Reconsidering Politics, Patriotism, and Faith

How I am navigating the intersection of election season and Christian faith.

Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

TLDR: I was raised in a religious tradition that shaped my beliefs about the interplay of religion and politics. Following the election of Barack Obama, the culmination of expanding religious beliefs and a change in the political tone of our nation began a shift in my beliefs about my relationship with politics. This shift was exacerbated by the Trump phenomenon and what I saw as the hypocrisy among my denominational leaders and colleagues that led to me leaving the church. I have better clarity now regarding my relationship with politics and share some details here as an introduction to a longer series of writings on the topic that I will share in the future.

I don’t like to admit it, but I enjoy the competition and excitement of election seasons. I stay up late for debates and election results. I stay up to date reading headlines and listening to political podcasts. My friends and I discuss the latest headlines and our thoughts on political policies and strategies. We critique and often make humor of the characters on the stage of the political theater. I love the competitive element that comes with this season. Besides that, I care about the country and world I live in, and that my children and eventual grandchildren will live in. I care about taxes, the economy, foreign policy, safeguarding our positions of power against corruption, and all the other things that matter to most Americans. My engagement is more casual this year.

But there was a time in my life when it was more than just the pastime of a concerned citizen. It was a passion related to my religion and was, therefore, inherently spiritual. My first exposure to politics came from my father, who voted in every election and was a Reagan-era Republican and even staked yards with Reagan campaign signs for the local GOP chapter. The first political conversation I ever had was with him when I was 7 years old. I was reading Michael Dukakis’ name in a copy of TV Guide and was trying to sound out “Dukakis.” Dad helped me pronounce it correctly and then told me he was a bad man because he believed it was okay to kill babies. A few years later, I learned what abortion was and realized that was what he was referring to. In church, we were taught to vote for Christian values, which included pro-life policies, safeguards against the demise of heteronormative families, support for the nation of Israel, and strong censorship in TV and movies. I once heard a popular female evangelist who managed to preach against homosexuality, abortion, and The Simpsons all in one sermon.

Probably the biggest impression any spiritual leaders had on me regarding politics was in Bible college. I started Bible college in the year 2000 at my denomination’s flagship school Lee University, right on the heels of the Bill Clinton sex scandal and right in the heat of the Bush/Gore election season. At the age of 19, I would eat lunch with a group of older Church of God ministers as they discussed how Al Gore was trying to steal the election from George Bush. Their conversations seemed to me to be deeply spiritual. They saw this as a spiritual attack from the devil because Satan wanted to destroy the family, promote abortion, turn our backs on Israel, and use Al Gore to do just that. I sat in a class on the minor prophets in which the professor eloquently weaved the complaints of the prophets with modern American political hot topics. He said Amos 1:3, a verse where God promises to punish the Ammonites because they “ripped open the pregnant women in Gilead to enlarge their territory,” was analogous to the issue of abortion and the pro-choice movement. He said the pagan god of Asherah was a tree and that the worship of Asherah was tantamount to the environmentalists who “hug trees.” He referenced Molech and how children were sacrificed to the idol and made the point that when a nation is led by people who want to hug trees more than they want to save babies, then we are on the verge of being judged by God. He would often use Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties as proof that liberal politicians were pagan and immoral. He said character matters and should be the most important thing Christians consider when supporting a Presidential candidate. I took what they said to heart.

During the next election seasons of Bush/Kerry, Obama/McCain, and Obama/Romney, I was very dedicated to supporting Republican candidates because they stood for the Christian values I was taught we should uphold. I didn’t campaign or stake yards, but I had an emotional investment in their campaigns and shared the good news of my allegiance to “God’s candidates” on social media and the pulpit. I would watch the speeches of their opponents and be dumbfounded that anyone could support them. How could they not see that every election was a battle of good and evil? How could they not see the evil in their candidate? Why didn’t they understand how important this is?

I remained that way throughout Barack Obama’s first campaign, against John McCain. I recall telling my church that I watched both conventions that year and only one of them made me want to puke. I will let you figure out the one to which I referred. Then, during Obama’s second campaign, things began to shift in my relationship with politics.

A conversation with a colleague at that time helped me realize that there were a lot of things to which I was not paying attention. I told him that I was terrified for the future of America if Barack Obama won another four years in the White House. I thought he would agree. Instead, he gave me a confused look and said, “Obama scares you? Mitt Romney scares the hell out of me!” My younger friend then schooled me in history that I had paid no attention to, particularly regarding Republican foreign policy and overall governmental corruption. Suddenly, I realized that while I had been paying attention to the candidates’ social and moral stances, there was so much more I wasn’t paying attention to—things I should have been paying attention to. When I started to pay attention and listen to perspectives different from those I inherited from my spiritual leaders, I learned that not everyone who shared my Christian faith shared my political preferences. After that, things began to shift rather quickly in my relationship with politics. I realized that my love of country and love of so-called Christian policies had done what love tends to do: blinded me to the bad and ugly parts of the platforms in which I placed my hope and trust.

