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

by Andy Stanley

The year 2020 brought out the best and the worst in us. It exposed weaknesses and showcased strengths. It slowed us down in some arenas and forced us to speed up to keep up in others. According to Scott Galloway, author of Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity, the pandemic was an accelerant. “Take any trend—social, business, or personal—and fast-forward ten years.”

Consequently, folks who don’t embrace our faith discovered what’s most important to us as well. And while we may be surprised by what 2020 revealed about us, they aren’t. They suspected it all along. Our response to the events of 2020 simply confirmed their suspicions—namely, that once you scratch off the veneer of our sermons and songs, we value what everybody else does.

And what does the evangelical church in America value most? Winning. What do we fear? Losing. Not winning or losing souls.

We left the impression that our personal faith would suffer irreversible harm if we couldn’t meet indoors every seven days.

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

With the collapse of the middle, nuance left the building. Without nuance, comments are taken more literally than intended, and productive discussion around complex topics becomes virtually impossible.

Non-Christians in Antioch, where the term Christian was first coined, viewed followers of Jesus as political partisans of a king. In time, to be called Christian would mark a man or woman as anti-Roman, not anti-religious. Christians were viewed as threats to the state not because of what they believed. Christians were viewed as threats to the state because of who they chose to obey.

In the first century, no one asked Christians if they were Christian. They were accused of it.

When Christianity is reduced to belief, we lose our voice. We lose our distinction. We’re easily reduced to a constituency, a voting bloc that can be wined, dined, lied to, and bribed. By reducing Christianity to a pagan bifurcation of sacred and secular, we’ve abandoned our opportunity—our responsibility—to serve as the conscience of the nation.

Boycotts, voter guides, protests, suing state and local governments, calling out politicians by name from the pulpit—these are the new spiritual disciplines. And if implemented consistently, with God’s help, we can take our country back! We can win! Which would be fantastic if the win really was winning. But Jesus didn’t come to win the way we define win.

It’s important to remember that Paul wasn’t asking gentiles to recognize the next step in God’s unfolding story of redemption. He was asking them to abandon their entire worldview! He wasn’t asking folks to add another idol to the mantle. Following Jesus would require them to empty the mantle and destroy their images. Including . . . including household deities linked to the centuries-old tradition of ancestor worship. “Sorry, Granddad. I’m a Christian now. Into the fire you go!”

To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.

We refused to alienate half our community by siding with one political party over the other. We chose to stand with Jesus in the messy middle, where problems are solved, rather than capitulate to divisive, broad-brush political talking points.

We’ve been told not to mix politics and religion. If by religion we’re referring to private prayers to and corporate worship of a God who is concerned primarily with private prayers and corporate worship, then, yeah. Don’t mix ’em. Actually, you can’t mix ’em. They exist in two entirely different realms. One in the real world. One in somebody’s imagination.

Most Americans recognize that everything is unnecessarily politicized and polarized. And other than the folks who profit from it, nobody likes it. Nobody likes it because, for the most part, Americans agree on the fundamentals.

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.3 Fear is motivating. It motivates us to shut our minds, hearts, and hands. It makes us smaller. More insecure. As Cherie Harder put it, “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.

For decades, politicians have played to our deepest fears. The other party, the other candidate, is out to destroy everything we value. The other party doesn’t care about your family or your values. They don’t care about America.

Kristin Du Mez sums it up disturbingly well: “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.”

There are three primary psychological responses to fear: fight, flight, or freeze.6 There’s little money to be raised or influence to be gained with options two and three. But option one? Fight? That’s always a win for those looking to win. After all, what’s the outcome of a fight? A winner.

I listened in horror as a Baptist pastor I’ve known for years made light of then-candidate Joe Biden’s memory during a sermon introduction—a sermon on renewing the mind. In my home state of Georgia, Republicans were caricatured as heartless racists who wanted to make it illegal to provide water to folks waiting in line to vote.

Water bottles with Dem lables, of course. Re: Pork Barrel

And what we witnessed destroyed our witness.

Pastors who publicly aligned themselves and their churches with a political party or candidate abandoned their calling, undermined their credib...

And in the end, nobody really won. We still can’t agree on who won. The only clear outcome is that the church lost.

The problem with the culture war is that there aren’t just winners and losers. There are casualties.

University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter coined the phrase culture wars in 1991. He explained the origin of the phrase in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: “As I was interviewing people back in the ’80s and then into the ’90s, the activists who were involved in it all said—left and right—this feels like war.”

As author and commentator David French notes, 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.”

