{"id":1814,"date":"2012-10-09T12:51:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T12:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/10\/lets-stop-our-unchristian-politics.html"},"modified":"2012-10-09T12:51:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-09T12:51:00","slug":"lets-stop-our-unchristian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/10\/lets-stop-our-unchristian-politics.html","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Stop Our Unchristian Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This week, a college student at the back of a crowded auditorium at a church-related school asked me how we could fix our political system. It was a good question: heads nodded all around her. \u201cHow can we as Christians change things so that when we come into power we don\u2019t repeat the same mistakes?\u201d she asked. I\u2019ve been spending two years thinking about this question, and I\u2019d been talking with these students for almost an hour on what I thought was going wrong and how we might fix it. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to stop all the unchristian ways Christians do politics,\u201d I said, at last. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to act in such a way that we change the tone of the debate \u2014 and show people how to respect and work with people who differ from us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christianity has never been so evident in political ads and discourse as it has been in the primaries and now in the general election, but although most Americans still identify themselves as Christian, we can\u2019t even agree on what that means. Christians on the political right insist that if you don\u2019t support their social values issues, you can\u2019t possibly be following Jesus. Christians on the political left insist that if you don\u2019t support their peace and justice issues, you can\u2019t possibly be Christian. So it is that both of the primary ways that people associate their religion and their political action have thus become partisan \u2014 and subject to the same bitter and divisive partisan wrangling as secular partisanship.
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This week, a college student at the back of a crowded auditorium at a church-related school asked me how we could fix our political system. It was a good question: heads nodded all around her. \u201cHow can we as Christians change things so that when we come into power we don\u2019t repeat the same mistakes?\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLet's Stop Our Unchristian Politics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, a college student at the back of a crowded auditorium at a church-related school asked me how we could fix our political system. It was a good\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/10\/lets-stop-our-unchristian-politics.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Let's Stop Our Unchristian Politics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week, a college student at the back of a crowded auditorium at a church-related school asked me how we could fix our political system. 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