A long time ago in another church far, far away, I remember going to my first denominational conference. The national leaders were talking about how they wanted the denomination to start becoming proactive in our approach to social issues. Imagining inner-city ministries and compassionate outreach to people with AIDS, I started to get excited. Then I heard their one and only idea for engaging the society: “We’re going to boycott Disney.”
I almost choked on my Altoid.
During the question-and-answer time at the end of the session, I nervously raised my hand. “Yes, young man,” said the leader (I was the youngest guy in the room).
“Uh, I don’t mean to be critical or anything, but boycotting Disney doesn’t sound proactive to me. It sounds reactive. Are there any other ideas you’re kicking around? Like maybe instead of boycotting Disney, we could fund film school scholarships for young people in our churches. Maybe instead of protesting abortion clinics, we could support crisis pregnancy centers.”
There was a long silence. Not the good kind of silence. The roll-your-eyes-at-the-dumb-kid kind of silence. “Thank you for your ideas. We’ll take them under consideration.” The Disney boycott continued as planned.
Ever since then, I’ve had mixed feelings about churches getting involved in large-scale social issues. Sure, Romans 13 is clear that we have a responsibility to respect our government, and in a democracy that means getting involved in our society to “do what is good” (v. 3). But every time the church tries to do this en masse, we seem to screw it up.
Well, the New York Times interviewed a few young evangelicals who have the same kind of ambivalence. The article, titled “Taking Their Faith, but Not Their Politics, to the People” says this:
They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.
…
“The easy thing is to fight, but the hard thing is to put your gloves down and work together towards a common cause,” said the Rev. Scott Thomas, director of the Acts 29 Network, which helps pastors start churches. “Our generation would like to put our gloves down. We don’t want to be out there picketing. We want to be out there serving.”
So what we’re talking about is not really putting politics aside, but redefining political involvement. Instead of working as the foot-soldiers for a single political party and accepting the planks we don’t like on their platform in order to get a little lip service on the ones we do, young evangelicals want to work toward biblical goals like compassion for the suffering and faithful stewardship of God’s creation and promotion of the sanctity of God-given life, regardless of which political party happens to agree.
We’ll still sign petitions (i.e. to end genocide in Darfur) and we’ll still support interest-groups (i.e. the ONE campaign). We’ll still remind the world that the equivalent of an entire generation has been wiped away through legal abortion. But those big political pushes aren’t what get us excited. We’re much more enthusiastic about quietly engaging society one-on-one than we are about carpet-bombing society in massive air wars.
We’ll still be salt and light in our culture, but it will look more like millions of scattered candles than a single blinding lighthouse.