Are Christians Called to Fight in the Culture Wars?

The Kingdom of God is an alternative culture, but some see it as the rationale for creating a battlefield in the culture wars.

To some of Jesus’ first listeners, he sounded like a new-fangled, naïve, wimpy prophet saying nonsensical, impractical things. Among his listeners were the Zealots, who predated Jesus. Their passionate, even extreme desire to overthrow Rome, based on fulfilling the First Commandment (you shall have no other gods), seemed right and good. Their views were normative to a significant percentage of the Jewish population and seemed intuitively correct. According to the Dictionary of New Testament Theology,  Zealots were “resistance fighters” and among themselves, it was a title of honor. Jesus, on the other hand, sounded like a pacifist ideologue. 

But no matter how right they seemed, the Zealots’ attitudes and practices were not aligned or harmonized with the Kingdom. The Zealots’ enemies were objects of God’s redemptive love. Love, mercy and forgiveness were Jesus’ urgent and high-contrast call to a new way of being Israel—creative, healing, redeeming, non-violent resistance—over and against seeking violent revolution. (N.T. Wright describes this idea further in his book,  Jesus and the Victory of God.)

Photo by Robert McGowan on Unsplash

Sadly, we can see a modern form of zealotry in the increasingly violent forms in which the Christian culture wars are fought. Trying to get something done in the name of God wrongly rationalizes warrior mentalities and practices against one’s neighbors, one’s enemies. Turning our culture, our neighborhood into a war zone eliminates what they are meant to be: missionary contexts, filled with people we are called to lovingly engage with. 

War, whatever seems to justify it, uses two main tactics: breaking things and killing people. Mission has a very different single aim: come alongside all people to help them follow Jesus. We are not meant to engage in a civil war over values. We are meant to patiently teach and model the way of Jesus—and lose our life if necessary in doing so.

John Douglas Hall put it this way:

Our Lord’s metaphors for his community of witness were all of them modest ones: a little salt, a little yeast, a little light. Christendom tried to be great, large and magnificent. It thought itself the object of God’s expansive grace; it forgot the meaning of its election to worldly responsibility. 

The Church is a contrast community but one that is simultaneously connected to the world. In this paradigm we are not called to chop down cultural trees (Luke 13:6-9). As God’s agents of healing, as a medicine of sorts, we are meant to steadfastly be present to human sin and error, like manure clinging to soil around the tree of God’s good creation. Eugene Peterson memorably put it this way in his book Tell It Slant:

When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light. And manure.

The role of the Church is to loosen the soil, stay in it (Luke 13, MSG), assisting, nourishing it to fruitful health. We are not called to fling poisonous weed killer around as a tactic in a culture war against our neighbors. The kingdom is an alternative culture, not the rationale for creating a battlefield in the culture wars. 

Consistent healing and redemptive mission can never flow from the culture wars. Our vibe, our ethos is gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience (1 Peter 3:15, 16). The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world (2 Corinthians 10:4). The Church is meant to become its best self by pursuing righteousness (2 Corinthians 6:7). Righteousness defines the powerful mix of true religion: personal piety and being agents of justice. Esteemed historian George Marsden clarifies, We cannot go back to either a secular enlightenment or a Christian consensus…and the culture-war stances are not helpful alternatives. 

Jesus knew that the Zealots and other popular social, political, religious schemes on offer would lead Israel further astray from their calling to be the world-healing, redemptive people of God. Jesus was thus leading Israel to a wholly different self-identity and way of practicing their religion. Rightly heard, Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom would have tamed the warrior spirit of the Zealots. 

In complete contrast to the culture wars, the Church is invited into something different, writes Douglas John Hall in The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity:

From the edges of imperial societies, a disciple community possessing awareness of its changed relation to power, can exercise a prophetic vigilance for God’s beloved world that, as part of the world’s power-elite, it never did and never could achieve.

With God’s story as our guide, Jesus as our model, and the Spirit as our animating power, let’s give up winning power through culture wars. Let’s fully differentiate as followers of Jesus while staying connected to society as agents of healing. This commitment frees Christians to cherish the everyday and ordinary people and events of life as the soil in which we learn to follow Jesus and be his agents of redemption and restoration. It frees us to never engage in fear-based political processes to grab power. And it frees us to never use violence to get our way.