Snippet: Bundled and Smuggled

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

This one is from John Dickson on his podcast, Undeceptions (a podcast I highly recommend). Dickson is involved in so many things—writing books, founding and running organizations, teaching, creating documentaries, podcasting—that' it’s hard to describe exactyly what he does. I see him as one of our leading evangelists and apologists.

This is an excellent and evenhanded example of the type of entanglement of theology and political ideology I wrote about in my last post. Dickson calls it bundling in the May 26, 2024 Undeceptions episode called “American Evangelicalism.”

In Australia, of course, there's universal healthcare through our Medicare system. It's the same as the NHS in the UK. And virtually all Australian and British evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, assume that free healthcare is wise and an important part of society.

But this makes me almost a socialist in America. My conservative evangelical credentials might be seriously questioned. In fact, they were in a recent public event, like two weeks ago.

Someone who'd read that Australians, even Australian Christians, support universal healthcare asked me in a public Q&A that had nothing to do with this topic how this could possibly be that Christians would support universal healthcare. I'm not sure how satisfied he was with my answer. And my point isn't really anything to do with healthcare.

It's that the political views of evangelicals don't necessarily have much to do with theology. They are sometimes just culturally conditioned. Certain cultural and political opinions come to be bundled together and then smuggled into the evangelical outlook without much reflection on whether those opinions really are connected to evangelical theology.

Now don't get me wrong, maybe that's me with my socialist approval of healthcare, or maybe it's American Evangelicals with their frequent rejection of universal healthcare. All I'm saying is that the cultural, the societal, the political, not just the biblical, can shape what it means to be evangelical.

Photo by Lauren Kan on Unsplash

Snippet: "Hot and Toxic"

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from an interview with journalist (and practicing Christian) Tim Alberta in Apple News. His latest book is The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

SHUMITA BASU: What does this mean for the political future of the evangelical church? Are we just going to keep marching toward a more politics-based identity for religious groups like evangelicals?

ALBERTA: My fear is that in the short term, yes, we will. The political environment we are in now is so hot and so toxic, and … with social media and with cable news and with the algorithms set up the way they are, even those Christians I’ve met who have been making a really concerted effort to extract themselves from the political hothouse have told me that inevitably they just keep getting sucked back in. It’s really, really hard to stay out of it. So it’s hard to imagine that this moment we’re in is going to fade anytime soon.

I can identify with this.

And I don’t believe the solution is to ignore politics or political conversations. The Bible speaks to all arenas of life, including politics. But it simply doesn’t provide the blueprint for the right political ideology. It provides principles and wisdom that will lead to many common concerns among Christians but an abundance of diversity when crafting political solutions.

I think that part of the problem is that even some of our most theologically and biblically astute public leaders, who take on cultural issues, have so entangled their political ideologies with their theology that they can’t see the entanglement or figure out how to disentangle it. So they keep feeding us the same entangled perspectives with all the power their powerful communication skills and platforms provide.

The results:

• We equate veering from our political ideology in any policy solution to sin.

• We excuse, minimize, and fail to call out bad behavior and ideas proposed by people on “our side.” Yes, you can vote for someone who behaves badly sometimes (i.e., a human being), but let’s not fail to call it out. Let’s not excuse or minimize it.

• We slander those with whom we disagree.

• Malice.

However, it seems that more and more are seeing the entanglement and battling it in themselves.

I’m hopeful.

This is part of what we’re talking about this weekend (as we did last week) in our series on “How to be Christian During the Election.”

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash