Putting the Election in Perspective

This is part of a sermon preached by Phil Johnson on political activism. While I respect Phil, I don't agree with everything he says. But His point is well taken. Only the Gospel changes lives. People need Jesus not a Republican or a Democrat. When Obama or McCain win they will need your prayers and respect. Both men are basically good men based on what I have read and seen on TV. Read this small part of Phil's sermon and tell me what you think.


I thank God for Christians whose vocation is to serve faithfully in our government—including those elected officials who are devoted Christians. But let’s be clear, here: that’s a different vocation from the calling of a pastor. And I am speaking to you as pastors and church leaders: It’s well-nigh impossible to be a good pastor full time if you also fancy yourself a political lobbyist.

We need to remember that political clout has nothing whatsoever to do with spiritual power. Study the priorities for the church in the New Testament; look at the duties Scripture outlines for shepherds of the flock. You’ll find no mandate to press the government for legislation on moral issues. In fact, what you’ll see is that jockeying for political clout is one of the very strategies Jesus named as worldly methods that are not to characterize leadership in His kingdom. He said His kingdom is permanently set apart from every earthly dominion because Christ’s kingdom is advanced by humble service rather than through the kind of political strategies that depend on the exercise of human authority.

I’ll show you that in a moment, but first I want to stress this: Nothing in the past half century has done more damage to the evangelical cause than the notion that the best way for Christians to influence society is by wielding our collective political clout. If you think the most important answer to the ills of our society is a legislative remedy; if you imagine that political activism is the most effective way for the church to influence culture; or if you suppose the church is going to win the world for Christ by lobbying in the halls of Congress and by rallying Christians to vote for this or that type of legislation—then both your trust and your priorities are misplaced.

Personally, I think the tendency to seek legislative remedies for every social ill is one of the absolute worst tendencies of contemporary secular society, and it disturbs me greatly to see Christians more or less follow that pattern blindly. To borrow a thought from the title of John MacArthur’s least-popular book ever, Government Cannot Save Us. The only power that can truly and permanently rescue human society from its own spiritual ills is the transforming power of gospel of Jesus Christ. And that happens through the regeneration of individual human hearts, right? We need to remind ourselves of that fact often, and put more of our energies into the task of evangelism.

We are pastors and church leaders who formally and confessionally recognize the authority of Scripture. Practically the worst kind of spiritual treason we could ever commit would be to supplant the gospel message with a different message, or to allow an earthly agenda to crowd out our spiritual duties. That is exactly the risk we take when we pour money and resources into political and legislative remedies for our society’s spiritual problems.

At the moment, America is in the throes of one of the most hotly contested presidential elections ever. For the first time in more than two decades, the so-called religious right has no clear-cut favorite candidate in the race. None of the likely nominees from either party has credibly expressed any distinctly evangelical convictions. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that the leading candidates on both sides are essentially secular humanists. The candidate who it now appears will be the Republican nominee is a man who has been wobbly on the issues of abortion and same-sex unions, and he has repeatedly made it clear that he doesn’t share the passions of evangelical voters. He once referred to evangelical Republicans as “agents of intolerance.”

Now, consider the bitter irony of this: For more than two decades the number-one issue on the agenda of the evangelical wing of the religious right has been abortion. The number-one legislative goal of evangelical political activists has been to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized abortion. Politically-active evangelicals have been instrumental—in fact, they have been the decisive factor—in the election of every Republican president from Ronald Reagan until now. And yet not only have they failed to achieve their single most-coveted political goal, but they are now approaching a presidential election without a single viable candidate who shares their views.

And meanwhile, if anything, America’s moral decline has accelerated dramatically since evangelicals became politically aggressive in the late 1970s. Although by most accounts evangelicals constitute the largest single voting bloc in America, they have been remarkably ineffective when it comes to using politics to reverse America’s moral and spiritual decline. In fact, if you measure their success or failure according to their own stated political ambitions, evangelicals have failed spectacularly in America’s political arena. Over the past quarter-century, they have not accomplished any of their long-term legislative or constitutional goals.

Worst of all, during that same period of time, the evangelical movement has completely lost its spiritual influence, because the evangelical segment of the church has grown increasingly worldly. Evangelicals have become accustomed to compromise. They have abandoned (or else are in the process of abandoning) virtually all the doctrinal distinctives that made them distinct from Roman Catholics and nominal Christians whose faith amounts to a kind of civil religion. Evangelicals have pretty much forfeited whatever real moral and spiritual authority their movement ever had.

Despite our outspokenness on selected issues in the political realm, American evangelicals have sent a mixed and often flatly contradictory message to anyone who looks at the big picture. Evangelical pulpits are notoriously weak and shallow. Evangelical churches are lukewarm and worldly. Evangelical people as a community tend to be increasingly unholy and are now virtually indistinguishable in lifestyle and behavior from their non-Christian neighbors. Evangelical leaders on the whole seem more concerned with being stylish and admired than with being clear and consistent.

For more than a decade now we have been hearing poll data that suggest people who identify themselves as evangelicals are just as susceptible to divorce and alcohol addiction as their unbelieving neighbors—which can only mean that our church rolls are filled with unconverted people. In fact, just about the only significant difference remaining between evangelicals and unbelievers is how we vote. (And certain forces in the Emerging Church are doing all they can to bring the church in line with the world on that front, too.) No wonder the world hasn’t taken the evangelical wing of the religious right seriously. The evangelical movement hasn’t shown itself serious about what we profess to believe.

I’d be thrilled if America ever elected a president who believed Scripture and followed its principles without compromise. But to be totally honest, I doubt that’s possible in any democratic system. Furthermore, on those rare occasions when truly devoted, Bible-believing Christians have found themselves in possession of the reins of significant political power, they have almost always managed to make a mess of it. Will Durant wrote this about the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell:

“His private morals were impeccable, [but] his public morals were no better than those of other rulers; he used deception or force when he thought them necessary to his major purposes.” And then Durant added this: “No one has yet reconciled Christianity with government.”

The problem, I believe, is the very thing Jesus highlighted in Matthew 20: the kingdom of God is ultimately not advanced by the flexing of political clout.


Let me say this in closing: If the question of who wins the American presidential election this year would alter your shepherding strategy, then you don’t have a very sound agenda. Whether our next president is John McCain or Barack Obama, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll find ourselves under a more hostile or more volatile political regime than Nero’s Rome, which is where Paul ministered. Under those circumstances, Paul did exactly what we need to do: he preached the gospel in every possible venue. And the church flourished.