“Have conversations with people and ask intentional questions to get at those kinds of things: What are you afraid of? What kind of loyalty are you feeling here?”
“How can we be shaping people’s affections so strongly for the Kingdom of God and for the King that all those other stories would sort of fade away? So often I think our focus is on correcting information when I think it should be on loves in the right direction.”
“Fear prompts a physical and a psychological response in us that we aren’t even always aware of.”
“We tend to think, ‘I’m just taking information in’…but there’s something really ingrained in our bodies that we just respond instinctively to the fears that are presented to us.”
“A pastor or ministry leader might think, ‘It’s not my job to engage in politics.’ Well, when your people are having that kind of instinctive reaction to so much…that’s a spiritual issue.”
“Even if you’re not super concerned about how church members vote, you should be concerned about how the people in your church are living out the Great Commission. And if it’s being hampered by the political media that they’re consuming…then that obviously is something that is a really important thing for pastors and ministry leaders to be addressing.”
“Is there a story humming underneath some [political] policies that says that the ultimate good for an individual or people is to be safe and secure, and we can justify anything else to make that happen? That’s the security gospel.”
“There are the things that we believe cognitively…and then there are the things that are our gut reactions that we sometimes don’t interrogate very well.”
“The work of forming people to respond better involves sermons and Bible lessons, but it also involves discipleship one-on-one, it involves the music that we sing…[and] the sacraments.”
“We do have a sense that if we do the right things, then we will deserve the things that we’ve gotten. And the reason I call this a political gospel is because it kind of shapes the way that we respond to systemic problems, to poverty, to injustice that says, ‘Well, if people are having those problems, it’s because of their own decisions.’”
“I give some examples in the book of ways that throughout history that, unfortunately, Christian churches have allowed things like baptism and prayer to continue to form us to this allegiance to white communities above other communities.”
Mentioned in the Show by Kaitlyn Schiess
Andy Crouch
The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor by Kaitlyn Schiess
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