In a recent article discussing the challenges Christian ministries are facing in the wake of paused federal funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Matthew Soerens, the vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, notes, “If President Trump understood that evangelical Christians wanted secure borders, he’s absolutely right. If he understood that evangelical Christians wanted refugees shut out who had been thoroughly vetted, who in many cases are persecuted Christians, then he got that wrong.” While we may assume that Soerens is correct that Evangelical Christians wanted both secure borders and appropriate distributions of care to those who need it, focusing solely on these two issues is overly simplistic—it serves a relatively narrow narrative that is not trivial but cannot account for the complexity of the situation we face.
The narrow framing is problematic (and evident) when the same article draws a connection between two statistics: “While 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, Soerens points to a new survey by LifeWay Research, the Southern Baptist Convention’s polling firm, found that 70% of evangelicals in the U. S. say they believe the U. S. has a moral responsibility to receive refugees.” Again, I have no reason to doubt the statistics. However, even if we assume that both are accurate, we can’t assume that they represent the full picture.
For instance, prior to the 2024 election LifeWay Research found that 82% of evangelicals said a candidate’s perceived “Ability to improve the economy” was either “important” or “most important” in determining for whom they would vote. To these stats, we could add matters related to national security more generally, religious freedom, and foreign policy, all of which evangelical voters identified as “important” to their choice of candidate. If we assume that voter concerns (a) are reflective of actual challenges facing the nation and (b) do not exhaust the problems facing the nation, we will recognize that we are in what Dave Snowden classifies as a “complex” domain in which “right answers can’t be ferreted out.” ‘To put it differently, there is no lasting, stable state that can be reached—any solution or fix is likely to influence some other aspect of the system (at least in the short-term). Snowden contrasts the complicated domain, in which “at least one right answer exists,” with the complex domain noting,
“It’s like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an expert mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The care is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux—a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source—and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of ‘unknown unknowns.’”
The Church’s Opportunity in a Changing Political Landscape
Why does all this matter? First, we need to recognize where we are. We are in a complex—bordering on chaotic—context and always have been. The United States of America has never been as simple as we might like to assume. A nation is a dynamic entity influenced not only by its elected officials and people but by other nations, economic factors, global supply chains and a host of other factors that create variability and volatility. When we understand that we are in a complex context, we also understand that every action has the potential to create more than an equal and opposite reaction.
Second, as changes are made within a complex context, we need to maintain the distinction between church and state. In particular, we need to recognize how theology changes the way we understand the world and its politics. Christians have a commitment to living in God’s presence, depending on God’s wisdom and resources, and being “free to obey” even when obedience doesn’t seem to fix the problems at hand. While the state is established by God and serves God’s purposes (Rom 13:1-4), the state and its leaders do not always recognize God as the source of their authority. The state doesn’t do what the church does. It doesn’t offer explicit testimony to the Triune God but implicitly gestures toward a relatively ambiguous higher power. God’s revelation and the theology Christians develop from it are required to give definition to the otherwise vague motions of the state.
We need to acknowledge that the state isn’t making the same sense of the world as the church. We might say that the state is using “logic” while the church is using “Theo-logic.” Though the state has been instituted by God in service of the good, it isn’t capable of solving the underlying and ongoing problems that plague the world. As theologian Oliver O’Donovan notes, “Recovery of theological description enables us to understand not only what the goods of our institutions and traditions are, but why and how those goods are limited and corruptible, and to what corresponding errors they have made us liable. It enables us, in other words, to understand the dilemmas that our tradition has generated.” He goes on to suggest that Christian theology “discloses” the reality of our political situation to us in a way “the prevailing master-narratives cannot disclose them.”
It is certainly appropriate to hold the state to a higher standard than it can attain—to point the state and its leaders to the Triune God. Yet, we must also recognize that the state often serves the good imperfectly. We cannot expect the state to fix a broken world but to encourage good—or just—behavior and discourage bad—or unjust—behavior. Its task is provisional as the utility of nations and their rulers will eventually go to zero when the Kingdom of God is fully established and justice reigns.
Finally, while Christians should be supportive in helping faith-based organizations seek to continue their work despite short-term—and potentially long-term changes—to distributions of funds from the federal government, we should also consider how such changes might open up opportunities for the church to take back some of what it has given away.
Clearly, the government has a role to play in the world. As the government’s pursuit of justice overlaps with the church’s mission, the church and the state can push in the same direction. Yet, the church’s work must be differentiated from the state because the church must always go further than the state as it pursues its task of making disciples. The church is not crippled by a lack of federal funding though it may be hindered. Rather than simply advocating that the funding be reinstituted, Christians might also consider how to continue making disciples whose resources may be added to the company of men and women who have committed all they are and have to the living God.
I am not arguing for an overly spiritual approach. The gospel and discipleship involve tangible, temporal life change. The church cannot abandon the poor, the widow, or the orphan any more than it can care for them apart from proclaiming Christ. In this moment of history, we have organized ourselves such that we are, in part, dependent on public funds to care for the world. There is nothing wrong with doing so unless or until such dependence tempts Christians to be more independent from than dependent on God.
Change always involves loss, yet, for the church, change also involves new opportunities. We should not be so enamored with the status quo that we forget that God can do abundantly more than we could ever ask or think (Eph 3:20). We need to walk the razor’s edge of advocating for the continuation of good work done by the government in collaboration with Christian organizations and engaging in prayerful discernment as we consider what God may be doing to build his people and his kingdom despite—or perhaps through—governmental changes.
Christians must never forget that we are a people of hope. That hope is not rooted in the wisdom or rulers or worldly wealth. Instead, our hope rests in Christ and the future opened up to all creation by his resurrection. While we are right, then, to remind the state of its responsibility to continue doing good, we must also acknowledge the limitations of the state so that we don’t overestimate the significance of its resources. Christians must respond to the challenges facing faith-based humanitarian aid in a way that demonstrates their conviction that they do not live on federal funding alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
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