Confronting the Myth that Pastors Must Stay Out of Politics

Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice “is firing back against the absurd, un-American demands that pastors must ‘stay out of politics.’… Rice is urgently calling on Christian leaders across the nation to STEP UP, find their courage, and get aggressively involved ahead of the most important midterm elections of our lifetimes.” This is almost a day late and a dollar short. It’s going to be hard to fix the problem in a few weeks. Pastors should have been dealing with the civil side of government forever! Our session told our new pastor not to preach on politics.

Unfortunately, most pastors don’t know how to preach on what we have named ‘politics.’ It’s not ‘politics’; it’s civil government. I wrote my book God and Government to show that civil government is one form of biblical government that includes self-government (Prov. 25:28; Gal. 5:22-23; 2 Tim. 1:7; 2 Peter 1:5-6), family governments (Eph. 5:22-25; Col. 3:17-20), church governments (Matt. 18:17; Acts 6:1-6; 15: 1-35; 1 Tim. 3:1-7; Titus 1:5; 1 Cor. 5:1-2; 6:1-8), and civil governments (Ex. 18).

Many Christians have been bamboozled into believing that religion should be separated from government. If this is done, then there are no moral or jurisdictional restraints. The civil sphere of government is found on nearly every page of Scripture. The Mosaic legislation is filled with civil application of the law. Judah and Israel were judged because of the misuse of the civil sphere. Isaiah presents a vision of Judah and Jerusalem during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. The prophet Isaiah accuses the nation of deep spiritual rebellion, noting that despite their extensive sacrifices and festivals, God rejects their worship because their hands are “full of blood” and they fail to practice justice for the oppressed. God promises to purge the nation’s “dross,” including the debasement of the currency and commerce (Isa. 1). David’s treatment of Uriah the Hittite (2 Sam. 11) and Ahab and Jezebel’s treatment of Naboth also come to mind (1 Kings 21).

According to a radio editorial some years ago, “a man’s religion and the strength of his conviction are his own personal matter” and therefore “religion should not interfere with politics.”[1] Regrettably, many churches during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power accepted the argument that religion and morality should be separated from politics based on the ever-operating neutrality myth. “Religion was a private matter,” historian Richard V. Pierard concluded, “that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order—nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft—operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.”[2]

The church’s sole concern and domain was a person’s spiritual life. “The Erlangen church historian Hermann Jorda declared in 1917 that the state, the natural order of God, followed its own autonomous laws while the kingdom of God was concerned with the soul and operated separately on the basis of the morality of the gospel.”[3] Because of this disjunction—built on the myth of neutrality—Hitler knew he could carry out his devilish schemes unhindered by religious arguments and pressures. The “Confessional Church” took a different, non-neutral position.

[It] opposed the Nazification of the Protestant churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories and denounced the anti-Christian doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. In between lay the majority of Protestants, who seemed too timid to join either of the two warring groups, who sat on the fence and eventually, for the most part, landed in the arms of Hitler, accepting his authority to intervene in church affairs and obeying his commands without open protest.[4]

Those “who sat on the fence,” having fallen for the neutrality myth, supported Hitler by default. While they did not openly join with the “German Christians,” a pro-Hitler alliance of ministers and churches, their inaction, their supposed neutrality, “landed them in the arms of Hitler” anyway.

Congressman Wilson Lumpkin (1783-1870) attempted to use the neutrality argument to keep Christians from arguing against removing the Cherokee Indians from Georgia in what has become known as the “Trail of Tears.”

“[Lumpkin] decried those Christians who left their proper realm and sought to involve themselves in politics as ‘canting fanatics.’ He said he had no trouble with ‘pure religion’ (that is, religion that steered clear of politics), ‘but the undefiled religion of the Cross is a separate and distinct thing in its nature from the noisy cant of the pretenders who have cost this Government, since the commencement of the present session of Congress, considerably upwards of $100,000 by their various intermeddlings with the political concerns of the country.’”[5]

In 2003, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry criticized the Vatican for saying that “it’s important to not have the church instructing politicians. That is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America.”[6] Would Kerry have agreed to the following logic of his position?

• “It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about slavery.”

• “It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about ethnic cleansing.”

• “It’s important not to have the church instructing politicians about civil rights.”

The church’s failure to address the issues of the day, including civil/political issues, has made it possible for the enemies of the gospel to impose their wicked worldview on the most innocent among us in their support of abortion by appealing to the Bible! “You know, Jesus didn’t get mixed up in politics.” The Great Commission says otherwise.

For Christians to adopt the neutrality myth is to fall into the humanist trap, to believe that religious convictions are reserved for the heart, home, and the worship center, while the affairs of this world are best handled by using reason, experience, and technical expertise devoid of religious assumptions and convictions.[7]

Humanists recognize the importance of education in shaping worldview shifts and control; why don’t Christians? Because they do not believe the family is a government, and children are not under the jurisdiction and control of civil government! Charles Francis Potter, who founded the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929 and signed the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, made no secret of the purpose of the American public schools.

Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?[8]

According to Rousas J. Rushdoony, modern government education “is erosive and destructive of all culture except the monolithic state, which is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture. When it speaks of the whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be molded by the statist education for the concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from transcendental standards.”[9]

The usual Christian response is to reform public schools, get more parents involved, sue to get a moment of silence, add prayers at sporting events and commencement exercises, release programs, and pass laws to teach the Bible as literature, as they’ve done in Georgia.[10]

Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign overall, does not cry, ‘Mine!,’”[11] Given today’s preoccupation with the last days, Christians often claim, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Satan doesn’t say, ‘Mine’” until Jesus takes us to heaven in the ‘rapture.’”

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[1] Heard on WGST, Atlanta, Georgia (September 12, 1986).

[2] Richard V. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” Fides et Historia (North Newton, KS: The Conference on Faith and History), X:2 (Spring 1978), 13

[3] Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” 14.

[4] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 236. Emphasis added.

[5] Quoted in John Wilson, “Why Evangelicals Can’t Opt Out of Political Engagement,” Books & Culture (July 15, 2002). See John G. West, Jr, The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996).

[6] Quoted in “Kerry criticizes Vatican Pressure,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 2, 2003), D4.

[7] E. L. Hebden Taylor, “Religious Neutrality in Politics,” Applied Christianity (April 1974), 19.

[8] Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 128. Quoted in David A. Noebel, J.F. Baldwin, and Kevin Bywater, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 1995), vi.

[9] R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Vellecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1961] 1998), 10.

[10] David Van Biema, “The Case for teaching the Bible,” Time (March 22, 2007).

[11] Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources

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