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