I was also engaging with Scripture on a whole new level. After reaching what I can only describe as a “dead end” in my faith with the Pentecostal theology I had been taught, I was reading new authors and discovering biblical and spiritual understanding beyond my native theology like N.T Wright, Frederick Buechner, Dallas Willard. One of the most significant shifts came when I started working on my Masters Degree. I gained a better understanding of the political climate of Jesus’ day. I saw how his teachings were influenced by it and how they challenged it. The dots were connecting for me in ways I had been longing for. Eventually, I realized that one of the prevailing messages of the gospels is that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. God’s Kingdom is among us, not in Rome. I came to see how human politics of every stripe are polluted by power and that Jesus modeled a life of service and self-sacrificial love that upended the structures of power in which humans blindly put their faith. Jesus said that the last shall be first and the first shall be last and only those who humble themselves like children can enter the kingdom of Heaven. The Lord began to deal with my heart about the trust I put in politicians. He convicted me for the way I othered people who didn’t share my political opinions. He charged me to exercise wisdom in how I connected the gospel to patriotism in my preaching. He opened my eyes to the theater, hypocrisy, and cultic nature of American politics.

Then along came Donald Trump. The Trump phenomenon rocked my faith to the core. I saw my elders and mentors in the Church of God completely renege on their convictions regarding the morality of candidates. I saw them attend the rallies of a serial adulterer who had owned casinos and strip clubs and appeared on the Howard Stern show. I was shocked when they laughed at his crude jokes and mimicked his bullying. The people who were once outraged when school children sang “worship” songs about Barack Obama, calling it messiah worship, were now attending political rallies in which Trump’s mockery of anyone who criticized him had no limits. The tone of their conversation changed to match their new favorite candidate. My friends and Bishops were using the words “libtard” and “snowflake” to label and dismiss anyone who challenged the morality of Donald Trump. I had never seen anything like it. It was completely unexpected.

The combination of my evolving beliefs and the pivot in political rhetoric from my friends and mentors led me to leave church and fully immerse myself in a process that some refer to as “deconstruction.” I did not know there was a word for it, or that others were having a similar experience. I only knew that somethings weren’t adding up and I needed to take it all apart and find the glitch in my spiritual coding. Deconstruction was not new to me. When I began seminary, they told us to think of our theology as though it were in a giant suitcase. In seminary, we would be asked to empty our luggage. In time we would pack it back up, leaving some things out, and putting a few new things in. Deconstruction was similar, except it wasn’t just my theological luggage. It was everything that formed the structure of my faith and life. I lost my church family, my ordination, my job, and I almost lost my family. Deconstruction isn’t just some fad that some Christians go through, it is an all-out existential crisis—a necessary crisis, but a crisis nonetheless.¹

I survived the crisis and found my way back to church. I never lost my faith during deconstruction. I have found that Pentecostals have a hard time believing one can deconstruct and then reconstruct, or that one can question faith and not lose it. Surprise! You can. There are many perspectives from my faith family of origin that I have held on to, and some others that I have not. One significant change is that I no longer believe that Christians are compelled by God to fulfill their civic duty in the election booth by voting for good over evil. I no longer see political platforms in binary terms of good and evil, us versus them. I embrace the complexity and nuance that comes with understanding diverse perspectives.

What seems abundantly clear to me now, though, is that the true evil we must confront is not found in a solitary candidate or party. It is the cultic nature of today’s political theater and the allure of religiously fueled nationalism. By cultic, I mean how the rituals of political theater take on religious or theological overtones. For instance, using a song about God’s blessings as the theme song for a presidential rally. Or having a well-known preacher and religious leader make speeches that highlight a candidate’s godly attributes, or worse, to make claims that God has chosen, anointed, or put God’s hand on a certain candidate. It is putting hope and trust in the personality of a politician to such a degree that that person becomes, in our eyes, the only one who can save us: from evil, from the apocalypse, from the other party, from the people of whom we are conditioned to be afraid. By religiously fueled nationalism, I mean the belief that the United States of America is God’s hope for the world and that it is the Christian’s job to preserve religious language, beliefs, and worship in every institution of our society lest we be divinely judged. Playing the “God Card” is always dangerous, especially when played by people positioned in places of power and domination. This is why the first commandments given to God’s people include: don’t use God’s name vainly and don’t create earthly forms and call them godly.

I will unpack all of this more in future posts. For now, though, I thought it was important to share some background on where I am coming from. I am at a place where I am not sure I will even vote this year, or ever again. I do not feel compelled by God to do so. I am discerning what feels like a compulsion of the Spirit to be a conscientious objector to the American political process. I see God raising up prophets and critics who can speak the truth in love who are pure and disengaged from the cult of nationalism. I know I am not the only one. Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. That is a message that will get you killed. For all the verses Christians choose to take literally, maybe it is time we literally take up our crosses and follow Jesus. Maybe it is time to challenge the power of politics, to rebuke the spell it has on our brothers and sisters, and model a new way of love and life. Not with violence, rallies, or protests—but with self-sacrificial love that is sown in apocalypse and rises in new creation.

1. See Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstuction by Bradley Jersak. Whittaker House, 2022.