Unarmed Empire Revisited #4

Victims of the Discourse

Staying in the house is a fabulous way to hang on to poor opinions. In 25 years of local church ministry, the two people in my churches who clutched most tightly to their political opinions where folks who (1) had never worked outside the home, and (2) watched a lot of cable news all day. Of course, there are good reasons for people not to work. My wife, Rochelle, stayed at home with our girls when they were babies and very young — though she work part time nearly all that time. What is not reasonable is to enter into the dark, sank cave of cable news and spend most of your day there.

Chapters 3 and 4of Unarmed Empire are about the predicament America, and increasingly, more of the world find ourselves in. We are siloed into doctrinaire news and opinion all day, where not only one side of the political spectrum is argued for, opposing views are held as sinister and evil. This inevitably leads to the kind of polarization where ideas and philosophies are never argued, but enemies are made and kept.

And what has happened in our politics overflows in our churches.

During the height of COVD in 2020 and 2021, I was approached by church members arguing that we return to in-person worship gatherings, not based on reason and science, but based on their view that our choices were political motivated. In essence, to go back sooner meant allying ourselves with the political Right. It was a way a signaling that the mead and '“the Left” wanted COVID to be as bad as possible so that it would injure the political ambitions of Donald Trump. On the other side, returning too soon meant we were MAGA-incorporated, just another church propping up an administration suggesting COVID could be cured with UV-Light and horse dewormer.

Something as monumental as a world-wide pandemic had somehow become a political football, not putting humans against a deadly virus, but the American Right vs the American Left. And why? Because this is who we are now. We simply parrot our politics, rarely pausing to scrutinize whether our faith is informing our politics or our politics is informing our faith. And any faith which bends its orthodoxy to partisan politics is no faith at all. It is an accomplice.

In Unarmed Empire I was attempting to break us out of a philosophical system wherein Christians and Christianity has become a tool of American Left/Right politics rather than its conscious or prophet. That being the case, it is no wonder that Christian churches are seeing an erosion in attendance. If we can offer little more than FOX News or CNN, why bother with the waking up and joining a community?

Little has changed in the five years since Unarmed Empire released. The question still remains whether or not American Christians are more interested in the flag or the cross.