Let’s Stop Our Unchristian Politics

This week, a college student at the back of a crowded auditorium at a church-related school asked me how we could fix our political system. It was a good question: heads nodded all around her. “How can we as Christians change things so that when we come into power we don’t repeat the same mistakes?” she asked. I’ve been spending two years thinking about this question, and I’d been talking with these students for almost an hour on what I thought was going wrong and how we might fix it. “We’ve got to stop all the unchristian ways Christians do politics,” I said, at last. “We’ve got to act in such a way that we change the tone of the debate — and show people how to respect and work with people who differ from us.”

Christianity has never been so evident in political ads and discourse as it has been in the primaries and now in the general election, but although most Americans still identify themselves as Christian, we can’t even agree on what that means. Christians on the political right insist that if you don’t support their social values issues, you can’t possibly be following Jesus. Christians on the political left insist that if you don’t support their peace and justice issues, you can’t possibly be Christian. So it is that both of the primary ways that people associate their religion and their political action have thus become partisan — and subject to the same bitter and divisive partisan wrangling as secular partisanship.
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