About a year ago, I titled one of these emails “Can we get back to politics, please?” This was really just an attempt to share with you that I’m a big fan of Hamilton (the musical from which that line comes), but it also points to a significant shift in my perspective in the last 5-10 years. When I was participating in conservative evangelicalism, I remember embracing the strategy (part of the seeker-friendly missional model) of never being political in our preaching or ministry.
This approach, I now realize, is doomed. It impoverishes both faith (which becomes relegated to personal piety and nothing more) and politics (which will cement itself to the status quo without engagement). This is why I’m so grateful for the Century’s thoughtful work at the intersection of religion and policy—like Rick Lischer’s reflection on Martin Luther King’s famous letter to White clergy, or Dorothy Sanders Wells’s observation that both US history and biblical history are repeating themselves in the expulsion of two Tennessee state legislators.
No video this week, but here is an excellent piece from our archives—11 pastors and theologians answering the question, “Do politics belong in church?”—that legitimately helped shape my thoughts about this when I first read it. (I like all the wise contributions, but especially the thoughts from William H. Lamar IV.)
“On the same day King was charged, eight prominent White clergymen published a letter in the Birmingham News characterizing his movement as ‘unwise and untimely.’ King scribbled his response in the margins of the newspaper.”
“The expulsion of Jones and Pearson is not the first such event in history. It calls to mind the expulsion of the Original 33—the first Black legislators elected in Georgia—155 years earlier. Examining the precedent can tell us a lot about our cultural moment.”
“Religious practice has proven to be neuroprotective for teens and adults, with higher levels of spirituality and religion associated with lower rates of depressive symptoms and suicidality.”
