Why Christians Lose Power by Legislating Morality

Jesus had a very different plan. Spoiler alert: His was better.

Right now, it feels like evangelical and conservative Christian communities in the US are trapped in a bad relationship.

It’s that old situation where you someone you know is just not with the right person, but no one can tell them until they choose to end it. Meanwhile, everyone on the outside can see things crystal clear.

More than 40 years ago, evangelicals started dating a movement called the Moral Majority. It surely wasn’t the only cause of a shift in the evangelical and conservative churches, but it’s impact can’t be denied. It led a movement on a relentless quest to acquire the political power to force conservative morality on the United States.

The Moral Majority and the leaders who followed its lead charged forward in the name of Jesus, but in truth they had lost trust in His teachings and run out of faith. They lured a countless number of churches into some ancient, damaged ways of thinking that have plagued Christianity for the entirety of its existence:

• What God told us to do doesn’t seem to be working. We’re going to need a new plan.

• We haven’t pleased God. Something’s gone wrong, so we have to try harder.

• Change isn’t happening fast enough. We need more power.

To people observing these faith communities from the outside, it seems painfully clear that the compassion of Jesus and this quest for power don’t match up.

It feels like the Christians who supported this movement had a good thing going with Jesus, and in a classic act of relational self-sabotage, they gave Him the boot in exchange for an abusive relationship that led to destruction.

The Ancient Wound that Brought Us Here

At the end of the day, the Moral Majority’s quest for Christian political power was born of an ancient wound that leads us to question whether God is worthy of our trust.

The first commandment is about worshipping other gods because our trust is always the first thing to fail. Likewise, the biblical account of creation begins with humanity posing a question of trust in God’s intent. That question was an arrow in the heart of Adam and Eve that would lead to the fall of mankind. It was a wound that would reverberate within all of us and never truly heal:

Does God really care?

The Moral Majority didn’t come out of nowhere. Their native distrust had been aggravated by the turmoil and upheaval of the late 60’s and 70’s. It seemed, to many in evangelical and conservative communities, that society was unraveling and that maybe God didn’t care – at least not enough.

What God told us to do doesn’t seem to be working. We’re going to need a new plan.

So, the Moral Majority re-introduced a seductive, lowercase “g” god to the Christian menu, political power.

This temptation to seek power as a means to serve Jesus goes all the way back to his own ministry, even before he died. His disciples often struggled to trust the path Jesus had set before them.

And ever since then, Christians have struggled to trust the teachings of Jesus because it all just seems too good to be true. In the Christian narrative and in the best of its theology, here is just too much love, acceptance, and truly good intent for our lives to seem like it’s meant for us. Our own negative self-image makes it hard for us to trust God, and we lean into an abusive relationship with power instead.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus Had a Better Plan

And the real tragedy of it is, Christianity in America had already strayed pretty far from the roadmap Jesus left us. It wasn’t working in the 60’s and 70’s because they weren’t following the plan, but they doubled down on something worse.

Every time Christians do terrible things in the name of God, it’s born from a lack of trust in His goodness and a futile attempt to seize power and force change upon others. In the name of God, people of the Kingdom of Heaven often manage to drag the world back to hell.

God had a different plan, and no one understood the original plan like Jesus, because he was there when it was drawn up.

• In this story, he’s the Son of God, part of a Holy Trinity, a Triune God made of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s crazy spiritual math we aren’t meant to understand: they are three distinct people and yet still somehow one.

• That’s a whole other thing to unpack elsewhere, but the long and short of the Trinity is, Jesus IS God, and God is love.

• That being the case, in this story the universe itself was born of love and not of accident, and it was born with a plan for creation to be loved and to love one another.

In other words, in the Christian narrative, all of time and history and creation is preceded by love, born of love, and is actively being loved into recovery, redemption, and renewal.

And Jesus is at the center of it all.

Pretty good stuff.

Jesus is the compass pointing true North for moments like this when the church loses its way and trusts in things that don’t align with the plan. For instance…

Jesus Didn’t Seek Political Power to Reach His Goals

It’s hard to understand how shocking this really was, and it’s almost impossible to truly appreciate the Jesus story in the gospels without understanding the world into which he was born.

Foremost on the minds of his people were questions like:

• Do we need a new plan?

• How much harder can we try?

• What kind of power can we gain to turn this thing around?

It’s almost impossible to understand the level of disappointment and discouragement the Jewish people felt with God at this point in history. They had found a Promised Land and had then been conquered and occupied and re-conquered and re-occupied for hundreds of years.

