Between Two Fires

Faith Is Not Blind · 4-1

Wars and Rumors of War · Watchman Insight

Section I

When the Preacher Became the Pundit

There is a moment the serious Christian observer cannot ignore, and it requires a kind of candor that this series has consistently tried to practice: the subject of this post is one on which thoughtful, biblically literate believers disagree, and on which this author holds a posture — not a party. The distinction matters, and it will govern every sentence that follows.

In 2022, the Pew Research Center documented what many in the pews had been sensing for years without quite naming it. Their data showed that 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats viewed the opposing party as not merely wrong but morally inferior — numbers that had climbed steeply from 47% and 35% just six years earlier. Subsequent surveys through 2024 and 2025 have found no reversal of this trajectory. The country had not merely sorted itself politically. It had sorted itself morally. The other side was no longer a political opponent to be persuaded. It had become, in the emotional logic of the electorate, something closer to an enemy.

The church arrived at this moment already divided. On one wing, a movement that had spent four decades building a political coalition on the conviction that Christian values required a particular party’s votes. On the other, a movement that had spent roughly the same period arguing that justice theology demanded progressive policy. Both were sincere. Both were, in specific and identifiable ways, captive — not to Scripture, but to the tribe their Scripture had been recruited to serve.

In the previous installment, The Steward and the System, we examined what it looks like for the Christian professional to work faithfully inside systems that do not share her framework. The question this post takes up is adjacent and perhaps more urgent: what does faithfulness look like when the system demanding allegiance is not a corporation but a political movement — and when both available movements have learned to speak a version of her language?

The Culture War is not your war. That is not a counsel of passivity. It is a counsel of clarity.

Section II

Three Times the Church Was Offered the Empire’s Throne — and What It Chose

The captivity of the church to political power is not a new problem. It has been the recurring temptation of Christian institutions since the moment, in the fourth century, when an emperor decided that Christianity was more useful inside the tent than outside it.

Constantine’s conversion in 312 A.D. produced, within a generation, the official Christianization of the Roman Empire. The church gained buildings, legal protection, and cultural prestige. It also gained something that functioned, over time, like a structural dependency: the equation of the empire’s fortunes with God’s purposes, the assumption that the right political arrangement and the Kingdom of God were, if not identical, at least adjacent. What historians call Constantinianism — the entanglement of ecclesiastical identity with political power — did not produce a Christian empire. It produced an imperially shaped Christianity. The two are not the same.

The pattern repeated at the other extreme in the French Revolution. This requires a careful distinction. The Enlightenment tradition that preceded the Revolution produced genuine goods: religious liberty as a legal category, constitutional limits on arbitrary power, the idea that persons possess inherent dignity regardless of birth. These are not small things, and the Christian tradition — which had its own struggles with coercive state religion — was not wrong to welcome them. But the Revolution’s own logic moved beyond these goods toward something totalizing: the conviction that humanity, freed from superstition, could construct justice from first principles, without remainder, without transcendent reference. The Revolution’s relationship to the church was not passive. Between 1792 and 1794, the dechristianization campaign systematically dismantled religious institutions, reconsecrated cathedrals as Temples of Reason, and installed, in at least one recorded ceremony at Notre-Dame, a woman dressed as the Goddess of Liberty on the high altar. The secularist who insists today that religion has no legitimate voice in public life has, in this episode, not the Enlightenment’s best inheritance but its most dangerous one.

The decisive historical counterpoint to both failures occurred in a church in Wuppertal, Germany, in May of 1934. The Theological Declaration of Barmen was written that spring by a coalition of German church leaders to help Christians withstand the challenges of the Nazi party and of the so-called “German Christians” — a popular movement that saw no conflict between Christianity and the ideals of Hitler’s National Socialism. The German Christians preached that racial consciousness was a source of revelation alongside the Bible, and glorified Hitler as a “German prophet.” Most German Protestants, in the early years of the regime, found this synthesis unremarkable. Patriotic sentiment and Christian conviction had been intertwined in German cultural life for so long that their separation required an act of sustained theological will.

The Declaration was drafted primarily by Reformed theologian Karl Barth, along with Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen. Its central argument was not political, though its implications were. It was theological: that Jesus Christ alone is the one Word of God, and that no political movement, no national story, no ethnic identity, and no ideological program may claim the authority that belongs to him. The Declaration expressly repudiated the claim that other powers apart from Christ could be sources of God’s revelation. What made Barmen remarkable was not its political courage, though that courage was real and cost several of its signatories their freedom and eventually their lives. What made it remarkable was its clarity: that the church’s captivity to the empire is not primarily a political problem. It is a theological one.

The Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper had arrived at a structural answer to the same question four decades before Barmen. At the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, Kuyper made a declaration that has since become one of the most cited sentences in the Reformed tradition: “In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare ‘That is mine!'” The sentence is frequently quoted as a claim about Christian dominion. Its actual logic runs in precisely the opposite direction. Kuyper continued: this absolute sovereignty of Christ “directly denies and disputes all absolute sovereignty on earth among sinful men.” The family, the state, the church, the academy, the marketplace — each has its own proper authority and its own proper limits. No sphere may colonize another. The state does not own the church. The church does not govern the state. No political party is the Kingdom of God in electoral form.

