If You’re Just Now Preaching and Teaching on Politics, It’s Too Late

A special, pre-election article.

Every four years Christian organizations ramp up efforts to emphasize civic and political responsibility. Prayer guides and voter guides are sent out. Small books and articles are published. Seemingly everyone pens an editorial or records a podcast to highlight the difference Christians could make if more of them voted.

The goal of these efforts—Christian political awareness and action—isn’t unrelated to what pastors do in their churches, but the pastors interest me most.

Pastors have the distinct privilege and responsibility of standing before people multiple times a week. They preach and teach. They have influence over what goes in the bulletin and/or announcements. They lead most of the congregational prayers. They participate in recurring conversations in the lobby before and after services. Yet for some reason they often reserve our pleas for civic engagement and voting for every four years.

This seems an entirely ineffective way to form civic-minded, neighbor-loving disciples.

First, there is a glaring fact that formation requires frequency. How often we teach, preach, mention, discuss, or pray about a topic says a lot about how important we believe it is. These actions communicate to believers how relevant an issue is to their daily walk with Jesus. Consequently, we should not be surprised that calls for wise, compassionate, courageous, civic involvement often don’t translate into much change.

At least part of why we don’t move people toward deeper, more mature understanding and action is because we can barely compete with the 24-hour media environment that congregations are marinading in. A thoughtful sermon every few years isn’t going to cut it.

People continue to post offensive or tactless content. They’re paralyzed with fear about the outcome of the election or are completely apathetic toward it. They skip voting because “everything is going to burn up in the end anyway,” or simply because they had better things to do. Sometimes they are offended by the fact that their pastor is meddling in what is seen as a deeply personal decision.

Frequency isn’t incidental to formation, but it is also crucial since there are many more opportunities besides what happens every four or even two years. In other words, if we saw civic-political life as a broader set of concerns, we’d be talking about more than voting. This relates to a second error.

This second error is that our teaching, preaching, praying, and leading isn’t nearly broad enough. Too often our message on Christian civic-political life is reduced to, “Go vote!” However, as important as most of us believe voting is, this isn’t the only way Christians exercise what my friend Matthew Bracey calls “the stewardship of citizenship.”

How many Christians ever attend school board meetings? Town Hall meetings? County Council meetings? How many volunteer to work the polls? How many write an occasional email or letter to their elected officials about a major vote soon to be taken?

How much praying for civic matters happens in church gatherings? When is the last time someone led a prayer for not only our soldiers and first responders, but the FBI, the CIA, or Homeland Security? Do we pray for the health and safety of public officials, including those for whom we didn’t vote?

Even on the difficult topics of our time—immigration, gender confusion, the economy, foreign conflict—do these subjects ever surface in our congregational prayer times? Do small group leaders tactfully steer complaints into prayers?

Too many believers’ spiritual imaginations are stunted and narrow. They’re unable to connect the whole counsel of God to the many ways it can inform and express civic faithfulness.

A third problem with the pre-election messaging from church leaders is the fact that it is a late-stage intervention. As I’ve already implied, faithful pastors aim to nurture an outlook that envision many kinds of civic engagement as ways to love our neighbors. But it’s naïve to think that we can achieve this in mere days and weeks leading up to an election.

Pastors know all too well that the marital intervention staged after the marriage has been in crisis for a couple of years seldom succeeds. The hurts are so deep, and the hearts are so hard. It truly is a Divine act whenever such marriages are saved.

Political understanding isn’t so different. People are easily engrained in patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. They are vulnerable to simplistic slogans, manufactured talking points and hasty generalizations. Even when we offer people a biblically based argument for voting, sometimes we’re simply too late. In my own state one needs to register roughly one month before election day in order to vote in that election cycle. Were I to teach on civic faithfulness just a few weeks before election day and persuade someone to cast a ballot, it would be too late.

Unfortunately, American political campaigns seem to get longer and longer. Candidates regularly announce their candidacies nearly two years before the general election. Over that period our senses are bombarded, offended, and then often deadened by the rhetoric, whether its tone or substance. Reminding someone a few months before the election to “watch your words” when they post or chat with friends is often too little too late.

Church leaders, especially those who preach and teach, shouldn’t wait until election years to form members to have a comprehensive civic imagination.

We should teach and model prayers and intercessions for elected officials and candidates (1 Tim. 2:1-4). We need to explain the God-ordained role of civic government (Rom. 13:1-7). We need to remind people that their earthly nationality and citizenship isn’t an accident, but is part of God’s providence (Acts 17:26-27). We need to show the connection between submitting to political authority and exhibiting spiritual witness (1 Pt. 2:13-17). We must remind them that persecution is a normal part of Christian commitment, not the exception (2 Tim. 3:12).

Besides these biblical practices and truths, there are other doctrines and themes that have a direct bearing on how we understand, discuss, and act in the public square. Jesus’s call to render to Caesar those things which are his and to God those which are His is one of the most revolutionary and influential teachings of any religion in the world (Mt. 22:15-22). It deserves more attention.

What about the conscience? What is it, and why does it matter? (Rom. 14:1-15:7) We will find ourselves hard-pressed to maintain unity in our churches without a clear understanding of this subject, one which the New Testament addresses far more often than we might realize. It isn’t unrelated to political views and preferences.

Identity-issues are massive these days. How does being a citizen of the heavenly kingdom (and a child of the King!) shape earthly citizenship?

We say Jesus is our Savior and Lord, and so we should. But how should the lordship of Christ influence how we see and engage the world around us?

Is the church only in the business of spiritual change, or does the gospel have cultural and social implications? How do we avoid false binaries when it comes to “political issues” and “moral issues”?

To fellow church leaders, pastors especially, we have our work cut out for us. It’s a year-round effort. When it comes to issues which touch on politics and civics, we need to resist the urge to set them on the shelf for three-and-a-half years. We need to unfold the whole counsel of God regularly and ask Him to help us imagine how His Word could apply in our unique context.

People’s opportunities, interests, and gifts will differ. Not everyone’s earthly citizenship needs to be exercised in precisely the same way. We dare not be legalistic on this point. But let’s remove the blinders.

First, let’s remove our own. How faithfully are we teaching, preaching, and modeling? Second, let’s gently remove others’ blinders. Help God’s people see a fuller picture of life in God’s world, and don’t wait until 2026 or 2028 to do it.