Category: Christ & Culture (Page 4 of 44)

“Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.” ~Psalm 115:8

One of the more disturbing things among the dozens of disheartening developments around the uncritical embrace of Donald Trump by Christians in America is that preachers are telling their congregations that character does not matter. I am not kidding. Ordained proclaimers of the Gospel are preaching in their pulpits that, when selecting leaders of your nation, character and integrity really shouldn’t play a role.

And we wonder why the Church in America is losing its Christian witness.

Several Christians I know and love dearly have sent me some of these sermons as representative of their own thoughts on the state of our culture and the Church’s role in changing it. They do so unapologetically. Sincerely. “Watch this sermon,” they say, “I agree with this 100%.” And the megachurch preacher they send me is telling thousands of Christians on a Sunday morning that character doesn’t matter.

Gary Hamrick, the preacher at Cornerstone Chapel in Virginia, says a Christian’s vote is not a valentine. You’re not saying you love a guy just because you vote for him. You’re not approving of his vibes or his look, the language he uses or the ways he acts. Your vote is purely about policy, not character.

Josh Howerton, the preacher at Lakepointe Church in Dallas, says a Christian should vote policy over personality. To quote him directly, “Stop looking at the person and only look at the policy!”

Both of these preachers, and countless others like them, are moving their congregations away from considering a candidate’s character. They’re telling us that character doesn’t matter.

I’m telling you it does. Character matters. It matters a great deal.

One reason it matters is that Christians who are giddily supporting and defending Donald Trump today were denouncing Bill Clinton thirty years ago for lesser crimes. The American Christians I knew then condemned Clinton’s supporters for prioritizing policy agreement over personal character.

In the middle of the Clinton sex scandal, a group of 74 Christian scholars issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency.” It stated, in part:

“We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused as long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy.”

For as long as the United States has been a nation, its political and religious leaders have demanded that personal character and integrity are critical for those we follow. For as long as God has been talking to his people, from burning bushes and shaking mountains, through the written word and the incarnate Word, he and his people have demanded ethical behavior from its leaders. So, today, when preachers are telling their churches that character doesn’t matter, that we should be placing policy over personal integrity and ethics, it destroys our credibility. It makes us out as hypocrites who really are only interested in political power and control.

Secondly, character matters because a nation becomes like its leaders. A corporation, a church, a civic club, a bowling team–all groups become like their leaders. Russell Moore, in an essay from the March issue of Christianity Today ironically entitled, “Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” argues that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture:

“Defending a president using his power to have sex with his intern by saying, ‘Everybody lies about sex’ isn’t just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, in the fullness of time, they should expect for themselves. Louisianans defending their support for a Nazi propagandist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan because he’s allegedly “pro-life” is not a “lesser of two evils” political transaction. The words pro-life Nazi–like the words pro-life sexual abuser–change the meaning of pro-life in the minds of an entire generation.

No matter what short-term policy outcomes you then “win,” you’ve ended up with a situation in which some people believe authoritarianism and sexual assault can be offset by the right “policy platform,” while others believe that opposing abuse of power or sexual anarchy must necessitate being opposed to “pro-life.” Either way you look at that, you lose.”

What happens to policy in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But what is it doing to us Christians when we say character doesn’t matter? That’s the third thing I want to mention here, that character matters because of the way it forms us individually. You don’t think it impacts you and your own development, your own Christian transformation, to say that character doesn’t matter? You don’t think it shapes the way you think and speak and act when you continuously convince yourself that what’s inside a person doesn’t matter? The Bible makes it clear that external conduct cannot be separated from internal character. What’s inside a person’s heart always comes out of his mouth. Scripture also tells us immorality, boastfulness, and ruthlessness will lead a person to ruin along with all who “approve of those who practice them.”

If I had told you 30 years ago that in your lifetime a vast majority of American Christians would be prioritizing policy over character in a presidential election and that preachers would be preaching that character doesn’t matter when choosing a U.S. president, you would have gasped and asked what in the world has gone so wrong that followers of Jesus would believe and behave in such awful ways. That’s a very good question. You might ask what happened to our culture. What happened with the world? What happened to our young people? The question I can’t shake, or answer, is what in the wide wide world of sports has happened to the Church?

Lots and lots of preachers and Christians are saying today that character doesn’t matter. I’m telling you it does. Because if character doesn’t matter, nothing does.

Peace,

Allan

“Of two evils, choose neither. Christians must turn from the endless cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils and expecting an unrighteous act to produce a righteous result. Choosing the lesser of two evils is still evil, and never should we do evil that good may come.”

~ Charles Spurgeon

I can think of no better way to observe this Fourth of July national holiday in the U.S. in this space than in directing you to an excellent piece written by my brilliant brother Keith on their Center for Christian Studies website. He penned it a couple of days ago; I have saved it for today.

The third-century Church Father Origen wrote that Christians are a tremendous blessing to the cities, states, and nations to which they belong. In fact, they do more good for their countries than any other group of people because of the way they live their lives for Christ Jesus. Keith takes those lines, and another couple from Augustine, to give us a compelling argument that the best way to be a patriotic American–or Canadian or Mexican or Russian or Brit–is to be faithful to our Lord Jesus first.

Here are the lines from Origen, straight from Keith’s opening paragraph:

“Indeed, the more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors—more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can” (Contra Celsum VIII.73). It is Christians, Origen says, who “educate the citizens and teach them to be devoted to God, the guardian of their city; and they take those who have lived good lives in the most insignificant cities up to a divine and heavenly city. To them it could be said: You were faithful in a very insignificant city; come also to the great city where ‘God stands in the congregation of the gods and he judges between gods in the midst’ [Ps. 82:1]” (Contra Celsum VIII.74, emphasis mine).

Keith walks us through some biblical passages and reminds us that the idea of dual citizenship for Christians only developed in later centuries, after it became apparent that Jesus’ idea of “soon” is different from ours. However, he writes, “Christians have always understood that allegiance to the heavenly city is primary, and all other allegiances are relativized, insignificant in comparison.”

It’s a short piece–you can read it for yourself in like four minutes. But, like everything Keith writes, each sentence is packed. Deep. Provocative. And helpful for better articulating what we already know. Or should know. I recommend you read the article two or three times and reflect carefully on each paragraph.

I’ll give you one more paragraph here to tease it:

“As for the United States, the two cities should never have been confused in the first place.  But for those who may have failed to maintain this important distinction in the past—when much of American culture was shaped by or at least paid lip service to Christianity—a valuable service has been rendered by our presidential candidates and national politicians over the last few years.  The line between the two cities has never been plainer, as the insignificance of this earthly city is clearly reflected by the intellectual and moral insignificance of its would-be leaders.“

Keith and I quibble a bit on the details of how Christians should or should not be involved in the worldly ways and means of the very insignificant city, the politics. But we will always agree on one of his final lines in this article: “The best way to involve ourselves, as Origen reminds us, is to be Christ in our neighborhood.”

Here it is. Click on it. Read it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Peace,

Allan