Resources for an election year

It is no secret that politics in the US and in many other countries have become increasingly contentious. These tensions are felt by many Christians within their congregations. I was recently asked for some resources that could help pastors guide their flocks through an election season.

This question has many facets, and I would not claim any special expertise. But here are a few resources that may be helpful.

An essay, “Neither Progressive nor Conservative: The Politics of a Confessing Evangelical, published by the Gospel Coalition, guides Christians in political contexts where the options are to be either “progressive” or “conservative” and counsels them to be neither as a matter of political identity. I try to make a case against partisanship, which often, maybe inevitably, silences Christians in the face of evil. It’s not an essay about how Christians should vote but about how they should behave in the sphere of electoral politics. It warns against the worldview embedded in “progressivism” but cautions against the impulse to conserve as a default. The essay includes links to several other resources.

In “10 Things You Should Know about Cultural Identity,” I distill some of the key points from my book Cultural Identity and the Purposes of God, published by Crossway. One of these (point 9 in the essay) is that Scripture eschews both nationalism – the idea that every cultural group should have its own state and every state should have only one culture – and identity politics – the idea that the identities of the cultural parts (and increasingly “sexual” and “gender identities”) is more important than the unity and identity of the (national) whole. Our two main political parties have tended to go to one extreme or another.

In a recent sermon, I  preached on the biblical concept of covenant and kingship and set this in contrast to the social contracts that provide the foundation of Western liberal democracies. I counseled against placing our hope in the attempts of political parties to tweak the social contract Social contract theory will never take us to the heart of the divine purpose for human beings or help us arrive at the biblical meaning of freedom. For that, we need a covenant with God and a king who is God.