It used to be simple.
Or at least it looks like that in hindsight. America was founded on, broadly speaking, Judeo-Christian lines. The framers of the Constitution may well not have all been ‘evangelicals’ but they were all influenced by the King James Bible, as well as by the thinking on ‘freedom’ that grew out of John Locke and other Enlightenment tolerance proponents that, while in some cases certainly radical (the French Revolution), were themselves also operating within or reacting to the same basic set of principles and assumptions.
This broad set of assumptions was promoted fully after the Second World War, and then reacted against vigorously in the following decades by a countercultural movement. Since then, the story has evolved in some familiar ways, but what seems clear is that the basic ground rules are not as straightforward as they once seemed.
New models of cultural engagement are developing. Russell Moore is an American evangelical theologian, ethicist, preacher, and President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He is putting forward a framework that is appealing to a wide range of next generation types – a model of engaging the culture without compromising the gospel, as he explains in his book Onward. There are complexities within complexities, wheels within wheels. The days of the evangelical ‘moral majority’ are over.
What is the best way forward?
Are we looking for top-down change, influence from the powers-that-be in politics and business and media? Or are we looking for bottom-up change, influence from a mass movement of new disciples voting with their feet and being salt and light in their various individual and communal areas of influence?
Surely the answer is both, at least in some shape or form. As one little example of top-down influence in the Bible, in the New Testament, Gallio’s ruling in Acts 18 probably allowed Paul and the nascent Christian movement a period of freedom of proclamation, however short-lived that eventually proved to be.
Similarly, in the Old Testament, we could point to the way God used Joseph or Daniel or Esther. These were people in places of power who were used by God to influence structures and authorities to the benefit of God’s people.
On the other hand, solely to rely on this top-down approach is to ignore the basic fact of New Testament church growth historically which has been one that began with a little known carpenter in the middle of nowhere, spread through fisherman, and overturned an Empire by multiple witness and compassionate lifestyle in the name of Christ.
Salt and light
In many ways, I suspect Jesus’s advice is the best. Be salt and light. Maintain your personal, doctrinal, theological, moral integrity (if salt loses its saltiness, what use is it?). And when there is opportunity to speak truth, witness to Christ, and verbally shape conversations (whether in the kitchen or in the cabinet of politics or the boardroom) to do so with the wisdom that God alone can provide.
