Dear Ray,
Before anyone tells me that a political platform is Christian, I want to ask a more searching question.
Who is God?
What is His life?
And when His kingdom comes in fullness, what will distinguish it?
Will its glory be that the wealthy kept more while the hungry went without? Will we recognize its righteousness by the number of prisoners executed? Will its strength be measured by how effectively strangers were frightened away?
These questions expose the distance between invoking God and expressing Him.
God is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. We cannot make Him the endorsement of our preferred policies and then ignore the person through whom He has made Himself known.
Look at Christ.
Look at whom He touches, whom He receives, what He condemns, and what He gives.
He confronts religious hypocrisy. He refuses to make wealth a certificate of righteousness. He commands love for enemies. He identifies Himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned.
Then He gives Himself.
Any claim to Christian politics must face that revelation. A religious label cannot exempt a policy from examination.
And Zoe is the uncreated, eternal life of this God, given to us in Christ. It is no campaign slogan. It is no religious enthusiasm added to our existing judgments. It is the divine life becoming the source of our actual living.
If we claim that life, we must stop giving cruelty a spiritual explanation.
Consider wealth and taxes.
Scripture does not hand us a modern tax schedule. But that does not leave us morally free to protect abundance while treating deprivation as someone else’s problem.
When tax relief for those with the most is purchased by withdrawing necessities from those with the least, the question cannot be settled by calling the arrangement conservative.
Who benefits? Who goes hungry? Who loses the care upon which daily life depends?
The rich man’s comfort does not become sacred because he calls it earned. The poor person’s need does not become unreal because meeting it has a cost.
James condemns favoritism toward the wealthy and the withholding of workers’ wages. Jesus places a searching demand upon our relationship with possessions.
A policy that shields privilege while abandoning vulnerable people cannot borrow His name without facing His judgment.
Consider abortion and the meaning of protecting life.
Concern for unborn life can arise from sincere Christian conviction. But sincerity does not make every restriction wise, every enforcement mechanism just, or every consequence acceptable.
A pregnant woman is a person. Her health, her fear, her poverty, and her circumstances cannot be dismissed as obstacles to a legislative victory.
A child remains a person after birth.
If we demand that a pregnancy continue, then turn away from the mother’s medical care, the infant’s nourishment, or the family’s need for shelter, our concern for life has become selective.
Do not present the prohibition as the completion of love.
Love assumes responsibility. It remains present after the slogan has achieved its purpose.
A movement that speaks urgently for the unborn must answer with equal seriousness for the people who carry, deliver, feed, and raise them. Otherwise, it risks defending an abstraction while abandoning the lives before it.
Consider prisons.
The person convicted of a crime remains human.
Their wrongdoing may require confinement. Their victims deserve protection, care, and justice. None of this grants us permission to turn imprisonment into organized degradation.
A prison system that tolerates abuse, denies necessary care, or treats rehabilitation as weakness should not be defended as Christian firmness.
Jesus does not invite us to forget the prisoner. In Matthew 25, He places the imprisoned among those through whom our response to Him is disclosed.
What does that do to our satisfaction when someone suffers behind a locked door?
Accountability must not become the respectable name for revenge.
Consider executions.
Christians have long disagreed about the state’s authority to impose death. My case against it begins with the finality of what we authorize.
An execution ends every earthly possibility of restitution and transformation. If the judgment is mistaken, the state cannot restore the life it has taken.
And even where guilt is certain, we must ask what spirit is operating in our demand for death.
Are we seeking protection? Or do we need someone’s destruction to satisfy us?
The language of justice can conceal an appetite for vengeance. We should be especially suspicious when execution becomes a spectacle of political strength.
No one should celebrate a death and then assume the celebration expresses the heart of Christ.
The victim’s suffering is real. The answer must not be to make another person’s death an object of delight.
Consider the stranger.
A border does not cancel a person’s humanity.
The circumstances of migration can require difficult public decisions. But deliberate humiliation is not a solution. Cruelty does not become righteous because officials hope it will discourage someone else.
The child at a border is not responsible for our fear. The family seeking safety is not a prop in a demonstration of national toughness.
When suffering itself becomes the instrument of policy, we must name what is happening.
People are being hurt to send a message.
Do not ask me to call that the compassion of Christ.
Consider the sick and the worker.
The Samaritan did not begin by establishing whether the wounded man could reimburse him. He encountered need and accepted a cost.
Christians may disagree about the institutions through which care should be provided. But indifference to preventable suffering cannot become a Christian position simply because it is expressed as an economic preference.
Likewise, the worker is more than an expense to be reduced.
A profitable enterprise does not gain permission to withhold wages, tolerate avoidable danger, or use people until their bodies fail. Economic success cannot absolve exploitation.
If our account of prosperity requires us to stop looking at the people who bear its cost, something is profoundly wrong with that account.
And consider the demand for Christian political privilege.
Where did Christ authorize us to make our neighbors’ civil belonging depend upon sharing our religion?
Where did He tell us that His kingdom would be established by securing advantages for those who carry His name?
He warned His disciples against the pattern of rulers who lord their authority over others. Greatness among them would take the form of service.
Christian nationalism reverses that movement when it seeks power to establish Christians as the people entitled to rule.
A cross displayed beside a platform does not sanctify domination.
Ray, these objections do not establish another party as the vessel of God. The same examination must reach any movement that exploits, deceives, humiliates, or abandons people.
My concern is the presumption that conservative policy arrives already bearing Christ’s approval.
It does not.
Neither does liberal policy.
Every claim must be examined. No party may demand that we silence our conscience to protect its reputation.
And now return to the larger question: when His kingdom is ushered in, what do we see?
Paul describes the kingdom in terms of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. The biblical vision of its consummation includes judgment against evil, the end of death and mourning, and God dwelling with His people.
Its hallmark is God’s presence and righteous rule.
No one buys a superior place before Him. No suffering person becomes expendable to preserve someone else’s comfort. No lie is excused because it benefits the victorious side. No powerful person possesses an exemption from truth.
Justice is no longer corrupted by influence. Peace is more than the silence imposed by fear. Life is no longer consumed by the struggle to protect ourselves from one another.
Christ is fully acknowledged.
That is the horizon by which I want to examine our claims now.
We cannot manufacture that consummation through a political program. But neither can we invoke its King while defending what contradicts His character.
If Zoe is our life, let it reach the place where we excuse the policies we favor.
Let it touch our money, our fear, our anger, our need to punish, and our willingness to look away.
Stop telling us that a platform is Christian because it mentions God.
Tell us what kind of God its conduct is asking us to believe in.
And then place that image beside Jesus Christ.
Does it bear His likeness?
Or have we made a god who blesses our advantages, shares our resentments, and never asks us to surrender anything?
