As Christians consider the implications of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over the public square, they have to take great care to get outside the cafeteria mentality that currently afflicts us. Christian engagement with the world does not mean that “Christ is Lord” is a mantra that will help us decide whether to eat this slop served up by the world or that slop served up by the world. Some Christians, locked in the world’s cafeteria, are over in the corner engaged in a hunger strike, waiting for the rapture — which better be pretty soon because they’re getting kind of hungry. Other Christians argue (rightly enough) that we should be engaged with the culture around us, but they then go on to adopt a deracinated “Christian worldview” that does nothing more than enable them to decide which worldlings to follow.
Some of them follow the Republicans, some follow Fox News, and on the other side of Gullibility Lane we find the kind of Christians who think that the cultural mandate from Genesis requires us to respond to all the lying global warming hype with the appropriate “concern” — call it stewardship hysterics. And it turns out that whatever worldlings the Christians support, the encroachments of that great idol, the State, grow steadily, year after year. But running east down the aisle of a westbound airliner is not the same thing as “going east.”
The thing that Christians need to learn is that the Christian view of the world is not supposed to be a variant of “us too!” Far too many of us have been suckered into a game that defines sin and evil in terms of the Democratic Party (an understandable mistake, I know), but which cannot see the glaring problems on the Republican side. And so evangelical activists are milling around now, trying to decide which least unacceptable horse to bet on — because we simply can’t let Hillary get in. And Obama would be just as bad, although we can appreciate the new life he has brought to campaign slogans (“Yo mama wants Obama!”) And so some are touting Romney the Mormon — although I can’t resist pointing out that, out of the front-runners the Mormon is the only one who hasn’t been a serial polygamist. Others are thinking about Guiliani of the nice smile, the pro-choice, pro-homosexual pending disaster. Others say McCain, which shows just how bad things have gotten.
It doesn’t help to be mainstream if Niagara Falls is just two hundred yards off.