As nearly everybody, even starry-eyed Christians, begins to get a sense of the dire situation into which British and Western culture has sunk, I’ve heard a number of people say stuff along the lines of “Politicians and scientists won’t save us – only Jesus is the answer.” And I don’t disagree… subject, though, to a number of serious qualifications.
I’ve been reading a book lamenting Evangelicalism’s loss of direction over the last few decades, which it attributes ultimately to the Lausanne Covenant. Without doing proper justice to the arguments, that movement was when Evangelicals decided they must involve social justice with their evangelism, as well as seeking to do so in a spirit of ecumenism with every branch of the Christian Church.
The writer regards this as having been disastrous, and much of what I’ve written on this blog down the years, from exposing the Open Theism of BioLogos to the divisive adoption of Critical Race Theory by much of what has come to be called “Big Eva” in America, reflects a similar view. As indeed does my ongoing critique of Pentecostal theology’s incorporation into Biblical Christianity, a move also decried by the book’s strictly Reformed author.
However, I disagree with the author in some areas, partly because of his tendency to attribute the problems entirely to deliberate malice rather than deception (aka “useful idiocy”), which condemns as apostates not only most of the Evangelicals whose books you’ve ever read, but also a number of my personal friends mentioned in the book, of whom I know better.
In my view he has also tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater by apparently rejecting any attempt to see the Gospel as wider than simple proclamation of individual forgiveness of sins. I haven’t time here to examine where I think his own theology is blinkered, but perhaps a better analogy than babies and baths is that I think he has somewhat misdiagnosed the disease. It seems to me, from my own knowledge of the Bible, that Evangelicalism’s problem is not so much that it has rediscovered social and political concern, the arts, science and so on, but that in doing so it has swallowed fashionable non-biblical, and usually socialist, concepts of the issues.
In other words, Evangelicalism (like most of the traditional churches) has become captured by the same “Long March Through the Institutions” that we now find has infiltrated pretty well every aspect of our lives. I don’t doubt that this has involved some cynical ideological manipulation by closet Marxists, but more important has been the same lack of spiritual discernment that nearly all of us have exhibited over the years, by exposing ourselves to the spirit of the age as if it were religiously neutral. We failed to understand that there is no buffer zone between God’s word and Satan’s deception. Hence we have to begin by becoming undeceived.
And so it seemed obvious to most of us that the answer to world poverty was for rich nations to give the poor our money, and only a minority (like my banker friend) questioned whether that might only produce subservient dependance, not to mention creating a gravy-train for corrupted institutions. We see the consequences both in Africa’s continued inability to develop, and in the Western cities reduced to drug-soaked shanty towns by misconceived and corrupt welfare systems (dig into Thomas Sowell for that).
There was a moral appeal in the simplistic idea that “our” capitalist greed had created all the inequality, but it failed entirely to differentiate wealth-creating free enterprise from globalist corporatism (which we now see as wedded to State and NGO interests in things like the military-industrial complex, the green industrial-complex, unaccountable Intelligence agencies, and the Deep State, to name just a few). And so even now many Christians are suckers for white guilt and the denigration of the Christian civilisation that is the only reason they are free to discuss it or preach the gospel, or rich enough to care about the underdeveloped world. And they hate the industry that has blessed the poor.
Nearly all of us came to assume, in the way we were intended to by cynical revoutionary ideologues, that issues from feminism and gay rights to anti-racism are matters of compassion rather than, as they always were, attempts to subvert the world order to a socialist utopia. Now that Creation itself is being denied by transgenderism, that agenda has become all too clear.
Likewise, Evangelicals were quick to swallow the climate alarmism that can be traced back to the Club of Rome’s perception that global warming could be weaponised to serve a socialist world order. And so organisations like Tearfund are pushing the whole Net Zero Agenda, along with an approach to their mission virtually indistinguishable from their secular peer-NGOs.
OK, so far I would appear to be endorsing the message that we should get back to just preaching the Gospel and saving individual brands from the fire, and leave politics and poverty to the heathen. But apart from anything else, that neglects the history of our own freedom to worship and preach the gospel, which has depended on Christ’s sovereignty over the world of politics and ideas as much as over individual souls.
John the Baptist lost his liberty, and his life, for a public critique of King Herod for unlawful marriage (even though Herod Antipas was not fully Jewish). In that, he was echoing the political messages of the OT prophets not only to the kings of Israel, but to the nations round about. Jesus, too, referred to Herod as “that fox,” which as a public statement was as much a speaking-truth-to-power act as anything Jordan Peterson might say. And of course, for Jesus to speak against the religious leaders and the temple-authorities was, in a theocratic state, also political… as his unjust condemnation to death by Jewish and Roman authorities shows.
