heretics whom Jesus and the disciples found themselves threatened by. As we navigate coming tyranny and ongoing Christian Nationalism, it will require the Church to stand up for the marginalized and fight against the powers of the Empire – outside and inside of the church. The road against the Empire is a narrow road, but I believe it’s a good one.
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota, sells poetry art here, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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