Red/Blue Maps Lie About Your Neighbors
Transcript
Rick Barry: If our churches aren't places where people who are likely to be politically liberal and likely to be politically conservative and likely to not really fit into either camp, interact with each other all the time on equal footing, we're setting ourselves up for disaster.
This week we're gonna start getting into a topic that's really important to me. Really, it's the reason I started doing this work in the first place.
We're gonna start talking about political diversity and why it's good. Especially the kind of political diversity we talked about in our last video, the kind of political diversity where two Christians can disagree about a topic for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them sinning or falling into idolatry.
And saying that any kind of political diversity is good is I realize a controversial opinion for some of us. But the fact is it's absolutely necessary for any church in the US that wants to reach its neighbors effectively. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned how this kind of political diversity actually demonstrates the power of the Holy Spirit to hold people together, that the world would rather tear apart.
Political Diversity Eliminates Barriers to Jesus
So this week let's just talk about how being part of a politically diverse church gets rid of some of the unnecessary stumbling blocks we might be putting up between our neighbors and Jesus.
If our church communities are politically monolithic, if they're dominated by and conformed to a single political culture, then we're actually making it unnecessarily difficult for all of our neighbors to hear the gospel, whether they match that political culture or not.
If someone visits our church and our church is politically monolithic, and that visitor does match our church's political culture, first of all, they're gonna think that they have less to repent of. They'll have a really hard time seeing the difference between their political culture and our faith.
And if someone's visiting our church or our small group and they don't match that dominant political culture, they're gonna feel like they have to go through the whole process of a political conversion before they can even start considering a spiritual one. They're gonna think that they can't have a conversation about faith with us because they don't speak our political language.
I didn't grow up in the church, so after I became a Christian, when I started trying to explain to my friends and family why I came to faith, I didn't want people to feel like they couldn't see Jesus clearly or understand what I was saying, just cuz they didn't grow up watching Veggie Tales or listening to DC Talk.
And then I started leading Bible studies. And then I started working for churches. And at every turn, this idea became even more important to me. I don't want people to have to learn a new social culture before they can even consider hearing the gospel.
And the New Testament doesn't want that, either.
In the first century, Jewish law and society didn't have a formal process for adoption. So when Jesus is addressing a Jewish audience, like his conversations with Nicodemus in the John’s gospel, he says that his followers are born again—this time born into the family of God.
Compare that to first-century Roman society, where natural-born children could be disowned, but adoption was final. Adopted children could not be disowned. So in the epistles to Christians in Galatia and Ephesus and Rome, who were more likely to be Roman in culture, Christians are called adopted children.
Jesus and the early church put in the effort to communicate the hope of the gospel in the cultural language of the people they were trying to reach. And that's more important here and now than you probably think, because I'm almost certain that your mission field is more politically diverse than you think it is.
A Case Study: Ross County, OH
You might be watching this thinking, “Being politically one-sided isn't really an obstacle in my church, because around here politics is so one-sided. It's okay that our church is overwhelmingly Republican because our town is overwhelmingly Republican. A Democrat hasn't won here for 20 years!”
Well, Let's put that to the test. Let's look at a practical example. Uh, let's look at Ross County, Ohio.
Ross County has basically been a safe Republican district for most of the last 40 years, and in 2020 it voted Republican for president by 66%. Democrats never stood a chance, but that's still only two thirds of the vote. Two out of three people.
Imagine going out to invite people to your church's Easter service and deliberately handing out every third flyer in the wrong language.
“Would you like to come to our church and learn about Jesus? You would. Great. What language do you speak? Oh, right, of course, English. Anyway, here's all the information you need in Esperanto. Hope it helps, and I'm gonna act like you are the one with the problem if it doesn't!”
But the numbers actually get worse than that. Because that two thirds, that's just two thirds of the people who actually turned up to vote. Now, Ross County had pretty high voter turnout in 2020: 72%! But that still leaves 28% of eligible voters who either weren't able to show up or who felt alienated enough by the process and by the options that they didn't want to show up. People who, for one reason or another, probably don't match that county's majority political culture.
Ross County 2020 Details
Total Population: 77,095
Population Over 18: 60,828
Registered Voters: 46,039
Republican Votes: 22,278
When you do that math, only 47% of eligible voters in this overwhelmingly Republican friendly district actually voted for a Republican candidate in 2020. If your church is in a place like that and it's incapable of actually speaking coherently to the roughly 53% of people who are likely to vote democrat or likely to not be motivated by either of the parties, then it's incapable of speaking coherently to more than half of the people you are trying to reach.
And that's just if the only people you're trying to reach are eligible voters. Does your church have a prison ministry? Because the people you visit there aren't even part of this equation yet. Neither are recent immigrants. Neither are the teenagers in your youth group, or the friends that those teenagers are hoping to invite, or the people with no fixed address who visit your food pantry or your soup kitchen.
American Churches Have Two Options
For a church in the US, privileging or normalizing one political culture over another is not a local quirk. It's not an accidental fact of geography. It's not a minor issue. It is basic, foundational missionary malpractice. It's implicitly teaching our fellow congregants and our neighbors to conform to some of the patterns of the world because conforming to these ones is just easier than living out the Bible's promises to challenge them.
It's turning our churches into what Michael Gerson called, “pitiful appendages of somebody else's agenda.”
“At its worst, evangelical political involvement is pretty discrediting and disturbing, and has been over the last few decades. Sometimes the content is too narrowly ideological and predictable. I remember when voter guides, in the 1980s and 1990s, they would feature your support for Taiwan but have nothing about other issues of Christian concern, such as poverty or race relations or other things. It’s very easy in politics to become a pitiful appendage of somebody else’s agenda, and that is a consistent problem that the church has had on both left and right.”
Christians in the US have a clear choice: Do we want our churches and our relationships in the church to cross cultural divides? Do we want them to be as attractive and frustrating to likely conservatives as they are to likely progressives and likely independents? Or do we want them to be co-opted into proxies for a culture war that was manufactured by people whose primary interest was gathering and securing power for the sake of their own security and glorification?
Those are our two choices. If we aren't deliberately discipling one another into crossing those divides, then the world around us is absolutely proactively discipling us into reinforcing them.
Assess Your Town
Visit the website for your state's attorney general or board of elections, and look up the detailed election results for your town or county. Compare the number of votes the winning candidate got to the overall number of people in the town/county, rather than to the number of votes the losing candidate(s) got. Does this change the way you understand how to most convincingly relate to your neighbors?