What he says next is worth pausing to catch your breath: “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.”10

But the dirty little secret of culture war advocates, both religious and nonreligious, is that they cannot afford to claim victory, or they lose followers and funding.

This is one of several reasons Jesus refused to take sides in the culture wars of his era.

Washington, DC–based theologian and political theorist Jonathan Leeman contends that when it comes to culture, Jesus followers must neither withdraw nor seek to control, but rather faithfully represent the values of the King we serve.

Might we present a strange and winsome confidence that is not desperate to win the culture wars but is also tenderly and courageously committed to the good of others?

Anyone who tells you, “Withdraw, we’re losing!” or, “Push forward, we’re winning!” may have succumbed to a kind of utopianism, as if we could build heaven on earth.

You can’t make disciples of people you demonize publicly and label as enemies of the faith or the state. 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.”

His assembly. His ekklesia. His kingdom—

Are you more concerned about your kid’s political views or their faith?

I'm concerned if their political views do not reflect their/our faith.

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. Beyond the personal harm inflicted by this insidious and insane trend, there are broader consequences: Cancel culture lowers the IQ of the entire culture. It lowers our IQ because we are no longer willing to listen to or learn from individuals or groups who don’t see, interpret, and experience the world the way we do.

Whose voice, influence, and opinion did you attempt to cancel when you were thirteen? Most likely the voice, influence, and opinion of the people who birthed, fed, and housed you. Then you got older. Over time you learned to appreciate the opinion and perspective of your imperfect providers. The point being, as difficult as it is to admit, sometimes we’re wrong.

Sometimes folks we don’t particularly like and don’t want to be like get it right. Sometimes Democrats are right. Sometimes Republicans are right. Sometimes the other side is partially right. But if we close ourselves off to everything they say, we miss the part we’re missing . . . which means we’re missing something.

Christians are reconciled people who’ve been given the ministry of reconciliation.

During the most recent presidential election cycle, a handful of high-profile Christian leaders platformed a version of Christianity that is anything but. They condoned, celebrated, encouraged, and participated in slander, character assassination, hyperbole, labeling, and vilifying anyone whose politics didn’t line up with their views or their candidate. It was embarrassing. It hurt all of us. I know some of these folks. They taught their children to behave better. Their children should have taken their phones away.

According to Jesus and the apostle Paul, that’s my responsibility. What’s not my responsibility—or theirs—is to publicly judge and alienate people outside our faith community, people who never subscribed to our worldview to begin with. Paul was crystal clear on this: What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?5

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

If you attend or pastor a predominantly white church where demonizing the Democratic Party or party leaders by name is commonplace and applauded, you should put a sign in the lobby that reads, We are unapologetically pro-Republican. Why not? Why make first-timers unnecessarily uncomfortable? Let ’em know before they drop off their kids. Let ’em know before they get seated in the middle of a row. Let ’em know before you take up the offering. And in keeping with my goal of being an equal opportunity offender, if you attend or pastor a predominantly Black or Brown church that is unapologetically political, you should put up a sign as well. Why not? Seriously, why not? “That’s ridiculous, Andy” is not a reason.

Politicizing your church and publicly demonizing the other party is more offensive and more harmful than a sign that tips people off as to what they may experience.

Are we willing to prioritize our faith over our politics? If not, it doesn’t matter what Jesus modeled or what the apostle Paul wrote. As long as we lead with our politics, we will find a way to deconstruct and reimagine Jesus to ensure he fits neatly within our political framework.

Are you willing to follow Jesus regardless of where he leads you politically? To tease that out a bit, are you willing to embrace the others-first kingdom ethic of Jesus when it requires you to keep your mouth shut and your opinions to yourself so as not to lose influence with outsiders? Are you willing to serve rather than cancel? Love rather than demonize? Pray for rather than publicly criticize? If not . . . if that’s too passive . . . or too progressive . . . then maybe your politics have become your lord. Maybe, like Judas, you are attempting to co-opt Jesus.

So why would followers of the King who did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life for the men and women in the party you dislike, prioritize allegiance to and allow ourselves to be divided by the promises of lesser kings? Why would we allow a political view to divide us from a living, breathing you? A you for whom Christ died?

To alter, much less reverse, a culturally held, self-evident assumption is no minor thing, especially when the assumption benefits the assumers. That Christianity—or as Peterson refers to it, “an ethical/religious revelation”—had the power to flip several ancient scripts is no small thing. But—to the point of this book—how? Peterson gives us several clues: 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.

with a bit of prompting from another Christian bishop, Emperor Constantine declared infanticide a crime. Later, Emperor Valentinian made infanticide a capital offense.

What was the catalyst for the change? 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.