A Future and a Hope
This is the sixth chapter of a book in progress, with the working title “Be Not Afraid of Their Terror.” The first chapter is here:
Before moving to the highly contentious subject of contemporary politics, it’s worth briefly revisiting what should be a key take-away by now: If you’re a fully-orthodox Protestant holding to traditional views on the Trinity and salvation, let alone ethics, you’re in the extreme minority in the West and, if you want to live in reality, you must come to accept that. For people like my wife and I, who left the decidedly secular majority to become part of that minority well into adulthood, this is obvious. As people who moved to a new city several years ago, centering our social circle around our new church, we also understand how those who have spent their whole lives in conservative Christian cloisters may have difficulty accepting this current status. Yet, the truth is that when self-described evangelicals make up only a quarter of the population,1 and over half of them agree with the statement, “The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being,”2 the momentum is not currently with us. We have to accept this.
This is not an existential crisis. Our brothers and sisters who have always been minorities in their countries know no other life as a Christian. Does a Christian in Japan expect all of our immutable social mores to become the law of their land? Does a Christian in India ask anything more of their government but to let them practice our faith in peace? They know that the promises of God are eternal, and they place their primary hope in a kingdom that is not of this world. We Christians in the 21st-century West, most of us born into nations already governed by the dominant religion of secularism, should learn from them. While we may win individual political battles—and some of those battles are of the utmost significance—there is no sense in maintaining the delusion that we have enough cultural cache to enact top-to-bottom societal change at this moment.
A good number of Christians are angered by such notions; make this argument on social media and you’re likely to be called all manner of names: liberal, pietist, retreatist, antichrist. Culture-war belligerents, so prone to fling ad hominems, miss the point entirely, that the way to “Christendom” isn’t though aggressive political action but through the people of God preaching the gospel, while peacefully living lives worthy of that gospel. We are in this world, and we should seek its good, but “the earth shall soon dissolve like snow.”3 On the other side, all of the political machinations of men will look no better than ridiculous schoolyard squabbles over who would win in a fight between Batman and Iron Man. God’s plans are infinitely bigger than our immediate desire for personal peace and affluence. We must never forget what the Lord told His people when He sent them into exile. It would take seventy years before they would be physically redeemed. It was not a promise for the first generation, but their children and grandchildren.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
—Jeremiah 29:11-14
This promise is prophecy, with more than one fulfillment, and for those born after the cross it is twofold. “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6), therefore we now have the peace in this life that only a people in Christ can have, no matter the physical circumstances. There is also the “restored fortunes” of the promised Tree of Life in a kingdom that will never end (Revelation 22:14). We are to enjoy the peace of the current fulfillment while doing the work of the one to come. Let us always keep this promise at the forefront of our minds as we engage in the political realm.
“Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/.
“The State of Theology,” The State of Theology, https://thestateoftheology.com.
John Newton, Amazing Grace