Worse yet, for those hundreds of years the prophets of old had stopped speaking. Even worse, there had been false hopes – false messiahs and violent uprisings and death of loved ones. It simply seemed like God was silent, and it felt possible that he did not care.

The question on everyone’s mind was,

When is a Messiah coming to turn this thing around and release us from oppression?

The deeper question behind that was,

What did we do wrong?

The people began to splinter into polarized political groups, each with their own opinion on how to set things right. Historians, forgive me the oversimplification here, but there were:

• Pharisees who were trying find the perfect formula for human behavior that would please God. They had added hundreds of new laws onto an already dense Old Testament to try and figure it out. “Try harder.”

• Sadducees weren’t on board with the new laws Pharisees had introduced, and they tried to leverage wealth and power to manage the situation.

• Zealots were willing to fight and use armed conflict to bring about change, and they had.

• Essenes who decided everyone else was wrong and retreated off on their own to try something new in the desert.

Then, caught in the middle of the fractious conversation was everyone else, everyone who was just trying to live their lives and get by.

This starting to sound familiar?

This conversation revolved around Jerusalem - the big city, the center of political power, the place from which you could leverage the power of the “media” and disperse a new message throughout the entire region.

And to further pack Jerusalem with potential for affecting change, there was a temple there which people understood to house the real presence of God.

So, the loudest voices of a people disappointed in God were trying many different ways to set things right in their culture’s center of power. Better yet, they were trying to do it in the place where God “was.”

1. Jerusalem was the place to be if you wanted to affect policy. It was the place to be if you wanted the power to affect change.

2. And this was the place that, save for a few required pilgrimages back to the big city for Passover, Jesus avoided.

Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry in Galilee, which was about as far in the geography of the Holy Land as you could go. It was two regions to the north from Jerusalem and its region of Judea, and between the two was a substantial buffer called Samaria. Samaria was full of people the Jewish considered to be heretical. To the urbanites in the center of power, Galilee was a far-off, backwater region separated from them by enemy territory.

There’s something else notable about Galilee. It wasn’t just a Jewish region. It was a melting pot of cultures and religions.

In this diverse land, far isolated from the center of power, Jesus began a grassroots movement based on the power of compassion, healing, and hope.

Jesus Prioritized the Personal Over the Political

Though the gospels are accented with stories of big crowds, they are driven by personal encounters and intimate, healing moments.

The personal encounters that drive the gospels are perhaps most notable for the societal, legal, physical, religious, moral, and social boundaries Jesus crossed to make them happen.

The gospels are a symphony of defiance against the rules of the day about who “belonged.”

When you understand the historical context and significance of nearly every personal narrative in the gospels, you see Jesus on a simple, stubborn quest to get one big message across:

“You belong.”

For every sick person healed, there was a message that took precedence over the actual illness. Illness was seen to be a result of sin. By healing the sick, Jesus was saying, “you are still loved by your Creator, and there is nothing that can take that away.”

When you understand the historical and religious context of the gospels, encounter after encounter brings that same message for different reasons.

Jesus went seeking everyone who had been told they didn’t belong and let them know they were loved by God. Period.

Later, the disciples would look back and realize that Jesus was God – that God himself had come to earth to find everyone who had been told they didn’t belong and love them into a changed life.

Now, God didn’t just live in that temple in Jerusalem. The story was no longer, “You go to God.” It was, “He comes to you.” That simple shift had seismic, lasting aftershocks in the way God was perceived.

At the end of the day, Jesus had little use for the power and politics of Jerusalem. (When he did, it was very strategic and the subject for a whole different writing.)

• He knew that change doesn’t come from the outside in or the top down.

• He knew that change couldn’t be regulated or enforced by policy.

He knew that change begins when you seek someone out, meet their needs as a humble servant, and look them right in the eye and say, with words if necessary, “You belong.”

Jesus was Leaving Us a Plan to Follow, and It Wasn’t About Policy

Later, the very first Christians would follow the plan Jesus laid out. They would travel to the fringes of the world and build a grassroots movement through personal encounters and gatherings around kitchen tables and family settings. They would heal and feed and serve and seek everyone who had been left behind or told they didn’t belong.

They would build a church in all of the places people of power ignored.

A few hundred years later, the Romans would legalize Christianity and being to reshape it in their own image which caused a whole new set of problems that reverberate today, but in those early, pure days, it was real love and real care in all of its inconvenience and sacrifice that was changing lives from the inside out.