Why did Jesus have Paul stand before kings and emperors? Not just because kings can legislate for tolerance of Christians, but because kings influence what their people believe. The early Roman church’s organised social concern for the poor and sick (even amounting to sacrificing their lives to care for the sick when others had fled during plagues), not only led people to “see their good deeds and glorify God,” but shamed the authorities into improving society – ultimately, as we know, by its becoming a Christian empire.
Christianised kings, having the power of the State, were prone to lapse into injustice like any others. But some were true Christians (think King Alfred in Wessex), and all were mindful of the teachings of Christ in their lawmaking. We owe Magna Carta to the pressures put on King John by what was, ultimately, a more Christian view of government.
We think of Luther bringing in the Reformation through preaching, but the Reformation spread because it was fostered by believing rulers like the Elector of Saxony. However fallible the English magisterial Reformers were, and however mixed the motives of Tudor monarchs – particularly Henry VIII of course – Protestant believers persuaded political leaders to reform the English Church and allow the preaching of truth.
Admittedly, persecution happened when kings or queens perceived that the truth was threatening their own privileges (and how much of our own vaunted “freedom to worship” only persists because we’re doing so little to hinder the completion of the globalist socialist agenda?). But civil disobedience, and endurance under suffering, led eventually to the political and social outcome of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience that we took for granted until it began to disappear. That in turn steadily escalated the progress towards real democracy (remember democracy?).
I could give other examples – slavery was abolished by a prolonged political campaign, and that campaign not only famously involved the Christian motivation of those like William Wilberforce (though if you read his work, my author might well find some theologically heterodox ideas in it), but the efforts of non-believers – whom we may regard, like Cyrus in the Old Testament, as raised up by God in answer to the prayers of those who understood the Bible’s condemnation of slavery.
The methods of abolition were disputed and messy – it’s possible that handling things differently might have avoided a costly Civil War, Jim Crow laws, and the downstream effects that led to the Civil Rights movement and its capture by the left, and so ultimately the cult of anti-racism that too many Evangelicals, especially in the States, have bought into. But few would dispute that fulfilling the Great Commission was served by the moral imperative to make men free, and by the political actions that made that possible.
Remember that this political action, in Britain’s case, involved the military might of the Royal Navy in curtailing slavery in all but the Muslim world.
What, though, is key (and where I certainly agree with my author), is that not only must the fruit of the gospel overflow in loving actions, but that the nature of those actions should be the product not merely of compassion (feelings!) but of the teaching of the Bible, interpreted as rigorously as for any other theological doctrine. Adding some human ideology to that teaching will inevitably, sooner or later, pervert the gospel and lead to the compromised witness that we have seen, in recent years, achieves little against the slow grinding of totalitarian wheels.
I have to end this with a slightly fuller reference to the example of Pastor Artur Powlowski, in Calgary, Canada, to which I linked in a comment under my last post. He learned the power of Christian politics when the Solidarity Movement peacefully ousted communist oppression in his native Poland. He was converted, as a successful businessman, after he moved abroad, and as a Christian began both to preach (in a “street church” before adding a building) and to feed the poor.
When corrupt local government tried to stop this by lawfare, two decades ago, he learned to resist by civil disobedience, fighting back in the courts, and being willing to suffer financially and physically. He came to international attention when he refused to close his church during COVID (both to meet for worship, and to feed the poor, being absolute mandates in Scripture), and even more when, after preaching to the Truckers protesting against mandatory vaccination he was arrested as a terrorist (for preaching!), physically abused, kept in solitary confinement, exposed to an official plot to murder him, transferred to a maximum security jail after preaching in prison, and even illegally put on the prison’s psychiatric ward… all things we “free” Christians thought were from Joe Stalin’s Gulag, rather than being features of modern life in Canada, or America, or England.
The State’s escalation of pressure to conform is formulaic: from bribery to threats, to harassment of family, to lawfare, to imprisonment, to physical mistreatment, to murder if all else fails.
Artur’s Christian response is also formulaic: ignoring threats and keeping on doing good and proclaiming Christ, refusing to compromise, using whatever legal defences are available, using the media to tell the truth (including naming names) – and being faithful under suffering. Every time someone does that, Satan is exposed for what he is. When everybody does it, kingdoms are shaken. Jesus is glorified, and society is transformed.
