Jennifer Craft

From James Bell: 💯🎯👇 I worry that American Christians have become so concerned about losing political influence that we’ve stopped asking what gaining that influence is doing to us. We’ve become comfortable defending dishonesty when it advances our political priorities. We’ve learned to excuse cruelty when it’s directed toward people we dislike. We’ve become suspicious of compassion because it sounds progressive. We’ve started treating criticism of powerful politicians as betrayal, even when that criticism is justified. And then we wonder why the church is losing its moral credibility. The early Christians lived under an empire that could imprison them, confiscate their property, and even execute them for refusing to compromise their faith. They lived in a world where confessing Jesus as Lord could come at an enormous personal cost. Yet they refused to give Caesar the allegiance that belonged to Christ. They understood that faithfulness to Jesus was more important than acceptance by the empire. I wonder what they would think of American Christianity today. We’ve become so concerned about whether political leaders will defend Christianity that we sometimes seem unwilling to ask whether our defense of those leaders contradicts the teachings of Jesus. We should care about religious liberty. We should care about laws that protect human life, uphold justice, and promote the common good. Political decisions have consequences for our neighbors. But none of those concerns gives us permission to abandon the moral standards we claim to believe. The early church was willing to lose its standing in society rather than compromise its allegiance to Jesus. We should be concerned when Christians become more afraid of losing political power than losing their moral credibility. Because what good is it to gain influence in a nation if, we lose the very character that makes our witness to that nation credible?