Should Christians be involved in politics?

Question 60028.

Christian political involvement makes many believers uneasy, and the unease usually runs in one of two directions. Some feel that any engagement with public life is a distraction from the gospel and a step toward compromise. Others feel that a faith which never touches how a country is run is a private hobby rather than a confession that Jesus is Lord.

I think the New Testament permits and even expects believers to be involved, while ruling out a great deal of what political involvement has come to mean in practice. Getting the difference clear is worth some effort, because the mistakes on both sides are costly.

Two errors to avoid

The first error is withdrawal. It sounds spiritual to say that this world is not our home and that politics is a dirty business best left alone, but the logic does not survive contact with the Bible. Joseph administered Egypt, Daniel served in Babylon and Persia, Nehemiah was a senior official under a pagan king, and Erastus was the city treasurer in Corinth and a Christian. God has repeatedly placed His people in public office.

The second error is the crusade, in which political involvement becomes the main event and the church effectively signs up to a party. That mistake has done enormous damage, not least because it fuses the gospel to a programme, so that anyone who disagrees with the programme concludes they must also reject the gospel. Watching parts of the American church over recent decades ought to be education enough for us.

What government is actually for

Paul’s account in Romans 13 is remarkably restrained. The governing authority is God’s servant for good, bearing the sword to restrain evildoers, and taxes are to be paid to it. That is a real but limited brief. Government exists to keep order, restrain wickedness and administer justice, and Paul writes this about a pagan empire under Nero rather than about a Christian state.

Notice what is not assigned to the state. It is not given the task of making people righteous, of forming their consciences, or of establishing the kingdom of God. Once you see the limits of the brief, political involvement takes its proper size. It matters, in the way that a good roof matters, and it is not the house.

Christians have often done this well

British history offers examples worth remembering. William Wilberforce spent decades in Parliament and turned a nation against the slave trade. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, drove factory and mines legislation, lunacy reform and the schooling of destitute children through the Commons because he believed those children bore the image of God. Elizabeth Fry changed the prisons.

None of them treated the state as the saviour of society. They believed that laws restrain cruelty and that cruelty restrained is a genuine good, and they were right. A Christian in public life who gets one piece of legislation right may spare thousands of people real suffering, and that is not a small vocation.

What politics cannot do

Here is the boundary. No law regenerates anybody. You can make a society more orderly and leave every heart in it unchanged, and you can outlaw a cruelty without curing the appetite that produced it. The change Scripture is interested in happens one person at a time by the new birth, and there is no legislative route to it.

My own reading of prophecy shapes this. I do not expect the world to improve steadily until it becomes the kingdom. The church is not building the kingdom; we are proclaiming the King until He comes, and He will establish His reign personally rather than through our political success. That saves me from both triumphalism when the vote goes my way and despair when it does not. The distinction I hold between Israel and the Church runs underneath a good deal of this.

Guarding the gospel from party capture

There is a difference between a Christian involved in politics and a church endorsing a party. The first is a believer using his citizenship. The second hands the pulpit to something that will not last a generation. When a congregation becomes identifiable by its voting pattern, the unbeliever who disagrees politically now has a reason to stop listening about Jesus, and we have handed it to him.

So I preach what Scripture addresses, and I try to do it without hiding behind vagueness. Where the Bible speaks about the protection of life, about justice for the poor, about honesty in public office, about marriage, I say so, and I let the political consequences fall where they fall. What I will not do is tell a congregation which box to tick, because that is not my authority and it never was.

Some sanity about disagreement

Believers who share every doctrinal conviction can differ sharply about tax, immigration policy, defence spending and how best to help the poor, because those are questions of prudence rather than revelation. Scripture tells me to care for the needy; it does not tell me the optimal design of the benefits system. Treating my own political judgement as though it came down from the mountain is a way of adding to Scripture.

That should make our political involvement more humble and our fellowship more robust. I can vote differently from the man beside me at the Lord’s table and still take the bread with him, because what unites us is a great deal older and stronger than our opinion about a manifesto. This is also why I try to avoid the imported culture war framing I have written about in why some American Christians focus on guns and borders.

What this looks like in practice

Pray. Paul makes it the first item of public duty for the church, urging that prayers be made for kings and all who are in high positions, and he says it about rulers who were persecuting Christians. Vote thoughtfully. Write to your Member of Parliament when something warrants it, and write like a Christian rather than like the internet.

Then look local, because that is where most believers can actually change something. School governors, parish and district councils, magistrates, charity trustees, foster carers. It is unglamorous political involvement and it is where a Christian presence tells over the years. And whatever you do, be the sort of person whose politics never makes them cruel, because the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

When political involvement becomes something else

There is a point at which political involvement stops being citizenship and starts being religion, and it is worth knowing the signs before you are in it. One sign is that your anger at political opponents has become permanent and personal. Another is that you find it easier to pray for a policy than for a person. A third is that a change of government now feels like the difference between hope and despair.

When that happens the state has been asked to carry something it was never built for. Israel wanted a king so that they could be like the nations, and God gave them one along with a warning about what he would take from them. The instinct to look for a political saviour is very old and it has never once been satisfied.

The test I apply to myself is simple enough. Can I say honestly that I want my political opponent converted more than I want him defeated? If not, my political involvement has stopped serving the gospel and started competing with it, and it is time to spend rather less time on the news and rather more on my knees.

None of that is an argument for going quiet. It is an argument for holding the whole thing loosely enough that you can put it down. A believer who can leave the news alone for a week without feeling that the country will fall over is a believer whose political involvement is probably in the right place, and he will be more useful in it than the man who cannot.

So, now what?

Take an honest look at your own balance. If you have withdrawn entirely, ask whether that is conviction or just comfort, and find one concrete thing locally to take responsibility for. If politics has taken up more of your attention and heat than the gospel has, that is worth confessing rather than defending.

Above all, keep the order right. Christian political involvement is a real duty of citizenship and it is downstream of something far bigger. We are ambassadors before we are voters, and the best political service most of us will ever render our country is to keep telling it the truth about Jesus while quietly being good neighbours in it.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

1 Timothy 2:1 to 2 (ESV)