Thread by @scott_m_coley

How did conservative evangelicals arrive at a place where, outside of one or two causes that cost nothing to promote, many don’t even pretend to integrate their faith with their politics?

In fact, such is the disarray of the evangelical political conscience that it may be helpful to comment on what it means to *integrate* faith and politics—i.e., what it means to have integrity.

As individuals, we all occupy a variety of social roles—e.g., spouse, parent, colleague, citizen and so on.

I have integrity when I approach each of these social roles in a way that’s consistent with how I approach the others.

When I have integrity, all the different parts of my life fit together—they are integrated—around a single coherent identity.

By contrast, I lack integrity when I inhabit one social role in a way that is inconsistent with who I am (or pretend to be) in some other social role.

The opposite of integrity is disintegration—an identity that’s fragmented. My identity is fragmented when I move through the various social roles that I occupy without any real sense of the self that inhabits each role, or how those roles inform the narrative of my life.

Like an individual, a political community can be integrated or fragmented. As a society, we have integrity when we share a sense of concern for what each of us deserves and what we owe to each other—which is to say, when we share a common concern for justice.

(The alternative to justice as a shared point of integration would be an ideology based in some feature of identity—such as race, ethnicity or religion. But we tend to reject, e.g., white nationalism as racist, Christian nationalism as idolatrous, and so on.)

A shared concern for justice furnishes us with a common goal for civic life, by reference to which it makes sense to debate and seek consensus around moral questions like what our laws ought to be and how our resources should be allocated.

By contrast, when we lack a shared horizon for deciding questions about what people deserve, our society is merely a collection of interest groups that assert their political will without regard for what we owe to each other.

And herein lies the source of much conservative evangelical hypocrisy in the political sphere:

Decades ago, a few self-appointed spokesmen decided that God’s blessed rage for justice is best articulated by a Church that seeks to make America the sort of place where upper-middleclass, white Christians can await the eschaton in relative comfort.

Yet we proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ, who insisted over and over again that our devotion to him is measured by our regard for the interests of those most vulnerable to injustice: the orphan, the immigrant and the dispossessed.

So our conduct in the political arena serves as a public refutation of our witness. (Unbelievers read the Bible, too; and they can see that we’re not living out the values we claim to espouse.)

It’s evident that conservative evangelicals are not truly pro-life or pro-family. The tax policies that they favor reveal what they value: where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Instead of advocating for economic policies that are conducive to raising a family, educating children and providing for future generations, many conservatives prefer policies that allow them to keep as much of their paycheck as possible—whatever the cost to our common good.

Nor will evangelicalism have integrity while there are yet unrebuked seminary faculty who’ve made a cottage industry of opposing godly calls for justice, with speeches that are contrary to the sweep of Christian theology and transparently ignorant of Western intellectual history.

Our identity will remain fractured until we set aside our own interests in the interest of justice. And until then, who we vote for matters a lot less than the fact that we’re voting for entirely the wrong reasons.