We shape society when we remember who we are first and foremost.
Historians will conduct postmortems on American Christianity’s recent relationship with politics and culture for years to come. Some Christians have felt pressured by the political right to trust the state to restore a cultural utopia that, arguably, was dystopia for many. The left pressured others to entrust the state with building a utopia that’s impossible on this side of eternity—and proven historically also to end in dystopia. Dissatisfaction with both camps has been palpable.
A Christianity qualified by any adjective now feels restrictive—for good reason.
Large parts of American evangelicalism proved to be ineffective in navigating politics and culture in the name of conservatism or progressivism. As I mentioned in a previous column, that’s why some are now calling themselves “Christians in America” rather than “American Christians.” The labels “conservative Christians” and “progressive Christians” seem just as hollow.
A Christianity qualified by any adjective now feels restrictive. Many are turning anew to the Christ of Scripture, under whom our secondary identities are subsumed. He is not the god of ethnic nationalism or the god of the oppressed but the sovereign God of all nations, King over all.
American theologian Stanley Hauerwas anticipated this moment: “It is the politics of the kingdom that reveals the insufficiency of all politics based on coercion and falsehood, and finds the true source of power in servanthood rather than dominion.”
Many distinctions, like ethnicity and gender, are gifts from God. Yet when they become idols, they dehumanize us. No single temporal category can contain the whole of our being. Force a Christian into an ideological box and part of him will stick out. Such boxes become coffins to bury our unique voice far beneath the ground of public discourse.
What happens as we reject such labels? Hauerwas says, “The church therefore is a polity like any other, but it is also unlike any other insofar as it is formed by a people who have no reason to fear the truth. They are able to exist in the world without resorting to coercion to maintain their presence.”
Christians are most powerful not when we’re “countercultural” but “other-cultural,” not “a-political” but “other-political.” Our power lies in engaging the culture truthfully and lovingly on Christ’s terms, refusing assimilation for acceptance’s sake. Historically, the true church values faithfulness over dominance—consequences be damned.
The late African theologian Kwame Bediako said how we frame our identity shapes the questions we ask, informs the answers we seek, and drives our actions and loyalties, carefully weighing our unity against our particular social and political concerns.
With an identity centered solely in the transformational Christ of Scripture, we are more in concert with the orthodoxy of two-thirds-world Christians, especially those in the underground church. We may be small in numbers at home, but when taken globally, we become a force whose faith can shape the culture, not vice-versa.
When we see afresh our primary identity in Christ, it’s as if we’ve been born into new and fertile terrain. We continue to “act justly and love mercy” (Mic. 6:8), affirming lives from the womb to the tomb. We proclaim the kingdom to the outcast, the unjustly accused, the powerless in our cities and rural areas—to any person, issue, or system crying out for Christ’s understanding of human flourishing. Yet we do so now more acutely conscious of the rest of the verse in Micah: walking humbly with our God.
It then becomes possible to work for the nation’s good without that work consuming us. An unqualified identity in Christ has proven to be the church’s most powerful historical asset as we have engaged cultural and political matters. This is a faithful posture, yes, but also a strategic one: It helps us mature in Christ while breathing in a growing atmosphere of negative public opinion.
By sacrificially loving a culture hostile to a transformative Christ, we will experience the uncomfortable Christianity of the early church and watch the Book of Acts come alive before our eyes.
“Unqualified Christianity” may well be the future of Christianity in America. The last few years have taught us to hold this ancient yet timely warning close to our hearts: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
Karen Ellis is an ambassador for International Christian Response.