What Barmen and Kuyper share — across different centuries and different national crises — is a refusal of the most seductive available option: choosing a side and calling the choice holy. The Christian intellectual tradition has produced, across its most lucid moments, a consistent verdict on this temptation: it is not faithfulness. It is a form of idolatry.

Section III

What the Texts Say About Kingdoms

The political theology of the New Testament operates in a tension that neither the religious right nor the secular left finds comfortable, because it refuses the resolution each side prefers.

The passage that American political Christianity most frequently invokes is also the one most frequently reduced:

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

— Romans 13:1 (NIV)

Read in isolation, this text has historically been used to sanctify whatever government exists — a move that Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Confessing Church explicitly rejected in 1934. The same letter that contains Romans 13 contains Romans 12, which commands its readers to refuse conformity to the patterns of the present age. The submission Paul describes is not the surrender of prophetic judgment. It is the refusal of anarchic violence as the instrument of justice. These are not the same thing.

The second text operates in the opposite register:

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

— Jeremiah 29:7 (ESV)

This is the instruction Jeremiah sent to Israelites living inside Babylon — an empire that had destroyed their city, carried them from their land, and had no particular interest in their flourishing. The instruction is not withdrawal. It is not collaboration with the empire’s agenda. It is the posture of the resident alien: someone who builds, prays, and works for the common good of a society whose deepest values she does not share, without pretending that the society’s purposes and God’s purposes are the same thing.

The third text is the one most likely to unsettle readers on both sides of the current political divide:

“Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.”

— John 6:15 (NIV)

The crowd that had witnessed the feeding of the five thousand was ready to install Jesus as a political leader. The logic was not unreasonable: here was a man with demonstrable competence, popular legitimacy, and a compelling vision of justice. Jesus withdrew. The Kingdom he was inaugurating did not operate on the terms the crowd assumed, and he refused to allow political utility to define his mission’s shape.

The moral conditions of contemporary American political life — the mutual demonization, the zero-sum tribalism, the collapse of the capacity to distinguish political opponents from moral enemies — are not a temporary disruption awaiting a better election cycle. They are a disclosure. They reveal what a society looks like when it has organized its moral language entirely around political identity, with no prior loyalty capable of interrupting that organization.

The question for the Christian is not which side to be on. The question is what loyalty is prior.

Section IV

The Idolatries Are Not Identical — But They Are Both Real

A careful diagnosis requires honesty about both failures, and about the fact that while they are structurally comparable, they are not identical in kind. The right’s characteristic failure is one of capture by power: the church’s prophetic voice is muffled because the church has acquired institutional interests in the party’s success. The left’s characteristic failure is one of dissolution: the church’s theological content is gradually replaced by the host culture’s justice vocabulary, until the gospel becomes a spiritual endorsement for political conclusions reached on other grounds. Both are forms of captivity. But capture and dissolution are not the same diagnosis, and they do not require the same correction.

The political captivity of much of the American evangelical world did not develop overnight. It developed over four decades, through a series of institutional decisions that bound a significant portion of evangelical identity to a specific partisan coalition. The consequences are visible in the data. A 2023 survey conducted jointly by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution — the largest of its kind, sampling more than 6,000 Americans — found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualified as either adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism, compared to roughly one in ten Americans as a whole. More than half of Republicans fell into the same categories. For a significant portion of the American evangelical world, a particular political identity had come to function as the organizing frame — the lens through which Scripture, community, and moral reasoning were filtered, rather than the reverse.

The precise phrase for this phenomenon comes from the theological tradition: Constantinianism. The recurring temptation to exchange the church’s prophetic independence for the empire’s institutional favor. Barmen was a warning against exactly this — against the moment when a political movement’s symbols appear in the sanctuary and its ideology appears in the sermon, and no one finds this remarkable because the merger has happened gradually enough that it no longer feels like a merger. It feels like faithfulness.

The captivity of the progressive religious left is structurally different, but it is a captivity. Its characteristic form is not the baptism of political power, but what the missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin identified as the privatization of faith — the reduction of religious conviction to a personal preference that must remain silent in the public square. Newbigin argued that “to claim that the Gospel is public truth is to insist that the Gospel must be heard as an affirmation of the truth which must finally govern every facet of human life” — not as a theocratic claim, but as the refusal to accept that Christian convictions are merely one lifestyle option among many, relevant in private but inadmissible in public argument. A Christianity that agrees, under secular pressure, to restrict its claims to the private sphere has not secured its freedom. It has accepted its marginalization.

