When individual Christians do involve themselves in cultural matters, they end up merely following the world and add nothing distinctively Christian to the issue except maybe on an obvious moral issue. So, in every way the Christian voice, if not lost, is very diluted, limp and the witness of Christ is muted. When or if Christians speak to the cultural corruption around them, there ought to be something that clashes with what the world is doing. The clash is in the difference between what informs the Christian’s mind and what informs the voice of the world.

Recently I was reading a brief essay by Sir Roger Scruton titled “The Pestilence of Pulpit Politics”. He speaks to the matter of the politics of religious leaders. The context of Sir Roger’s remarks focuses on a meeting of Roman Catholic bishops in the UK during the early 1980s. At that time, bishops were encouraged to get more involved in cultural affairs. Although Scruton’s remarks are directed to this group of RC bishops, his comments apply equally to the evangelical leaders in the Protestant tradition. He writes:

“We must remember that a certain kind of politics is, for a priest, an easy way out. It is far more agreeable to exalt oneself through compassion for what is anonymous and abstract–the working class, the victims of capitalist oppression, the Third World—than to work humbly in the ways of charity, which obliges us to help those concrete, knowable and often unlovable individuals whom Providence has placed in our paths. Not only is it more agreeable, it is also more gratifying to the ego. The attention of the world is more readily captured by the man with a cause than by the man who merely attends to his duty. There lies the origin of the modern heresy, which sees true religion in large-scale worldly enterprises and which exhorts us to fight oppression in Chile, racism in South Africa or nuclear weapons at home—in short, to perfect the unfinished work of Providence—rather than to save our own souls.”

Any evangelical watching with a modicum of insight witnesses this very same mischief-making in leaders in the evangelical world where having a cause overtakes the pursuit of godliness. In fact, in many cases, leaders think that having a cause is doing one’s duty. There is a convoluted notion that the church must be engaged in cultural causes as the way to demonstrate their Christian duty. This can be seen in how many church leaders allow causes such as the Social Justice Warrior Movement to shape their ministry and message.

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