Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: Jane, you're on the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?

Jane: This is kind of a tough one for me. It's tough to express my question, and I've been dealing with it for a long time. It's about politics and Christianity. I have friends and pastors online and on the radio who use politics to demonize people who don't agree with their politics and blame the world's problems on them. They're politically divisive.

I understand liberals who are for gender identity and those kinds of things. I'm not talking about that extreme. I'm talking about people putting another group in a bucket if they don't agree with their politics and blaming the world's problems on them from a Christian view. There are some online pastors and friends who do this and I don't know how to deal with it because it really bothers me. I don't know whether to speak up, what to say, or how to deal with it.

Pastor Mike: I have sympathy for the question. I also recognize that there are people who are new to Christianity. In their education of biblical truth, their knowledge of the application of that truth will temper their frustration as they go along. In other words, a one-year-old Christian is going to have a lot more trouble seeing the germane connection of biblical knowledge and how that fleshes out in the morality that ends up being reflected in political policy.

Political policy, let's just say private property rights, some people think that has nothing to do with the Bible, and yet it does. But it's going to take you a while to learn in scripture where the principles of private property rights and the incompatibility of socialism or communism and what American right-leaning politics is going to find the continuity to biblical principles. If you're a one-year-old Christian, that's going to be hard to see. If you're a one-day-old Christian, you may have a hard time seeing the connection to pro-life issues or even heterosexual morality and the Bible. So sometimes growth in biblical knowledge is going to start to temper that frustration.

But I will agree with you. I know there are plenty of preachers out there where it's all the way down to certain tax policies and expenditures in bills that come across the California Assembly. I'm saying there are pastors that go way too far. I feel like I know the Bible pretty well, and I can say after studying it my whole life and career both personally, devotionally, and professionally, you have no right to say what we should think about this biblically. You've just become so entrenched in politics that you're now bathing this in your Christianity when you don't have authority to say this.

I share frustration in that. You cannot claim that this is a Christian view. There are things that I think there are Christian preachers saying you have to see this political view this way. So it's both and. I can sympathize with both sides of this. There are some people that don't see because they don't know the Bible well enough that yes, if you're a Christian and you know your Bible, you're going to end up in this particular place on a political issue.

All that we're doing with politics and coming up with policies for how we ought to function in a society is coming down to whether or not this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. People say don't legislate morality. Of course, legislation is morality in one way or another. And yet there are plenty of things that the Bible does not care to address. Should government money go to this project or that project, or this museum or that museum? We can't say that.

Politics has become so granular in addressing so many things that there are people pounding the pulpit on things that the Bible doesn't address. Where the Bible doesn't address it in principle or specifically, then you should take that and debate it at the coffee shop, not in the church. One thing that would be helpful for newer Christians is Wayne Grudem. He's a systematic theologian who's written a book on politics according to the Bible. He at least will help new Christians see that the fleshing out of biblical truth will affect your politics.

Politics really are rooted in your understanding of right and wrong. A lot of times some people miss this, that it's not just homosexuality and abortion. There are many more things about how we come to conclusions about things that are going to be decided in political theory, political understanding, and political legislation. If you're a Christian, you're going to end up here as opposed to there. But you can only say so much about how we're going to function as a society and governmental policy. You can't go all the way.

That's why in my church that I lead, we're not flag-waving American Christians. You're not even going to find a flag in our church and some people give me a hard time about that. We are the church of Jesus Christ. We're an international organization. We're not about United States people first. We're not Americans first. We're Christians first. My citizenship is in heaven, and I'm as much Ugandan or Canadian as I am a Christian because I'm a part of God's kingdom.

I want every country in the world to have their politics based in Christian principles. That's always going to be pro-life. It's always going to be marriage. It's always going to be about the sanctity of what is true and right and good, which is always going to be about the things that I'm going to find in scripture fleshing themselves out in political theory. It's not going to be as granular as a lot of people are. I don't want to be a flag-waving Christian in the sense that I'm forcing you to be the kind of patriot that I think some people are demanding.

I'm not going to adopt a particular football team for my church either. Christianity to me is all-encompassing. That's what matters. Now, if Christianity is going to say you can't adopt that football team because that football team plays by those rules and those rules are incompatible with Christianity, then fine, I can't support that. I can't support a lot of things because of my Christianity. I know there's something about Christianity that's going to lead me to adopt some things and reject other things.

I know there's a lot about America I've got to reject because of Christianity, at least modern America and even back to the beginning. I want everything in my life to come down to whether God is going to approve it or disapprove it. I think some of your frustration is probably well-founded. I think maybe some of it could be that in a greater understanding of scripture, I can see why I should be for that and I would have to say that. But I would highly recommend Wayne Grudem's book, Politics According to the Bible.

It's going to lead you to say I really can't adopt a lot of what I'm reading in leftist politics today. I can't go there and be a Christian because too much of it is antithetical to biblical principles. It's going to lead me to be a right-leaning political supporter. I'm going to have to vote to the right, not to the left, because of scripture. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to be a flag-waving political right activist. You want to be that outside of church? Well okay, but the merging of all this, if you struggle with that, Jane, I'm with you there. I want to know what the church is. The church is not a political action committee.

Jane: It's hard for me because I consider myself in the middle because I agree with some of the right and the left. It just depends on biblical moral beliefs mostly and the character of the people doing the legislating. But when I hear a pastor online, in fact, one you co-host with sometimes, demonizing the left, calling them socialists and just criticizing them and members of my church, it's really hard for me. It's really hard to just keep my mouth shut and I don't know what to say. Should I just keep my mouth shut?

Pastor Mike: I do think we can really paint with a really broad brush. What I'm hearing you say, Jane, I can totally identify with. We can't just say because you carry this label, I'm going to demonize you, in part because some people are brand new Christians in that political party. It's going to take you time to make connections because everything needs to be held loosely when I become a Christian.

I need to start adopting everything that the Bible is going to tell me. That may change everything about how I drive, let alone how I vote. I've got to be more open to what the Bible has to say. I have to be in complete deference to it. I appreciate that call, Jane.