Perhaps it is due to my recent series of conversations on Jacques Ellul’s book Presence in the Modern World, but over the last few weeks half a dozen subscribers have sent me examples of what they judge to be the ideological capture of the mainline church. These essays and postings all presume to speak from a place of status confessionis and make assertions such as “the gospel is public not private” and, in the case of my own tribe, “the Wesleyan tradition requires social engagement.” A couple of the examples sent to me were clips of a candidate for the Senate using the Annunciation to argue in favor of abortion. I do not wish to engage any of these examples directly, for together they exemplify Ellul’s argument that, in his framing, propaganda has twisted Christianity into ideology.
On the right and the left.
If Ellul is correct— and I am astonished at his prophetic prescience, then the temptation facing preachers is not, as so often is posited, the temptation toward silence. It is the temptation toward a certain kind of speech— biblically conversant, politically urgent, morally serious— that mistakes the idiom of the surrounding culture for the voice of the gospel. In our own moment, with its ferocious political polarization and its habit of sorting every institution into one of two camps, this temptation has become nearly irresistible. We want to be on the right side. We want the gospel to mean something in the public square. We want our preaching to matter beyond Sunday morning. These are not regrettable desires. Nevertheless, they carry a danger with which well-intentioned preachers have not sufficiently reckoned.
The danger is capture. Thanks to the excesses of so-called Christian conservatives, we are well-acquainted with the dramatic capture of a church that sells out to power, “We have no king but Trump!” Nonetheless, a more subtle captivity circumscribes the witness of the mainline church, luring it to adopt the concerns, the vocabulary, and the priorities of one political coalition. The garish, almost cartoonish examples of capitulation to partisan relevance on the right are both obvious and well-documented.
What is less often acknowledged is that it is also happening on the left.
In fact, the theological moves involved are structurally identical even when the political conclusions are different.
Thus does pattern play out:
A set of social concerns is identified as requiring prophetic address.
The concerns are real but always uniformly align with one political party’s agenda (e.g., poverty, prejudice, injustice, the suffering of the vulnerable— the vulnerable never include the unborn).
The scriptures are then cited in support— often in the manner of isolated Encyclopedia entries (the jubilee legislation of Leviticus, the oracles of Amos, the Magnificat, the judgment scene of Christ’s final parable).
The likes of Wesley, Bonhoeffer, or King are invoked.
The case is made that silence in the face of injustice is itself a moral failure, which is true.
Whether it is conscious or not, the pattern relies on a sleight of hand.
Prophetic address is almost always made the equivalent of gospel proclamation while the gospel either goes undefined or is rendered as a slogan for the life and teaching of Jesus. And notice, somewhere in the course of this argument, a substitution has occurred. The specific social concerns of one political tradition have become identified with the demands of the gospel itself, without any criterion offered for how one might distinguish between them.
