In a recent article discussing the challenges Christian ministries are facing within the wake of paused federal funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Matthew Soerens, the vice chairman of advocacy and policy for World Relief, notes, “If President Trump understood that evangelical Christians wanted secure borders, he’s absolutely right. If he understood that evangelical Christians wanted refugees shut out who had been thoroughly vetted, who in lots of cases are persecuted Christians, then he got that fallacious.” While we may assume that Soerens is correct that Evangelical Christians wanted each secure borders and appropriate distributions of care to those that need it, focusing solely on these two issues is overly simplistic—it serves a comparatively narrow narrative that just isn’t trivial but cannot account for the complexity of the situation we face.
The narrow framing is problematic (and evident) when the identical article draws a connection between two statistics: “While 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, Soerens points to a latest survey by LifeWay Research, the Southern Baptist Convention’s polling firm, found that 70% of evangelicals within the U. S. say they imagine the U. S. has an ethical responsibility to receive refugees.” Again, I don’t have any reason to doubt the statistics. However, even when we assume that each are accurate, we can’t assume that they represent the total picture.
For instance, prior to the 2024 election LifeWay Research found that 82% of evangelicals said a candidate’s perceived “Ability to enhance the economy” was either “essential” or “most vital” in determining for whom they might vote. To these stats, we could add matters related to national security more generally, religious freedom, and foreign policy, all of which evangelical voters identified as “essential” to their alternative of candidate. If we assume that voter concerns (a) are reflective of actual challenges facing the nation and (b) don’t exhaust the issues facing the nation, we’ll recognize that we’re in what Dave Snowden classifies as a “complex” domain wherein “right answers can’t be ferreted out.” ‘To put it otherwise, there isn’t any lasting, stable state that may be reached—any solution or fix is prone to influence another aspect of the system (no less than within the short-term). Snowden contrasts the complicated domain, wherein “no less than one right answer exists,” with the complex domain noting,
“It’s just like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an authority mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The care is static, and the entire is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, however, is in constant flux—a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source—and the entire is way over the sum of its parts. This is the realm of ‘unknown unknowns.’”
The Church’s Opportunity in a Changing Political Landscape
Why does all this matter? First, we want to acknowledge where we’re. We are in a fancy—bordering on chaotic—context and at all times have been. The United States of America has never been so simple as we’d prefer to assume. A nation is a dynamic entity influenced not only by its elected officials and folks but by other nations, economic aspects, global supply chains and a number of other aspects that create variability and volatility. When we understand that we’re in a fancy context, we also understand that each motion has the potential to create greater than an equal and opposite response.
Second, as changes are made inside a fancy context, we want to keep up the excellence between church and state. In particular, we want to acknowledge how theology changes the way in which we understand the world and its politics. Christians have a commitment to living in God’s presence, depending on God’s wisdom and resources, and being “free to obey” even when obedience doesn’t appear to fix the issues at hand. While the state is established by God and serves God’s purposes (Rom 13:1-4), the state and its leaders don’t at all times recognize God because the source of their authority. The state doesn’t do what the church does. It doesn’t offer explicit testimony to the Triune God but implicitly gestures toward a comparatively ambiguous higher power. God’s revelation and the theology Christians develop from it are required to provide definition to the otherwise vague motions of the state.
We must acknowledge that the state isn’t making the identical sense of the world because the church. We might say that the state is using “logic” while the church is using “Theo-logic.” Though the state has been instituted by God in service of the nice, it isn’t able to solving the underlying and ongoing problems that plague the world. As theologian Oliver O’Donovan notes, “Recovery of theological description enables us to know not only what the products of our institutions and traditions are, but why and the way those goods are limited and corruptible, and to what corresponding errors they’ve made us liable. It enables us, in other words, to know the dilemmas that our tradition has generated.” He goes on to suggest that Christian theology “discloses” the fact of our political situation to us in a way “the prevailing master-narratives cannot disclose them.”
It is definitely appropriate to carry the state to the next standard than it could possibly attain—to point the state and its leaders to the Triune God. Yet, we must also recognize that the state often serves the nice imperfectly. We cannot expect the state to repair a broken world but to encourage good—or simply—behavior and discourage bad—or unjust—behavior. Its task is provisional because the utility of countries and their rulers will eventually go to zero when the Kingdom of God is fully established and justice reigns.
Finally, while Christians ought to be supportive in helping faith-based organizations seek to proceed their work despite short-term—and potentially long-term changes—to distributions of funds from the federal government, we should always also consider how such changes might open up opportunities for the church to take back a few of what it has given away.
Clearly, the federal government has a job to play on the planet. As the federal government’s pursuit of justice overlaps with the church’s mission, the church and the state can push in the identical direction. Yet, the church’s work have to be differentiated from the state since the church must at all times go further than the state because it pursues its task of creating disciples. The church just isn’t crippled by a scarcity of federal funding though it could be hindered. Rather than simply advocating that the funding be reinstituted, Christians may additionally consider the way to proceed making disciples whose resources could also be added to the corporate of men and girls who’ve committed all they’re and need to the living God.
I’m not arguing for an excessively spiritual approach. The gospel and discipleship involve tangible, temporal life change. The church cannot abandon the poor, the widow, or the orphan any greater than it could possibly take care of them aside from proclaiming Christ. In this moment of history, now we have organized ourselves such that we’re, partially, depending on public funds to take care of the world. There is nothing fallacious with doing so unless or until such dependence tempts Christians to be more independent from than depending on God.
Change at all times involves loss, yet, for the church, change also involves latest opportunities. We mustn’t be so enamored with the established order that we forget that God can do abundantly greater than we could ever ask or think (Eph 3:20). We must walk the razor’s fringe of advocating for the continuation of excellent work done by the federal government in collaboration with Christian organizations and fascinating in prayerful discernment as we consider what God could also be doing to construct his people and his kingdom despite—or perhaps through—governmental changes.
Christians must not ever forget that we’re a people of hope. That hope just isn’t rooted within the wisdom or rulers or worldly wealth. Instead, our hope rests in Christ and the long run opened as much as all creation by his resurrection. While we’re right, then, to remind the state of its responsibility to proceed doing good, we must also acknowledge the constraints of the state in order that we don’t overestimate the importance of its resources. Christians must reply to the challenges facing faith-based humanitarian aid in a way that demonstrates their conviction that they don’t continue to exist federal funding alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Photo Credit: Nagesh Badu/Unsplash
