Someone had a conversation recently that wondered about the intersection of Christianity and politics. Below are some of the points that came up in their conversation and my responses to them, should they be helpful to you.
1. Someone said Christianity is not and shouldn’t be political.
Jesus was the prophet of prophets and prophets were quite political. They were constantly telling nations and their kings how God wanted them to live and pursue proper justice. Jesus spent a lot of time instructing people in the way of proper living, which was based on love for all and serving the marginalized. He is a King, and he came preaching about his Kingdom, which is political language. The kingdoms of this world may have their own understanding of morality, but when their kingdoms are unjust and persecute others, the Kingdom of Heaven and its Christian citizens are called to intersect and turn it toward justice.
2. Someone said protesting means you’re focusing more on the world and politics than on Christ.
I protest because my eyes are on Christ. I stand among the marginalized and prophetically draw attention to them. There are good ways of protesting and bad ways of protesting. So long as your way of protesting matches the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount and the character and ways of King Jesus, then you can make a prophetic holy ruckus.
3. Someone said we should follow authority and who God put in power.
Democracy is about humans putting people in power, not God. Even when God was supposed to be putting kings in power in Israel, the prophet Hosea heard God say, “They made kings, but not through me. They set up princes, but I knew it not” (Hosea 8:4). The biblical concept of political authority is to create order, because God is not a God of anarchy. The Bible’s perspective is that both spiritual beings and human beings are supposed to work together to bring about a world of justice. But we all know that doesn’t happen. Psalm 82 says the spiritual beings don’t do that, and we don’t have to look far to see that human beings are the same way. The same Paul who said to respect authority was unjustly thrown in prison several times and abused.
4. Someone argued that there were plenty of slaves in Rome and Jesus didn’t do anything about freeing them.
Jesus also didn’t do much to reach the Gentiles of his time, but that was one of the major plot points upon which most of the New Testament rests. How did we come to understand this movement of God? Through the Holy Spirit’s conviction after he was resurrected. As he told his own disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Jesus certainly cared about the treatment of slaves, and he has brought about freeing them through his Spirit-empowered disciples as they have listened to him. You even have John calling attention to the injustices of our fallen kingdoms, noting that we live off of “slaves, that is, human souls” (Revelation 18:13).
5. Someone said Jesus didn’t come to conquer and just came to teach, and that it’s our job just to pray and save people’s souls and not their rights.
Teaching means nothing if you don’t live it out. Prayer does little if you don’t live it out. Just trying to save people’s souls is a form of gnosticism, which was an early church heresy that only cared about the spirit and not about the body. Christianity is holistic. It’s about the here and now, not just the later. The evangelical church has fallen back into this old gnostic mindset and needs to make Christianity about redeeming matter and bringing about justice in the here and now.
6. I asked why God freed the Israelites from Pharaoh if he didn’t care about slavery, and someone said that they were slaves for 400 years.
To some extent, I think the Bible wants us to see that we reap what we sow. Before Egypt enslaved the Hebrews, Abraham enslaved an Egyptian and treated her horribly. Later, Joseph saved Egypt from famine, but then turned all of Egypt into a slave-state. Regardless of the situation, the point is not that God took a while to save the Hebrews from slavery—the point is that he was so frustrated by the injustice that he supernaturally stepped in to save them.
The world is broken. All human beings and spiritual beings have been allotted power and authority, and we all use it the wrong way, which is what causes nearly all the brokenness and injustice in the world. Jesus sent us into the world to change it, cultivate it, and bring about the Kingdom of Heaven in it. If we do not fight injustice, his Kingdom cannot break through. If we remain silent, then there is no prophetic witness left and God turns us over to our consequences (Ezekiel 22:30). God is good, and if we do not display that by going into dark places and bringing about healing like he did, then the world will not know his goodness, for we are his hands and feet in the here and now.
Hope that helps for starters 🙂 This is a broad and dense topic. I’ve written all about the Bible’s call to political justice in my shortest book, Supernatural Justice.
Jamin Bradley 
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