So, in short, morality-enforcement political policies aren't the drivers of change.

1. Jesus laid the roadmap, and it left no room for the convenience of voting in delegates to do the work for you and force change upon the world.

2. The church was called to be present in the world, healing, serving, and singing two words together in one key, “you belong,” so that people could meet God for themselves.

In the late 70’s, many Christians, made vulnerable by their disappointment, were scratching their heads wondering what had gone wrong, not knowing they had lost the map.

• They had built new temples where God supposedly lived and called them churches.

• They were spending the bulk of their time and energy on figuring out how to get people to come to their churches on a specific day and time.

• They had lost the strategy of going out, every day, to find the people who had been left behind.

“But what about sins x, y, and z? Aren’t we supposed to fight against them?”

If the Christian narrative is true, no single human was ever changed from the outside in. God’s plan was for grassroots, individual, inconvenient revolutions of mercy and grace that help people understand they are loved as they are.

A fight against sin is easy, and if often offers the Christian a place to hide. Anyone can shout from a distance, "Hey! Don't do that!" and then run away.

How many Christians are ready fight the real fight? Not many are ready for the service and sacrifice it takes to dig in and help individuals understand that no matter how broken or unlovable they may feel, they are loved by Jesus like the old hymn says...

Just as I am, though tossed about

With many a conflict, many a doubt;

Fightings within, and fears without,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

The driving, relentless heartbeat of Christian theology is the doctrine of grace, which author Phillip Yancey described beautifully and succinctly, that "There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and nothing we can do to make him love us less."

In other words, it's God's choice, which we can't take away.

And it's a choice that precedes any choice we have ever made regarding sin or anything else.

We are not proven or qualified to become Christians.

We are pursued, chosen, and desired.

The starting point feels something like these words from The Prayers of Catherine of Siena:

Oh, unutterable love, even though you saw all the evils your creatures would commit against your infinite goodness, you acted as if you did not see and set your eye only on the beauty of your creature, with whom you had fallen in love like one drunk and crazy with love... You are the fire, nothing but a fire of love, crazy over what you have made.

Change comes when you introduce people to that God first and give them hope and a promise to walk alongside them.

It’s not that sin doesn’t matter, it’s that change isn't driven by a faith narrative focused on what you can’t do or what you must do to belong.

• It comes from a faith narrative about what God is doing for us to help us accept how deeply we are valued and loved.

• It comes when we focus on the great lengths God went to in order to overcome sin so that everyone could always belong.

Change comes when people are invited into a positive movement where belonging drives us to action. In this movement, the needs of the hungry, the poor, the beaten, and the broken are tended to with gentle mercy and a furious longing for a world where no one is left behind.

If you’re looking for policies to support that line up with Jesus, look for the ones who do those things.

And then go tell your church, “It’s nice that the government is helping people, but we were called to this work. What will we do to reach outside our walls and do our part to make this world a better place?”

That's how people begin to meet God and find out they belong, and eventually that's how they are freed of their sins. The search, the service, and the sacrifice precede the sermons.

The Cost of Rejecting the Plan is High

Jesus laid out a mission statement at the beginning of his ministry. In the Gospel of Luke, right before things really kick into gear, Jesus takes a quick trip to his hometown of Nazareth in chapter 4:

He went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor,

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

And recovery of sight for the blind,

To release the oppressed,

To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then, he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

That’s the first century equivalent of a mic drop.

Jesus is quoting the Old Testament, making a clear reference to the longing his people have for a Messiah to deliver them from oppression and centuries of oppression.

The people in the religious “audience” at the synagogue don’t take this well. They identify as the poor and oppressed, and they see no reason to think anything has changed. They just see a kid who grew up in their town making furniture or whatever Christ’s dad did as a carpenter. More importantly, nothing in Jerusalem has changed, and the Romans still occupy their land!

Meanwhile, Jesus stands before the religious people of this day and says, “Nope. You missed it. This is for you, but it’s also for all of the people you left behind. And while you argue about policy, I’m going to go and find them and show you the way.”

Anything sounding familiar?

For a people who thought:

• We need a new plan.

• We have to try harder.

• We need more power.

Jesus taught that the real change and the real joy in life would come through powerful personal encounters and a grassroots movement for serving the needs of individuals.

Jesus Revealed the True Source of Power to Make the World a Better Place

This all sounding too wishy-washy for some of you? Too touchy-feely?

