Not in It to Win It: Why Choosing Sides Sidelines The Church

by Andy Stanley

For all our talk of evangelism, revival, and reaching the lost, clearly those are not our primary concerns. That’s not what we value most. If it were, we would not have allowed ourselves to be dragged into and embroiled in far less noble conflicts with far less noble goals. If evangelism and discipleship were truly most important, we would not have so easily surrendered influence with those who need to be evangelized and discipled. We would not have allowed ourselves to be reduced to a voting bloc. A constituency. Part of the electorate. Pawns.

Instead, we hid our light under a bushel. We lined up behind our political party of choice and leveraged our sacred text to validate our political talking points.

their attempt to save America from the other political party, they lost their opportunity to save half the American population from their sin. Consequently, we all lost influence. We all lost credibility.

The church is not here to win. Just the opposite. By every human measure, our Savior lost. On purpose. With a purpose. And we are his body.

“When the church as a whole is no longer seen as speaking to questions that transcend politics, and when it is no longer united by a common faith that transcends politics, then the world sees strong evidence that Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were right, that religion is really just a cover for people wanting to get their way in the world.”13

The sad truth is, the fear fueling our division has been created, cultivated, and stoked by those who benefit from it. Fear is profitable. Media companies want engagement and fear drives engagement. Wannabe leaders need followers. Fear draws followers. Fear-based messaging is nearly twice as effective as messaging that fails to stir that emotion.

“Dwelling on fear and outrage is spiritually deforming.”4 It’s spiritually deforming because fear entices us to place our faith in the person, party, or platform that promises to protect us from whatever they’ve convinced us we should fear.

Pastors and prominent Christian leaders have done their share of fear-mongering as well. They’ve stoked the imaginations and capitalized on the concerns of their congregants, followers, and mailing list subscribers. They’ve contributed to the image of the godless Democrats and the soulless Republicans.

“Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear. . . . But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

Pastors who publicly aligned themselves and their churches with a political party or candidate abandoned their calling, undermined their credibility, and exploited the body of Christ.

The problem with the culture war is that there aren’t just winners and losers. There are casualties. When the church takes a leading role in the fray, the casualty is always the faith of the next generation. Their faith is sacrificed on the altar of temporary power and political gain.

the culture war approach “often confuses Christian power with biblical justice, and it creates incentives for Christians to not just seek power but to feel a sense of

failure and emergency when they are not in positions of cultural or political control.

“Any admonition that declares that we must rule should be checked with the immediate reminder that Christ did not. It is the cross—not the boardroom, not the Oval Office, and not the box office—that is the absolute center of the Kingdom of God.”

That’s how they win. The entire endeavor is fueled by fear. Both sides of any culture war conflict need an enemy to survive. They need an enemy to exist. This is why Christians and the church in particular should refuse to participate.

In political and imperial terms, Jesus lost.

As Ed Stetzer asserts, “You can’t hate people and engage them with the gospel at the same time. You can’t war with people and show the love of Jesus. You can’t be both outraged and on mission.

Politically active pastors and churches, by nature of their public affiliation, eliminate common ground with anyone associated with or sympathetic to the other party. It’s politics first, faith second . . . or perhaps third. It’s One God under Nation . . . There’s no getting around it. Politically associated churches attempt to leverage Jesus for an agenda other than the agenda of Jesus. Judas tried that.

Leveraging Jesus, the teaching of Jesus, or the ekklesia of Jesus for a purpose other than the mission of Jesus is just another way to gain the whole world and lose our souls. And our influence.

Our faith is not an ornament. It’s not an adjective. There are no Christian Republicans. There are no Christian Democrats. You can’t have two masters. Having two masters didn’t work in the first century. And it doesn’t work now. Until we let go of our infatuation with winning, we will continue to be divided. We will continue responding to culture and change as if we have no choice but to play by the rules of the kingdoms of this world. Consequently, we will continue to be used, leveraged, and, ultimately, ignored.

Public alignment with a candidate or party is a betrayal of the church’s imperative, our mandate, to make disciples. Anything that serves as an obstacle to that simple imperative should be eliminated from a local church.

