Eclectic Christian

By Michael Bell

Introduction

Part 1: Busyness

Part 2: Politics and the Culture War

Over the last several weeks I have been thinking about things that distract us from the Gospel. The issue of Politics and the Culture War has to be one of the most significant. To state the issue briefly, Evangelical Christians in the United States have been very concerned with trying to determine who is going to be the political party in power. This is as result of two things, the Republican Party co-opting the religious right by preying on their fears of a homosexual focused, or pro-choice agenda coming from the Democratic Party, along with Evangelical Christians having general concerns about these things and so looking to support a party that shares their concerns.

As a result, Christians have put a lot of effort into pro-life agendas. What Christians may fail to realize is that other than education, there are at least three things that will lower the abortion rate:

1. Legislation – When abortions became legal the rate went way up. Reintroducing legislation is part of the Republican/Evangelical agenda.
2. Improving economic conditions – A one percent drop in the unemployment rate roughly translates into an six percent drop in the number of abortions. (I determined this by charting US Abortion ratios against Unemployment statistics from the period of 1982 to 2004 and then displaying as a scatter graph with a best fit line.) This is the Democratic way forward as proposed by Obama and Tony Campolo.
3. Transforming lives through the power of the Gospel. What I find interesting is that I don’t find Christians talking a lot about this item. If we believe in the power of God to transform lives then wouldn’t we expect the abortion rate to go down as people made genuine commitments to follow Christ?

Now I realize that we could have a discussion about abortion rates between Christians and non-Christians and reasons for the similarities or differences, but I don’t want to go here with this post. All I want to point out is that we have been so concerned with Politics and the Culture War that we have lost our focus on Christ. Jesus did not come to elect political parties, Jesus came to transform lives.

Up in Canada, the political scene is quite different. Politicians are extremely private about their faith. Up until 2004 Evangelical Christians were pretty much split between two Political parties, the Conservations (48%) and the Liberals (42%). In the 2006 election, their was a swing by Canadians in general towards the Conservative party, reinforced by a strong move in the Evangelical community. However, as our Evangelical community is much smaller percentage wise than in the United States, and because Canadian Evangelicals tend to be on the left of American Evangelicals, we have not seen the culture war up here near to the extent that you have in the United States. Instead Canadian Churches have been able to focus on other things, among them church planting and evangelism.

What has been the result? As I have pointed out in previous posts, while the American Evangelical church has been declining, the Canadian Evangelical Church has shown significant growth over the past twenty years. There are certainly other factors, but I would propose that not being distracted as much by Politics and the Culture War has been a major reason leading to the relative growth of Evangelicals in Canada.

Postscript: If you would like to read more about the political differences between Canada and the United States and how that impacts on matters of faith, I have found that the blog “Pulpit and Politics” by Dennis Gruending, is very good at exploring these differences in depth.