In the gospel of Mark chapter 12, a Jewish leader comes to Jesus and asks him to help sort out the ongoing conversation about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. He asks about the tangled maze of laws and regulations his people face.

“Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Love God. Love others.

Love.

And that’s the greatest thing we can do…

That’s power.

Likewise, when Jesus stood before a crowd of people early in his ministry in Matthew chapter 5, he knew they were hungry for answers about what had gone wrong and how to fix it. They were also looking for a Messiah with the power to fix it, the power to release them from oppression.

Matthew chapter 5 begins the Sermon on the Mount. It’s an incredible discourse that turns everything we think we understand about power on its ear. Theologian Henrietta Mears called it “The Constitution of the Kingdom,” and indeed, it lays out the plan Jesus has for “governing” the world.

The Kingdom of God (or Heaven. Both terms are used interchangeably in scripture.) is the theme of the teachings of Jesus. He taught with words and through his actions, and his followers were watching both very closely.

• The Kingdom isn’t about a place. It’s about a way of life.

• It’s not about the power to dominate the world. It’s about the plan to change it for the better.

The teachings on the Kingdom of God answer these questions, “If God is truly good, what was his plan for how we are to live, and how do we find our way back to it?”

Jesus was revealing the original plan, conceived before creation, for how the world was to work. As much as gravity drives the universe, he was presenting immutable concepts that keep the world turning. The only difference between gravity and these ideas is that we can choose to ignore them at our own peril.

In a world ruled by Kingdoms and centers of power, Jesus took this concept everyone understood and turned it upside down. And in Matthew chapter 5, he opens his discourse on the Kingdom of God, the master plan for how we are to live, like this…

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who acquire political power to coerce people to God’s will.” Is nowhere to be found.

The Sermon on the Mount relentlessly rewires the intuitions we’ve earned in a broken world.

For example, forgiveness, rather than vengeance, is how we survive and thrive.

In poetic defiance, Jesus launches his sermon with a barrage of paradigm-shifting truth bombs that alter our true North in this world. “If you want power, this is where you find it. From the before the dawn of creation, this is where it has always been.”

There’s nothing wishy washy about these words, and in chapter 7 the Sermon ends, essentially, with a series of warnings that your ignore this creation-level, cosmic truth at your own peril.

Jesus Did More than Just Teach the Plan

Jesus had a better plan.

But he didn’t just teach about it.

He WAS the plan.

He was the plan for addressing a rift between sinful humans and the perfect and just God who had created them.

In the Christian narrative, this perfect and just God also had a heart that was driven by compassion and mercy. His plan was always about reaching out and making sure no one was left behind, so he came to earth and sacrificed his own life on the cross so that nothing could separate his creation from his love.

And even thought the cross is central to Christian theology, in the Christian life salvation through Jesus isn’t the climax of the story, it’s the inciting incident.

Salvation is the invitation to take part in a plan, a search and rescue plan where everyone belongs and the meek, humble peacemakers hold the deepest power to change the world for the better. It’s an invitation to be part of a Kingdom where everything we rightly hoped, expected, and wished about God's true nature is presently, passionately true.

Jesus WAS the plan, and it worked something like this:

1. Every action and word of Jesus was God himself showing us the best way to live.

2. It changed lives from the inside out, beginning with the message, “You belong.”

3. And then He called Christians to follow the example. The Christian mission is real simple: live like Jesus did.

4. Then, the plan was for the church to be Jesus to the world.

Our Actions Can’t Be Separated from the Plan

The actions of Jesus were the plan. So are ours.

So, morality-enforcement policies aren’t going to create change. Following the plan will.

Meanwhile, your votes do have the potential to damage the witness of the church, to lend your name and your support to leaders who think more power to force people to their way of thinking is the answer.

You can’t separate a president or other leader from a set of policies, because those policies aren't the scorecard.

The scorecard, if you are a Christian evaluating a leader was always, “What’s happening in terms of action? Does this person live like Jesus did?”

That was always the plan, and it’s the only question that matters in that particular choice, because the story we tell about faith gets represented in the people we ask to tell it and how they live, not the policies they support.

In the end, Christians are meant to be known as a people who speak, support, and most of all live the following truth:

And now I will show you the most excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

(1 Corinthians 12:30-13:3)

Confessions from the Bridge

Christianity has disappointed a lot of people. We’re building a bridge between Christianity and those who’ve been hurt by it so we can confess what’s gone wrong and reclaim an expansive view of a loving God.