One of the reasons I say that it is good for American Christianity to no longer think of itself as a “moral majority” is that such a mentality obscures the strangeness of the gospel. When a vision of Christian political engagement hinges on building a politically viable network of ideologically united voters, Christ and him crucified will tend to be a stumbling block, not a rallying point. I’m sure that if a journalist had been present when Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone,” the headline the next day probably would have been, “Religious Leader Calls for Pullback From Agriculture Policy.”
The call to a gospel-focused engagement is not a call to retreat. On the contrary, it’s a call to a more vigorous presence in public life because it seeks to ground such witness where it ought to be, in the larger mission of the church. Even some sectors of religious activism chafe at the honest accounting of apostolic Christianity as a minority viewpoint in Western culture. Minorities do not exert influence, they will contend, on the culture or the systems around it. The temptation is to pretend to be a majority, even if one is not.
But this is a profoundly Darwinian way of viewing the world, like a frightened animal puffing out its chest in order to seem larger and fiercer, in the hopes of scaring off predators. Such is not the way of Christ. The church of Jesus Christ is never a majority, in any fallen culture, even if we happen to outnumber every else around us. The Scripture speaks of a world system that is at odds with the kingdom, a world to which we are constantly tempted to pattern our own intellects and affections after until we are interrupted by the ongoing transformation of the kingdom (Rom. 12:1). The world system around us, the cultural matrix we inhabit, is alien to the kingdom of God—with different priorities, different strategies and a different vision of the future. If we don’t see that we are walking a narrow and counterintuitive road, we will have nothing distinctive to say because we will have forgotten who we are.
Forgetting who we are and forgetting our mission can leave us particularly vulnerable to false teaching that doesn’t sound false because it comes from “our side.” Consider how, though some leaders of religious activism were and are genuine saints and heroes, many others seem to make a living outdoing one another with outrageous comments. Too often, the race for fundraising success and media platform went to the most buffoonish and outlandish voices in the air. This confirmed a common secular caricature of Christianity as Elmer Gantry meets Yosemite Sam.
