A Christian’s political guide.
Articles & Papers
What Do We Do?
A Christian’s political guide.
Download the full PDF One-page summary (PDF)What follows is not a set of tactics. It is the precondition for any tactic working. A people that will not do these five things cannot be saved by a better candidate, a better bill, or a better strategy. And none of it is private. If Christ is King over everything, then a household brought under His order is a political act, not a substitute for one.
- 1
Stop compromising with evil and rebellion.
Refuse to participate in sin because it is politically advantageous, or because the alternative looks worse. The lesser-evil argument has governed Christian political behavior for two generations, and the result is that the line keeps moving and we keep moving with it. If a thing is wicked, you do not vote for it, fund it, staff it, or stay silent about it because the other side is worse.
- 2
Repent of your own liberalism.
Not the party — the philosophy. Autonomy: the belief that you answer to no one you did not choose. Egalitarianism: the belief that all authority is suspect. Individualism: the belief that you are the basic unit of the world rather than a son, a husband, a father, a member. Most conservative Christians hold these instincts without knowing they hold them, which is why conservatism conserves nothing. It is liberalism at a slower pace.
- 3
Confess the sins of our fathers.
Acknowledge before God the rebellion and failure we inherited and then carried forward ourselves. This is not modern blood-guilt. It is what Scripture models — Daniel confessed sins committed before he was born, and confessed them as ours. A nation under judgment does not get out from under it by insisting the wrongdoing belonged to someone else. Leviticus 26:40–42 · Nehemiah 9:2 · Daniel 9:4–19
- 4
Submit to Christ and His order.
Bring yourself under it first, then your household, then your church, then your work, then your community. Christ is King in fact, not in sentiment. The family is an ordered institution, not a contract between equals. Every earthly authority holds delegated authority and answers for how he used it. Submission to Christ means obeying legitimate authority and refusing any authority that commands sin. Both halves.
- 5
Speak prophetically.
Call Christians and the culture to repentance, and proclaim the lordship of Christ without softening it for political expediency. The prophets did not poll. The pastor who will not name sin because he will lose families has already decided what he is protecting, and it is not his people. Then trust God with the outcome.
Remember Judges
Israel rebelled, was handed over to its enemies, groaned under the oppression, and cried out. And God raised up a deliverer — Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, and the rest. Note the order. The oppression came before the deliverance, every time.
The deliverer came from God. Not because Israel finally engineered the right political strategy, but because God heard their groaning and showed mercy. Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding from Midian — the last man in Israel anyone would have recruited.
Our task is not to manipulate the political order into salvation. It is to repent, confess, submit, proclaim, pray, and remain faithful. If God is pleased to grant deliverance, He will raise up the deliverer.
Judges 2:18 · 3:9, 15 · 4:3–7 · 6:6–14 · 10:10–16
Receive the Deliverer
When God raises him up, you will not be asked to approve him. This is where most conservative Christians stumble, because they have absorbed the notion that authority is manufactured from below — that a ruler is legitimate because we agreed to him. That was never true. No man was ever born free. Every man is born a son, under a father he did not choose, owing an obedience he did not negotiate. The first government was Adam’s, and it was fatherly before it was anything else.
What the magistrate holds is that same fatherly power, extended over a people. It comes down from God through the order of fathers. It does not come up from the consent of the governed, because the governed never held it and cannot give away what they never had. Follow the popular theory to its end and it collapses: if authority originates in the people, every subject keeps a private right to judge whether his ruler still deserves obedience, and there is no government at all — only a standing permission any man may withdraw. A promise you may revoke at will is not a promise. A king you may depose at your discretion is not a king. He is a servant with a title.
So the deliverer, when he comes, does not arrive holding your mandate. He arrives holding God’s. Your part is not to audit him. It is to recognize the authority God has placed over you and submit to it as to a father, which is what it is.
Make him meet your conditions first. A people that will only obey a ruler who agrees to their terms has not submitted to anyone. It has hired someone, and the arrangement lasts exactly as long as the terms stay convenient.
Make the manner of his arrival the test of his right. Providence supplies the title. None of it — the house you’re born into, the magistrate placed over you, the deliverer raised up — arrives by your selection.
Expect him to be impressive. Gideon was hiding in a winepress. Ehud was left-handed, which in that world meant defective. Jephthah was a whore’s son, run out of his own family. If your standard is that he look like a deliverer, you will miss him.
Obey him in the ordinary way, in the ordinary things. A people fit to receive a deliverer is a people already practiced at obedience — in households where fathers govern and are honored, in churches where elders rule and are heeded.
Repent. Confess. Submit. Proclaim. Pray.
Then stand ready to follow.