On Religion: Progressive Evangelicals Decry Political Theology
(ANALYSIS) The hours after an apparent assassination attempt are a tricky time for social media humor.
Some readers didn’t get the joke when a progressive evangelical offered a hot take on the man with an AK-47 hiding in the bushes beside Donald Trump’s golf course.
“This could either be somebody waiting to try to kill the former president or somebody legitimately using his AK as a putter,” noted the Rev. Ben Marsh of First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on X.
Then he added: “Folks, we're talking about Florida here.”
As critics circulated the quip, Marsh reposted strong rejections of political violence, including this appeal: “Please protect Trump and ban these guns!!!”
The furor was timely, since Marsh was one of the first to sign “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” a new statement urging evangelicals to reject verbal violence in American life.
“Unlike the false security promised by political idolatry and its messengers, the perfect love of God drives away all fear,” noted a key passage. Another passage states, “We reject the stoking of fears and the use of threats as an illegitimate form of godly motivation, and we repudiate the use of violence to achieve political goals as incongruent with the way of Christ.”
Skye Jethani of The Holy Post podcast, the document’s lead author, tweeted: “The attempted murder of Donald Trump is evil & every Christian should condemn it.”
In the bitterly divided evangelical world, any discussion of these issues — such as a confession signed by A-list evangelical Trump critics, as well as some doctrinal progressives — will automatically be framed by the rhetoric of the former president and his boldest supporters. Decades of rapier thrusts by late-night comedians, newsroom warriors and oppo researchers fade into the past.
“It’s hard to read this new confession and disagree with any word in it. The statement is correct in virtually all its ... assertions about Jesus Christ’s supremacy over worldly political regimes and about the dehumanizing attitudes that can corrupt Christian political witness,” noted Andrew T. Walker, of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in his article on The Gospel Coalition website.
The question is whether it “ends up telling us almost nothing about how to properly relate Christianity to politics. It becomes a vacuous declaration that one gets the impression is a way to tsk-tsk rightward-facing evangelicals,” he added.
Several commentators have noted that this confession appears — in format and subject matter — to have been inspired by the “Barmen Declaration,” published in 1934 by the Confessing Church of Germany as a rejection of the Nazi Party.
“Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction” declares: “No political ideology or earthly authority can claim the authority that belongs to Christ. ... We reject the false teaching that anyone other than Jesus Christ has been anointed by God as our Savior, or that a Christian's loyalty should belong to any political party. We reject any message that promotes devotion to a human leader or that wraps divine worship around partisanship.”
Another passage added: “We affirm that the character of both our political and spiritual leaders matters. ... We reject the lie that a leader's power, popularity, or political effectiveness is confirmation of God's favor, or that Christians are permitted to ignore the teachings of Christ to protect themselves with worldly power.”
“Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction” does argue that Christian faith “compels us to act with love and mercy toward all from the very beginning of life to the very end." But it avoided the precise language of many "whole life" statements, such as the Democrats for Life affirmation that being “pro-life” means “promoting policies that protect human life at all stages from conception to natural death.”
It’s important, noted Walker, that this new confession says Christians shouldn't retreat from the public square, while it also condemns political actions it considers worldly.
“Which is it? Should we embrace piety on the margins of society or public engagement toward the common good? ... Believing one side is acting against the common good doesn't necessarily justify supporting the other side,” he added.
“The solution isn’t to undermine the common good by choosing the lesser of two evils. The solution is to use political power to promote the common good using the available means within a political community.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.