There is something profoundly shameful about placing the name of Jesus Christ beside a political allegiance, as though the crucified and risen Lord belongs on the platform of a party. We speak His name, announce our political convictions, and scarcely notice the contradiction. We have taken the One in whom all things hold together and recruited Him to endorse one fragment of a divided world.
I write this as an accusation I must first bring against myself. Whenever political anger captures my heart, whenever being right becomes more precious than remaining in Christ, I participate in this dishonor. The evil begins before I cast a vote or repeat a slogan. It begins when another source gains possession of my inward life.
The New Testament does not give us a sentence declaring every political opinion sinful. Its challenge reaches deeper: we belong to Christ. No party, nation, cause, or ideology has the right to possess what He purchased.
The Kingdom Jesus Refused to Make Political
Jesus stood before Pilate and declared that His kingdom was not of this world. He immediately connected that distinction to the conduct of His servants: if His kingdom arose from this world, His servants would fight to prevent His arrest (John 18:36). The origin of His kingdom determines its character. We cannot claim its heavenly origin while adopting the world’s hunger to dominate.
When the crowd wanted to make Him king, Jesus withdrew (John 6:15). Here was an opportunity for popular influence, public authority, and national leadership. He refused it. How strange that we eagerly pursue, in His name, the very enthronement He would not accept.
In the wilderness, the devil offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world and their glory in exchange for worship (Matthew 4:8–10). That temptation exposes the spiritual danger beneath the promise of power. We imagine that sufficient influence will allow us to accomplish good. But what must we bow before to obtain it? What dishonesty must we excuse? Whose cruelty must we defend? How much of our conscience must become negotiable?
We ought to tremble before those questions. The fact that we intend to accomplish something good does not mean that the power we seek, the methods we adopt, or the spirit we express comes from God.
The Old Testament’s Warning
The Old Testament makes this danger painfully visible. Israel demanded a king so that it could resemble the surrounding nations. God told Samuel that the people had rejected His kingship, and Samuel warned them that their desired ruler would take their sons, daughters, fields, and goods (1 Samuel 8). Their longing for visible security opened the door to servitude.
That passage does not mean every king was equally wicked. David’s calling was real. Yet even David’s authority became an instrument of adultery, concealment, and murder (2 Samuel 11–12). Scripture refuses to let us confuse divine calling with immunity from the corruption of power.
The prophets likewise confronted religious people who preserved sacred observances while practicing oppression. Isaiah condemned hands stained with blood and called the people to seek justice and defend the vulnerable (Isaiah 1:15–17). Amos rejected worship divorced from righteousness (Amos 5:21–24). Religious language cannot sanctify cruelty. Neither can Christian language sanctify a political movement.
Someone will answer that these prophets addressed public injustice. Indeed they did. Faithfulness to God has consequences for our treatment of neighbors, workers, strangers, and enemies. But confronting injustice does not require surrendering our identity to a faction. The prophet stands under God’s judgment alongside the people he rebukes. The partisan continually discovers that judgment belongs to the other side.
That difference is immense. One allows God to search him. The other uses religious language to protect himself from being searched.
Anti-Abortion Is Not a Certificate of Christian Faithfulness
Consider specifically the Christian who announces, “I am against abortion,” as though those words establish faithfulness to Jesus Christ.
They do not.
They tell us your position on an issue. They do not tell us whether you abide in the Vine, whether you love your enemies, whether you bear another person’s burdens, or whether the life of Christ governs your treatment of anyone.
And when you make that position a certificate of Christian authenticity, you have presumed to establish a test that Jesus did not give.
You may be entirely convinced that abortion takes an innocent life. But even that conviction cannot turn your political allegiance into righteousness. Being right about a moral question does not make every response to it holy.
Peter had a sword and an apparently righteous purpose: defend the Lord from those coming to arrest Him. Jesus commanded him to put the sword away (John 18:10–11). A cause does not sanctify the spirit in which we pursue it.
Paul goes further than many of us dare to go. A person can possess extraordinary knowledge, exercise remarkable faith, give away everything, and still be nothing without love (1 Corinthians 13:1–3). If even such sacrifices cannot substitute for love, how dare we imagine that an anti-abortion label can?
What a dreadful bargain when a Christian excuses habitual lying, humiliation, cruelty, or corruption because a politician promises the desired result on abortion. You cannot defend one commandment by granting yourself permission to trample the others. You cannot purchase a preferred outcome with your conscience and call the transaction faithfulness.
Paul explicitly rejects the reasoning that we may do evil so that good will result (Romans 3:8). Yet this becomes the operating principle of political Christianity: tolerate the wickedness, defend the indefensible, silence the conscience—because the outcome supposedly justifies it.
No. The name of Christ does not belong over that bargain.
Where Is Your Love for the Actual Person?
And what of the woman herself? Does she exist in your Christianity as a person to be loved, or merely as the location of an issue to be won?