There is a second, subtler failure in some progressive religious quarters: the absorption of secular justice frameworks so thoroughly that the theological content becomes vestigial. When the church speaks about justice without the theological anthropology that grounds it — without the imago Dei, without the cross, without the resurrection’s claim that history moves toward redemption rather than merely toward equity — it is not doing theology. It is doing political theory in ecclesiastical dress. The vocabulary remains. The framework has been borrowed from elsewhere.

The structural problem both failures share is not primarily political. It is anthropological. Once the person on the other side of the political divide has been reclassified — from neighbor to threat, from fellow citizen to enemy of the good — the category of genuine encounter collapses. You do not need to persuade an enemy. You need to defeat one. And when the church adopts this logic, it forfeits the one thing it uniquely possesses: a theological account of the other person that is prior to and more durable than any partisan classification.

What would a genuinely third position look like? The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, who wrote Exclusion and Embrace in the aftermath of the Balkan wars — wars in which Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim communities had each recruited their faith to bless their violence — articulated the challenge with unusual precision. Volf proposed embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion, arguing that exclusion had become the primary sin of the age, skewing perception and causing people to react out of fear and anger toward all those outside their ever-narrowing circle. The embrace he describes is not the sentimentality of false unity. It is the costly, theologically grounded act of holding open the possibility of genuine encounter with the person the political logic of the moment has classified as an enemy. This is not a third political position. It is a prior anthropological position — a claim about what the person across the ideological line actually is, and therefore what she is owed.

The Christian who holds this prior position is not politically homeless. She is politically unowned. The difference is crucial.

When the church loses the capacity to make this distinction — when it cannot tell the difference between being politically engaged and being politically captured — it loses not its electoral influence but something more essential: the independent standing from which prophetic speech is even possible. A prophet who speaks only on behalf of the party that hired him is not a prophet. He is a spokesman.

Section V

The Independent Witness

There is a kind of Christian public presence that neither side of the current divide has learned to accommodate, because it does not deliver the endorsement either side seeks.

William Wilberforce spent twenty years in Parliament attempting to end the British slave trade. He was a committed Christian, a skilled political operator, and a man who maintained throughout his career that his faith was not a political instrument but its animating source. He was also, it should be said plainly, a Tory MP who worked in close political alliance with Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger — a consummate insider who used every available instrument of the system he was trying to change. He lost the first eleven votes. He lost them because the economic interests arrayed against abolition — the plantation owners, the trading companies, the Caribbean merchants — were organized, well-funded, and capable of making the moral argument look like naive sentiment dressed in religion. Wilberforce did not change his argument. He continued making it, in the same terms, from the same theological ground, for twenty more years. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807. Slavery itself in 1833, three days before Wilberforce died.

The lesson the political tradition has drawn from Wilberforce is about persistence. The lesson his own account draws is different: that the moral clarity which made him effective came from a source the political system he was working within did not control. He was not above politics. He was inside it, deeply and strategically. What distinguished him was not detachment but accountability — his agenda was not derived from the coalition he was building. The party served the conviction; the conviction did not serve the party. He was useful to no faction as a spokesman because he was, in the deepest sense, owned by none.

This is the posture the current moment makes difficult and the current moment requires. In a climate where the primary social sorting mechanism is political identity, and where that identity has acquired the emotional register of moral identity, the person who refuses to be sorted looks, to both sides, like a defector. She is not a defector. She is the thing the political system cannot produce from within its own logic: a witness.

The witness does not pretend to have no views. She has views, held rigorously, argued carefully, with attention to evidence and to the genuine interests of people across the divide. What she refuses is the totalism — the demand that her theological convictions become the property of a party, that her vote become a confession of faith, that her neighbors who vote differently become, in her moral vocabulary, something less than neighbors.

Newbigin warned, with unusual clarity, that there can be no return to Christendom — nor should there be. Any attempt to restore it requires a marriage between the church and ruling power that stands in direct contradiction to the sovereign lordship of Christ. But the alternative is not silence. It is the posture of the resident alien from Jeremiah 29: fully present, genuinely engaged, working for the welfare of the city — while remaining accountable to a different sovereign whose jurisdiction the ballot does not determine.

The church has, at its best moments, been the institution that reminded the empire — any empire, any party — that its pretensions to ultimacy were exactly that. The cost of that reminder has sometimes been very high. Its absence has always cost more.

The culture war is not your war. Your war is older than the parties and will outlast them. Engage it where you stand — in the vote, in the policy argument, in the relationship across the line — with the weapons that are actually available: attention, honesty, and the refusal to let your theological convictions be borrowed by anyone who has not earned them.

The watchman does not endorse the tribe on either side of the wall. He watches from above it. What he sees from there — which is not visible from either camp — is that the wall is not the thing that matters most, and that the morning is coming regardless of who currently controls the gate.

To be politically unowned is not a posture of withdrawal. It is the most demanding form of public engagement available — because it refuses the shortcuts that tribal loyalty provides, insists on persuasion rather than solidarity, and holds open the possibility of being wrong in ways that partisan identity never permits. The witness who cannot be owned is not less present in the city. She is more accountable to it.