It’s not news that modern American Christians are deeply divided over politics—to the purpose that it could appear we have now more in common with individuals who share our political views than with our siblings in the religion. That division raises the query: If we’re all reading the identical Bible, how can we find yourself with such conflicting and conflict-prone politics? Is our political engagement actually shaped by Scripture?
Preston Sprinkle’s recent book, Exiles: The Church within the Shadow of Empire, challenges American Christians to recenter our politics on the Bible fairly than on American culture and to found our political identities on our faith fairly than on our partisanship. Some of his applications of Scripture are questionable, but his altar call is welcome and needed for the American church.
A longtime Christian author and public mental, Sprinkle has made a reputation for himself as an orthodox evangelical with some unusual positions, including his commitment to Christian nonviolence, his annihilationist view of Hell, and his approach to problems with sexuality and gender identity. In Exiles, Sprinkle first uses his training as a biblical scholar to take readers through what Scripture says about how God’s people should live politically, then considers how Christians should apply these lessons in modern-day America.
The strongest feature of Exiles is its call for Christians to challenge our own political opinions with a careful reading of the Bible. Sprinkle is precisely right on this: It’s far too easy to assume our politics are an outgrowth of our faith without ever giving them serious scrutiny. Sprinkle challenges Christians on the left and right alike to see how Scripture each affirms and runs against parts of their politics:
Social justice. Concern for the poor. Economic checks on the wealthy. Redistribution of wealth. Forgiveness of debt. These aren’t liberal or Marxist or “woke” ideals. They’re straight out of the Bible. So are other values like small governments, limits on centralized power, and able-bodied people working hard and saving for the longer term. When Christians take into consideration money and economics, we want to stop letting the rhetoric and categories of Babylon’s culture wars shape our values. The Bible provides us with some wealthy categories for excited about this stuff.
Christians can disagree together with his interpretation here and elsewhere. But the larger and more necessary point Exiles makes is that our disagreement must be grounded in careful exegesis, not partisan instinct.
Biblical guidance may not at all times seem practical, efficient, or shrewd, yet as Sprinkle reminds us, the Bible teaches that “things are usually not at all times as they appear.” He quotes 1 Corinthians 1:27: “God selected the silly things of the world to shame the sensible; God selected the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”
Sprinkle’s willingness to think in scriptural fairly than partisan terms is obvious when he turns to applying his exegesis to recent political situations and controversies. There’s quite a lot of good here, especially in his advice for the church to bypass looking for government solutions to problems that communities can solve on their very own. His example of local churches using their very own money to cancel medical debt is deeply inspiring and something more congregations should do no matter the longer term of health-care policy and insurance.
Unfortunately, this application portion can be the weakest a part of Exiles. Sprinkle’s message is especially confused on whether and the way Christians can wield state power.
He says that at any time when the church has gained power from the state, it “has never ended well”: “It’s almost at all times the case that when the church becomes too enmeshed with the facility of the state, the upside-down kingdom of God is turned right side up. Christianity is just not designed to occupy positions of worldly power without betraying its mission and witness.”
But that comes just a couple of pages after he praises Martin Luther King Jr. for using state power to finish segregation—not only state-enforced inequality like segregated public schools or buses but private segregation in restaurants and other public accommodations. Similarly, Sprinkle is skeptical of “working in and thru the demonically empowered authorities of earth to bring justice to the world,” likening it to “working with a dragon-empowered beast to defeat … the dragon.” Yet he supports passing laws to ban slavery and segregation and approvingly quotes King’s statement that “the law can’t make a person love me, but it might probably restrain him from lynching me.”
To be clear, I support those laws too and am also wary of Christian hunger for power. But his condemnations of state power are so sweeping and absolute and his criteria for exceptions so vague that he comes across as saying, When I don’t like the outcomes, state power is bad, and after I like the outcomes, state power is nice. This isn’t a helpful framework for Christians trying to find out how we should always engage with politics. I feel it’s possible to tell apart between different Christian uses of state power. But it requires a coherent theory of the correct scope of presidency authority alongside a theology of Christian engagement with politics and the state. Sprinkle could have such a theory, but he doesn’t spell it out here.
Sprinkle’s account of American Christians’ political tribalism can be dubious. He lays considerable blame on the “God and country” mindset, which endorses a split allegiance between Jesus and America as long as Jesus comes first. Sprinkle argues that, in practice, we don’t put Jesus first, and accordingly advises eliminating a powerful sense of national identity, replacing it with a Christian identity. We may be patriotic, Sprinkle says, but only insofar because it’s a soft patriotism that doesn’t command allegiance.
This explanation doesn’t delay. Sprinkle admits that each left- and right-wing Christians are politically tribal, but polling consistently shows left-leaning Americans are less more likely to claim high levels of patriotism and national pride. If Sprinkle’s evaluation is correct, you’d expect that politically progressive Christians can be less politically tribal—but, in truth, the alternative is true.
As sociologist George Yancey demonstrates in his book One Faith No Longer, liberal Christians are more likely than conservative Christians to place their politics above their faith, use their politics to find out their theology, determine their friend group based on their political tribes, and use “us” and “them” language based on politics fairly than theology. As Yancey summarizes in an article about his book for The Gospel Coalition, “political conformity is more necessary for progressive Christians than for conservative Christians,” and “progressive Christians have an underlying value system that leads them to a stronger political loyalty than the worth system of conservative Christians does.”
A greater explanation than Sprinkle’s—which works across the political spectrum—is that Christians give more time and a spotlight to our political (and cultural) identities than to our identity in Christ. This is the case made in books including James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom;Handing Down the Faithby Amy Adamczyk and Christian Smith;The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan P. Burge; and Aaron Renn’s Life within the Negative World. We spend someday per week at church and 6 in school, at work, with friends, and online. Sprinkle hints at this reality together with his advice to Christians to spend less time taking in political talk shows. But he’s more considering telling American Christians to like America less than to hunt Christ more.
On abortion, Sprinkle’s charge for churches to turn into more “hospitable and forgiving places for ladies with unwanted pregnancies” is disappointing as well. It’s right, to this point because it goes. But it misses the work Christians are already doing to welcome and look after moms who might otherwise seek abortions as a result of practical and financial hardship. It neglects the problem of balancing welcome with accountability in a culture that increasingly treats the 2 as mutually exclusive.
And it ignores complicating facts, like how higher-income women are more likely to have abortions, which suggests lack of economic support from Christians isn’t the one reason American women decide to abort. All which means that sincere Christians in search of a practical, nonpartisan path forward on abortion will find little actionable guidance in Exiles.
For all that, Sprinkle’s call for Christians to firmly ground our political views within the Bible is a worthy one and one our country desperately needs. He doesn’t must get every application right for the larger principle to be vital. In fact, I hope this book sets off a flurry of exegetical debate over Sprinkle’s ideas. If it sends Christians back to Scripture, Exiles couldn’t ask for a more worthwhile legacy.
Joseph Holmes is a Christian culture critic and podcast host living and figuring out of New York City. He has written at outlets including Forbes, The New York Times, Religion Unplugged, Relevant, and An Unexpected Journal. He cohosts a weekly podcast called The Overthinkers.
