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Photo by Erica Nesbitt, '09 |
Both John McCain and Barack Obama felt compelled to prove their Christian bona fides in order to attract religious voters to their presidential campaigns. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is a dangerous one for the country and, especially, for the Christian church, according to pastor and best-selling author Greg Boyd.
When Christians become too connected to political candidates or causes, Boyd says, "they stop trusting the power of self-sacrificial love and start trusting the worldly power of laws, policies, bombs and bullets. The church stops looking like Jesus, which is our singular call, and starts looking like a religious version of Caesar."
Boyd elaborated on that theme in an October lecture at Whitworth. The lecture was based on his best-selling book The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church (Zondervan, 2006).
In the book, Boyd recounts that in the run-up to the 2004 election he felt pressure to shepherd his 5,000-member congregation at Woodland Hills Church, in St. Paul, Minn., toward conservative candidates. Instead, he delivered a sermon series outlining a biblical case against the Christian faith being too closely associated with any political agenda. The sermons generated overwhelming feedback, both positive and negative, from his congregation, as well as coverage in The New York Times, National Public Radio, CNN and Christianity Today.
Assessing the landscape in 2008, Boyd says he sees "more people who are getting a vision of the Kingdom of God that transcends politics and that advances the cause of God by simply living, individually and collectively, like Jesus."
Listen to Boyd's lecture 
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