The Church and Politics: Three Pitfalls


By Shane Vander Hart

The late Chuck Colson offers three pitfalls in the political realm for the Church and individual believers if they are not wary.

The late Chuck Colson, the only member of the Nixon Administration to go to prison in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, turned his life over to Christ while in prison and later founded Prison Fellowship. He offered a unique perspective of the dangers the Church faces as it engages in politics.

In his book God & Government: An Insider’s View on the Boundaries between Faith and Politics, which I encourage every Christian to read, in the chapter entitled “The Perils of Politics,” Colson shares three pitfalls in the political realm for the Church and individual believers if they are not wary.

1. The church will become just another special-interest group.

Colson noted that was a mistake that President Reagan made when he was challenged by the press regarding his attendance at a “religious right” function during his 1980 campaign was “mixing religion and politics.”

Reagan responded that “the church was like any other special interest group, after all–like a union, for example.”

Colson wrote:
“Reagan was refreshingly candid, but dead wrong….. We should always remember that our allegiance is to the kingdom of God. To behave as if the Church is just another special-interest group demeans the Church and the Lord of the Church…. Representatives of the kingdom of God must never forget that the transcendence of God’s justice must come before any political entanglement that marries Christianity to a political movement.”
This, unfortunately, has come to pass in the minds of many in our culture. “Evangelical” has become synonymous with “Republican.”

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