Flirting With Irrelevance

Constantinian Christianity—the marriage of church and state ostensibly for the advancement of the kingdom of God—has never lived up to its advanced billing. The church, particularly in the West, has never really recovered from the Edict of Milan, which made Christianity “legal” throughout the Roman Empire and set the stage for its eventual adoption as the “official” state religion. It is no coincidence that the most thriving churches have always been persecuted churches, and this is as true today as it was in ancient Rome. Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds in the two-thirds world, where faith in Jesus Christ is a matter of life and death every day.

In the United States, however, where “persecution” of Christians consists of boneheaded insults by Bill Maher and frivolous lawsuits by the ACLU, the church has been locked in a time warp for over a generation. The decline of the mainline church, owning to its nihilistic embrace of the destructive agenda of “tolerance,” is well documented. But the current plight of the evangelical church in America is also one of waning influence born of a foolish worldly pursuit. Ever since the 1980’s, when evangelical political activism became chic, evangelical leaders have gauged the spiritual health of the nation by the results of elections and the internals of polling data ostensibly showing what “issues” were of primary concern to voters.

Homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle was still a marginal issue 30 years ago. Activists were only beginning at that time to push a radical agenda that would subvert the moral fabric of American society. Today, despite well-funded, well-organized efforts on the part of evangelical activists to prevent political advancement by the “gay rights” movement, legalized “gay marriage” is a very real prospect across the country. One is left to wonder how the one society traditionally considered the most “Christian” in the history of the world has come to the point where it would legitimize a practice which was never even remotely considered by history’s most notoriously pagan civilizations. How can a nation in which Christians have such unfettered access to the political process be on the verge of committing cultural suicide by undermining the very pillar of civilized society?

The church is at its best when it understands itself as a counter-cultural community whose embodied witness to the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ causes such an upheaval that the culture is transformed in spite of its best efforts to eliminate the church’s disturbing presence. Evangelical leaders have co-opted this counter-cultural witness in pursuit of a favorable position within the culture.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,” writes St. Paul, “that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). This biblical advice has been completely ignored by evangelical leaders who continue, after decades of utter failure, to try to transform through secular political means a secular culture to which they have themselves conformed. It is no wonder even some of them are beginning to sense that in courting favor in the halls of Congress, they are flirting with irrelevance.