Give us a king

When more than 100 Christian leaders gathered next door to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., for three days last week-at least in some measure to reflect on the apparent failure of the Christian gospel to have much effect in contemporary American society-one option was repeatedly rejected. At the meeting, that option was referred to several times as "the political temptation."

By that was meant the temptation to try through political means to Christianize America. There were allusions to the early days of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and the purported efforts by groups like Moral Majority to take a pagan society by the throat in almost Constantinian fashion to say: "We've lived long enough under your secular rules. Now, like it or not, we're going to impose some Christian rules on you. See how you like it."

If it seems evident that the lesson of the '80s should be clear for all to see, and that God's kingdom is to be brought in by the word of his power rather than by the force of a political movement, why then is there still a Christian Coalition? Why are mailing lists of politically active evangelical Christians among the hottest that you can rent?

The fact is that the so-called political temptation is almost as seductive as ever. The reasons are both external and internal.

Externally, we evangelicals keep getting tempted to go the political route in making our case partly because that's what our opponents have done.

The political process is what we read about and hear about every day in the news. It seems to be the main power game everyone plays. Finding at least a bare majority of people is the main goal, but there are so many greedy people out there on a host of causes that it's no big trick to go out and stir folks up about rights or health care or education or retirement or something. That's the name of the game in politics.

But the mainline denominations and the big church councils have done it, too. As long as most of us can remember, they've not hesitated to get heavily involved in the political arena. Whether the issue has been South Africa, the minimum wage laws, or before that the war in Vietnam, you could always count on plenty of opinions and political muscle coming from the top-floor bureaucrats of organized religion on the left.

So the natural impulse is to do it too. Even if you don't like political solutions to every problem, and find especially distasteful a whole string of programs from far-off Washington, you still have to get somewhat political just to try to undo what has already been done. You agree that the answers to today's problems aren't political-but you still have to counter those people who think and act as if politics were indeed the answer.

In every case, your succumbing to the political temptation is reluctant. But it's still there.

At the same time, there's an embarrassing reason deep within us that also prompts us to fall for the political temptation. It's that we don't really believe in the unique dynamic that powers the kingdom of God. We don't ultimately trust the God whom we so glibly profess-and so from deep within ourselves, we turn in panic to other power games.

Those issues were what attracted folks to the Harvard campus last week. A group calling itself the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals said, in effect, that it's time for American evangelicals to quit playing games-to end the superficial sham that fills so many supposedly Bible-believing churches every week. Such churches, and the people who fill them, have fallen into the trap of adopting so many secular marketing techniques, worship styles, superficial Bible study, youth programs, educational philosophies, counseling styles, and flat out excuses for sin that in many ways you can no longer tell God's people from anyone else.

Professor David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Seminary, whose 1993 book No Place for Truth sobered many evangelicals and angered others for its bluntness, told the Cambridge group last week that whereas it was popular less than a generation ago to think of evangelicals constituting 35-40 percent of the American population, serious polling now suggests that no more than 1 or 2 percent of all Americans claim to have a self-consciously Christian worldview.

All this doesn't mean we're to withdraw from the political process. God calls his people to be faithful. It's difficult to see how anyone could fail to be informed about public issues and still pretend to be faithful. It's hard to see how you could skip your opportunity to vote in this year's elections and call yourself faithful. For many, faithfulness will also involve significant participation in details of the process on many levels, involving much time, money, and emotional energy.

But as soon as you start thinking God needs that effort to achieve his ends, you've quit being faithful. Then you've fallen for the political temptation. It's an admittedly delicate balance to keep.