Christians Must Set Their Own Political Agenda

As a tax exempt non-profit, the group I lead, Christian Heartbeat, is prohibited from supporting specific political candidates and parties. That suits me fine. I suppose I could try to fudge the issue by endorsing here on my blog and not in my web magazine at http://www.christianheartbeat.org/. Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family seems to have gotten away with that sort of sleight of hand, having been cleared in a recent investigation of his obvious partisanship. From my perspective that’s his problem and a problem for his integrity I’d rather not have. I guess he has the lawyers to do it.
Identification with one political party or the other is self-defeating for conservative and progressive Christians alike. Ask a conservative evangelical how they can be so against destruction of a frozen embryo that shows no resemblance to a human being but have no problem with bullets tearing apart a fully formed child and they start to mumble some remote scriptural nonsense. Ask a progressive how they can get so incensed about the war in Iraq and still support nine months of abortion on demand and they too will spin into intellectual gyrations.
Believe me, I’m not a head-in-the-sand Christian who thinks our faith should be apolitical. I take my lead from Jesus on that one, and anyone who thinks I’m wrong simply doesn’t understand the historical Jesus. Our Lord was harassed and crucified because he opposed both the Romans and the Jewish aristocracy which aligned itself with the occupiers against the good of their own people. But Christ was original in his opposition, his point of view distinct from the Roman-friendly religious class and from the angry zealots who yearned to drive out the occupiers by force.
Peter used the phrase “a peculiar people” to describe Christians. He calls on us to set ourselves apart in our perspective--not in a way that makes us invisible, but in a way that makes us powerfully uncorrupted. When we do, our thoughts, our goals and our politics will clear like the sun melting away the morning mist. Then we’ll truly be worthy to call ourselves Christians, and we’ll begin to understand how to bring God’s values to a world much in need of redemption..