“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul -- packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals -- was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.
But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.
“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”
Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.
<idle musing>
There is a strong danger of diluting the Christian gospel with a patriotic slant that reflects what a culture is, rather than what God is. This takes the euangelion and turns it into a kakangelion, capable of saving no one and eliminating the transformational nature of the gospel.
No culture is free from it, the church fell into the same trap in the Roman Empire. Throughout history the church has wrestled with how to relate to government.
A strict separation is no more realistic than a melding of the two. You can't separate a person's religious stance from his political stance—they are intertwined with who a person is. That is not what I am fighting against. My fear is that a particular political viewpoint gets equated with Christianity. It doesn't matter if it is my viewpoint (somewhat left of center), or Joe Cathey's view (somewhat right of center), or Boyd's view (probably a bit left of center), or Bush's view (right of center). The point is that different political viewpoints do not have a special "in" with the gospel.
</idle musing>
1 comment:
James,
Very well said. You have inspired me to a post on this very topic!
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