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Although the United States is in a Republican era, in which the majority is culturally conservative, the people last night voted in Democratic majorities to governorships, the House, and perhaps the Senate. Like most complex events, this one has multiple causes. The issues were less local and more national. The people rejected the war in Iraq (but not in Afghanistan). The people seemed to want less unilateralism in international affairs, less budget deficit and trade deficit, less pork in our legislation, and less hubris, arrogance, power-lust, partisanship, and corruption in our leaders; and they wanted more good jobs, health care, truth, principle, and competent government.

The pre-election campaign exposed evangelical Christianity's fading influence in the Republican Party and in the nation. David Kuo's Tempting Faith revealed that the actual influence of evangelicals in the government was more image than reality. While some Republican leaders cultivated evangelical votes, the former White House staffer reported, they also ridiculed evangelical ideas and leaders. In the campaign, evangelicals were seldom visible—except in relation to Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, Foley, Haggard, and other public scandals.

We may, of course, ignore the insights of 2006. Or we could reflect, repent, and rethink our witness in this land. Consider the following two-plank platform.

First, we could repent of our monogamous alliance with the Republican Party and encourage evangelicals to become involved with Democrats. Biblical Christians are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; there never was biblical warrant for disengaging from the half of the population called Democrats. We are called to love Democrats as well as Republicans, to support their causes that are congruent with Scripture, and to reach Democrats as well as Republicans. From the 1700s until the late 1970s (from the traditions of Wesley, Wilberforce, Finney, and others), evangelical Christians strived, in cooperation with many parties and movements, to end slavery and to advance many humane causes—as evangelical Christians continue to do in many nations today. We could recover our tradition's full social power.

Second, we could recover, and champion, Christianity's full ethic. Most Americans would assume, from listening to public evangelicals, that the biblical social vision is limited to concerns about abortion, homosexual marriage, and evolution. For our sake and the nation's, let's allow society in on the larger revealed ethic that Jesus mandated his disciples "to obey" (Matt. 28:20).

Jesus' ethic, for instance, stands powerfully against war and all forms of violence; because his kingdom is "not of this world," he said his servants must not fight (John 18:36). Many pagans know that Jesus taught nonviolent love; our acquiescence to the current war of choice in Iraq has undermined evangelical credibility with millions of people.

Again, people know that Jesus taught us to "love your enemies" (Matt. 5:44). It doesn't take much brainpower to reason that, whatever else the command means, it undoubtedly implies that we are not to torture or abuse your enemies! Our reluctance to speak prophetically against prisoner abuse, and the astonishing denial by some evangelical leaders that it has ever happened, undermines our credibility with millions of people.

Yet again, we are the people who are supposed to know that all people are our brothers and sisters, they matter to God, and Christ died for them. While we are called to love our country and its people, we have no business cooperating with nation-state idolatry (which, like gluttony, is too much of a good thing), or with the corollary assumption that "we" matter more than "they" do.

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November (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50