Will you listen to her fear? Will you help with housing, food, medical care, childcare, and the long exhaustion that continues after everyone else has stopped applauding your convictions? Will you remain beside her if she makes a decision you oppose?
Or does your compassion expire when she refuses your direction?
James exposes the emptiness of blessing a hungry, poorly clothed person while withholding practical help (James 2:15–17). The same searching light falls upon a Christianity that demands enormous things from a frightened woman while offering little more than condemnation and a ballot.
Do not congratulate yourself for defending life if your defense leaves you unwilling to bear anyone’s burden. Do not mistake the intensity of your opposition for the depth of your love. Anger is easy. A slogan is easy. Remaining present through another person’s suffering is costly.
Jesus rebuked religious authorities who carefully observed small requirements while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23). He did not praise their precision as compensation for their mercilessness. Their selective obedience exposed their condition.
That rebuke should shake any Christian who makes abortion the one question that excuses indifference to every other expression of human suffering. The unborn child must never become an alibi for despising the immigrant, abandoning the poor, mocking the vulnerable, or celebrating violence. Human beings do not cease to matter to God after birth.
You can defend unborn life while despising the frightened woman carrying it. You can demand a birth while refusing the costly love that must surround mother and child afterward. You can speak of sacred life while cultivating contempt toward people already breathing before you.
Your position cannot substitute for the fruit of the Spirit.
The evil I am naming is the conversion of moral concern into an idol: an identity that claims your loyalty, excuses your hatred, and borrows Christ’s name to protect itself from examination.
If your anti-abortion identity teaches you whom to despise, it is discipling you in something other than Christ. If it requires you to defend falsehood, it is demanding disobedience. If it becomes the ground on which you declare yourself righteous, it has displaced the Lord you claim to serve.
The Other Political Camp Has No Exemption
To those who call themselves pro-abortion, or defend abortion under the language of choice: freedom does not relieve us of the obligation to reckon honestly with developing human life. Compassion cannot mean dismissing every moral question as interference.
Women facing desperate circumstances deserve practical help, patient listening, and love. They should never become symbols in someone else’s campaign. Neither should unborn life disappear behind a slogan.
Do not assume that opposing religious coercion establishes your own righteousness. You, too, can reduce people to arguments. You, too, can substitute the approval of your political community for the searching of your conscience before God. You, too, can become so determined to defeat the opposing camp that you cease to hear anything except your own side.
These positions are not identical, and the people holding them do not all have the same motives. But neither camp possesses Christ. Neither label demonstrates spiritual maturity. The searching question is whether we will love the actual people before us when doing so brings no political advantage.
No Election Suspends the Life of Christ
Paul identified the works of the flesh as including hatred, strife, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, divisions, and factions (Galatians 5:19–21). How much political Christianity is sustained by precisely these things?
We excuse the temper because the cause is urgent. We bless the faction because its opponents seem worse. We call anger discernment and contempt conviction.
Yet the fruit of the Spirit remains love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23).
No election suspends that standard.
There is no emergency clause in abiding. There is no permission to abandon the character of Christ until the danger passes. A believer cannot set love aside for the campaign and expect to retrieve it undamaged after the victory.
Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). Christ has broken down the dividing wall and created one new humanity in Himself (Ephesians 2:14–16). What dishonor, then, when believers rebuild walls around political loyalties and treat brothers and sisters as enemies because they will not repeat the approved slogans.
The apostles instructed believers to pray for rulers, honor civil authority, and live peaceably. They also obeyed God when authorities commanded disobedience (1 Timothy 2:1–2; Romans 13:1–7; Acts 5:29). None of this authorizes turning the church into a political constituency.
The church belongs to the One who gave Himself for her. She is not available for recruitment.
Lay This False Righteousness Down
I will therefore call the fusion evil: using Christ to sanctify our appetite for control; making political allegiance a measure of faithfulness; excusing falsehood because our side benefits; teaching believers to fear their neighbors more than they trust their Lord.
These are despicable betrayals precisely because they wear His name.
And I must not make even this accusation into another platform from which to congratulate myself. I can denounce political Christianity with the same contempt I condemn in others. My argument, too, must come under the judgment of Christ. If I have words against hatred but no love for the people caught in it, I have not escaped the disease.
The answer begins with repentance.
Let the party lose its claim upon our hearts. Let the outrage fall silent long enough for us to recognize its source. Bring our convictions themselves under the judgment of Christ.
You are not made alive by opposing abortion. You are not made alive by defending it. You are not joined to God through a political cause. Your calling is to abide in Christ (John 15:4–5) and allow His life—Zoe—to become actual in your dealings with every person, including the person whose decision you most deeply oppose.
Jesus did not say the world would recognize His disciples by their political victories. He said they would be known by their love for one another (John 13:35).
We have no right to replace His testimony with ours.
