A liberal acquaintance told me recently that while he generally dislikes evangelicals, he doesn’t find me to be as bad as the remainder: “At least you don’t rant about wanting to determine a theocracy!” I made a decision to just accept what he said as a compliment, although I regretted not coming clean with him about theocracy.
Truth be told, my wife and I do belong to a pro-theocracy organization. Indeed, we attend its meetings every week. In those gatherings, we find out about what it means to support a theocracy, and we sing songs that should strengthen our theocratic commitments. The organization I’m referring to, after all, is our local church.
Theocracy literally means “the rule of God,” and Christians consider that while our churches do have human leaders, those leaders know that they’re directly accountable to God for what they think and do. They keep reminding us that we Christians belong to “the dominion of God,” which implies that our ultimate allegiance is to Jesus, whom we frequently check with as “ruling” over us.
The idea of the church as a theocracy, nonetheless, is a component of a much larger theocratic picture. The universe itself in all its complex glory is a theocracy. The Jewish community’s shabbat prayer captures well the Bible’s theocratic perspective when it begins with “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe.”
Everything that exists is under God’s rule. It is that this theocratic arrangement—defining the very nature of reality—that offers believers meaning and hope in our lives. But does that mean that believers like me should attempt to turn the United States right into a theocracy? I believe not. God doesn’t want me to force my theocratic understanding of reality on others. What God wants from people is that they freely offer their obedience to his will.
I don’t serve God’s purposes on the earth by attempting to impose “Christian” laws on people against their very own values and convictions. I mustn’t want all the things that I consider to be sinful to be made illegal. For example, although I don’t just like the blasphemous language that I hear all too often while watching Netflix today, I’m not inclined to call for laws banning these expressions.
That doesn’t mean that I should withdraw right into a live-and-let-live posture, content to attend for Jesus to return. The Bible makes it clear that God wants me to be lively within the society where he has placed me.
The apostle Peter puts the mandate this manner: “Live such good lives among the many pagans that … they might even see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12).
Peter is echoing the admonition God gave through Jeremiah when the people of Israel were exiled within the pagan city of Babylon: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the town to which I actually have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7). In addition to witnessing to others in regards to the power of the gospel, we will join them in working for God-glorifying social goals.
I’m grateful for the chance to live in a pluralistic society where I can learn from individuals with whom I seriously disagree about religious beliefs, public policy, and moral lifestyles. For one thing, I can learn in regards to the mistakes and misdeeds that Christians like me have made up to now—and still make today—about necessary matters. In genuinely engaging others on these matters, I often find effective ways to partner with them for the common good.
Historically, American evangelicals have gone forwards and backwards between two ways of regarding the larger culture. In my youth throughout the Fifties, we evangelicals had a status for being “apolitical.” We liked to sing patriotic songs, and preachers frequently reminded us that we had a Christian obligation to indicate up as voters on election days. But we typically didn’t actively engage in political advocacy.
To be an evangelical citizen was to mostly forged our votes for Republican candidates and pray for God’s blessing on the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. In all of this, we were passive about politics—grateful that we enjoyed the freedoms of a nation that was “under God.”
Things modified around 1980 with the emergence of the New Christian Right, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Evangelicals became aggressively political, working for candidates who promoted what we saw as godly causes, often explicitly guided by the theocratic project of returning to the vision of a “Christian America.”
Thus, we have now either distanced ourselves from lively involvement within the political system or worked to take it over. Either we were a cognitive minority content to sing, as we did in my youth, “This world just isn’t my home, I’m just a-passing through”—or we proclaimed ourselves to be a “moral majority,” boldly belting out “Shine, Jesus, shine / Fill this land with the Father’s glory.”
There is, after all, a 3rd option, one desperately needed today in our increasingly polarized society: an evangelical willingness to labor patiently alongside others—individuals of other faiths and of no faiths in any respect—in in search of workable solutions to the complex challenges we face as a nation.
In our weekly theocratic gatherings, we evangelicals tell God—in our prayers, hymns, and sermons—about our spiritual weakness as vulnerable human creatures. When we walk into church, we also bring with us the hopes and fears that we experience in our political lives.
The self-righteousness that we so often exhibit in the general public square doesn’t fit well with what we find out about ourselves in our deep places. It is time for us to display a kinder and gentler evangelicalism, promoting a cooperative political quest for brand new ways of flourishing together in our shared humanity.
One of my heroes in the religion, the nice Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper, proclaimed in his inaugural address on the university he founded, “There just isn’t a square inch in the entire domain of our human existence over which Christ, who’s Sovereign over all, doesn’t cry: ‘Mine!’”
I find that inspiring manifesto to be a motivation for the way I’m to live as a theocrat in contemporary life. There is all the time a temptation, after all, for us to reply that rallying cry in an boastful and imperialistic manner—as if all we have now to do is go on the market and grab hold of all those square inches within the name of Jesus.
Properly understood, theocracy requires a humble spirit. The apostle Peter tells us that after we are challenged “to provide the explanation for the hope” we have now in Christ, we must take care to “do that with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). Since Jesus claims every square inch of creation as his own, wherever we go in our lives, we’re standing on sacred ground.
In my evangelical youth, I used to be taught Hudson Taylor’s famous saying “Christ is either Lord of all, or just isn’t Lord in any respect.” I continue to learn more about what it means to represent the reason behind the gospel in a delicate and respectful manner.
The God whose majesty we theocrats worship in church not only sends us out into the world over which he rules but additionally assures us that, wherever we go, he shall be with us.
He invites us to affix him on those square inches which can be occupied by precious human beings who are suffering from the pain of abuse, grief, loneliness and the hopelessness that comes from unbelief.
We live in times when our fellow human beings desperately need to come across evangelicals for whom being theocratic means actively serving the reason behind a loving Savior.
Richard Mouw is a senior research fellow on the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and former president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
