Blinded by Might

In our book "Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?," we affirm the right and responsibility of every person, religious or not, to participate in the political process. But we warn that when the clergy and other institutions of the church do so, they run the risk of being compromised and their central message obscured as they are often seduced by the siren song of temporal political power. It is never the state that is threatened, as liberal clergy and secularists have claimed. It is always the church that suffers, because the kingdom of no compromise that the church is supposed to represent becomes involved in a political kingdom that is all about compromise and almost always is seduced by the world and follows its appeals and agendas, rather than leading the world to the only agenda that can change a life: Jesus Christ.

As just one example of how politics can corrupt the church, or at least those who presume to speak for God, we cite a New York Times report in August 1999 in which two former members of the Christian Coalition described that organization's tactics. According to the two, the Christian Coalition lied about the number of its members, counting dead people, double counting others, and adding to its membership list anyone who so much as called with a question. The two also reported that when the organization knew that news crews were to visit, it hired temporary workers to fool the media into believing it was larger and had a greater impact than it actually did.

Are these the tactics most people would associate with someone, or some organization, that uses the name "Christian" as part of its title? If conservative Christians really want to affect their world, they already possess the power to do so. It is the power that Paul referred to in Colossians 1:27: "Christ in you." This is not a call for retreat or disengagement, as some have falsely claimed about our book. It is about an engagement that has more power with greater potential for results than the false promise of politics. Consider the Republican congressional class of 1994, the one that rode to majority power on a wave of "family values." Former speaker Newt Gingrich is divorcing his wife. Affairs and divorce among several other conservative Republican members of the Senate and the House have also been reported. If people who ran on "family values" cannot even impose them on themselves, what makes us think they will be more successful imposing them on the country through the legislative process?

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