With each inflammatory political post on social media, we make Jesus secondary and politics primary. Disparaging words about anyone who voted for “that candidate” push people away from our Jesus.

church steps into the culture war arena. Many have noted how millennials and Gen Z are convinced that evangelicals are double-stitch sewn into the hip pocket of the Republican Party. Russell Moore summarizes what pastors all over the country have observed: “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.

because they disapprove of Jesus. They are leaving because they’re convinced that the church itself disapproves of Jesus!

Perhaps your political party of choice has become your primary identity marker rather than your faith. Perhaps you’re guilty of one God under Nation.

I was raised Southern Baptist. We canceled pretty much everybody except other Southern Baptists.

The reality is that if you say one thing I disagree with or don’t like, I discount everything you’ve ever said, along with everything you’ve ever accomplished. You’re dead to me.

Cancel culture cancels the right to be wrong.

Their interpretation overruled my explanation. Basically, they didn’t believe me. They could not imagine that I decided to suspend in-person worship services just to protect the community. There had to be another reason, an ulterior, politically motivated motive.

It was baffling. Baffling because they didn’t leave over something I said or did. They left because I wouldn’t say or do what they were convinced I should say or do. And by their own admission, what they wanted me to say and do had nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus. It was based entirely on partisan spin. So they canceled their church! For now anyway.

All Democrats are not morally corrupt, anti-God, anti-family, and anti-church, and all Republicans are not anti-voting-rights, anti-healthcare,

healthcare, and anti-vaccine. Let’s not participate in that type of labeling. This kind of rhetoric divides American from American. It divides Christian from Christian as well.

When we reimagine Jesus to fit our partisan agendas, we rob the world of the message that changed the world. We cancel the message that canceled our sin.

The Roman Colosseum is now a monument to the suffering of Jesus—the same Jesus who was viewed as a threat to the empire and consequently crucified by the empire.

Christianity was the catalyst for “the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen.”

The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the pagan—even the Roman—ones it replaced. . . . It objected to infanticide, to prostitution, and to the principle that might means right. It insisted that women were as valuable as men. . . . It demanded that even a society’s enemies be regarded as human. . . . All of this was asking the impossible: but it happened.6

The reversal happened in part because long before the value of a human life became self-evident to the Roman Empire, Christians were busy rescuing and raising abandoned children with no financial help from state and local governments. Christians rejected and condemned infanticide from the beginning. The Didache, a first-century Christian handbook, states, “You shall not . . . kill that which is born.

Classical philosophers considered mercy and pity to be character defects, contrary to justice. Not until Jesus did that attitude change.

As citizens of the empire internalized and embraced the kingdom values Jesus introduced, the empire itself began to change. As a result, to quote Bart, the ekklesia of Jesus triggered “the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen

nation-changing was never part of his agenda. His agenda was broader than changing or rescuing any one nation. His agenda encompassed all nations. Specifically, people from all nations.

Jesus instructed his followers to do unto one another as he had done unto them.

Theologian Don Carson writes, “I suspect that one of the reasons why there are so many exhortations in the New Testament for Christians to love other Christians is because this is not an easy thing to do.”

The litmus test for being a card-carrying Jesus follower involved nothing even remotely religious. It was relational. It had nothing to do with how one treated God. It had everything to do with how one treated others.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.31

Early Christians were not despised for their behavior. They were despised by the empire for their allegiance to Christ. Imagine if that were the only legitimate charge that could be leveled against us.

The problem with Christians is that they love their Savior more than they love their country!

We’ve lost our voice and diminished our influence because for too many of us the opposite is true. I’m not suggesting that you love your country less. I’m suggesting that we love one another better. In doing so we demonstrate our allegiance to our Savior, who made it clear that our love for one another is the best evidence of our love for the Father. If we want to make America great, we should make more great citizens, citizens for whom the sum and substance of their fault or error is that they are accustomed to meet on a fixed day and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so.35

Against all odds, a cult dedicated to a crucified teacher with no territory, military, or recognized authority survived, multiplied, and eventually replaced the prevailing . . . not religion. Christianity replaced the prevailing worldview.

It will require us to love one another on both sides of the political aisle with our words and with our deeds, with our social media posts, our responses, our resources, and our sermons. It will require us to stop sizing people up and writing them

off because of their political views.