October 10, 2025
Partisan Piety?
This past weekend we had Dominique Gilliard, the Covenant’s Director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation as a guest of our church. While here, Dominique attended the Pilgrimage of Hope to the ICE Detention Center in Tacoma, reflected on how the prayer of Habakkuk speaks to us in this current season we are living through, and offered a biblical survey on the expectation of God’s people to be a witness to justice and mercy, while naming sin and injustice.
In the midst of his presentation, he offered a phrase that I have used more than once. Christian faith is political, but not partisan. The good way to understand that phrase is to think of it through the work of former North Park Seminary Ethics professor, Brent Laytham, whose teaching and writing often began with the phrase, “God is not…”. God is not a Republican, God is not a Democrat, God is not an American, God is not a Capitalist; to name a few. In other words, God is not like us: God doesn’t have a philosophical bias about politics, about economics, about denominations, or about nations. God loves and offers redemption to them all.
However, God has values that reflect God’s nature. When considering God’s nature, I begin and end with John 3:16: “For God so loved the world (in Greek “ton kosmon,” literally the cosmos or universe), that God gave God’s only Son” for its salvation. God loves everyone. Christ died for everyone. But that doesn’t give us a free pass to accept salvation and do and think what we want. We ought to reflect God’s nature in our speech and in our life. That certainly means we reflect God’s love, along with God’s mercy, truth, kindness, and justice. The scriptures are clear God’s salvation is intended to transform the way we think and live. (for example: Romans 12:2)
Think of it this way. Imagine a preschool room filled with toys and children ages 2-5. When the adults aren’t looking, the older children take masking tape and mark off a corner with only a few toys in it. The older children tell the younger children that that “this corner is yours the rest of the room is ours.” When the adults in the room realize what has happened, the quickly pull up the masking tape, as the distinction that was made is not what was intended. So it is with our distinctions— geographical, political, economic—they are arbitrary and temporary. And they are all open to critique rooted in scripture and the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
We all have allegiances that are to human movements and institutions. Right now people are allowing their political persuasions to inform their health choices, their ecological choices, even their religious and faith choices. Yet to claim that Christ is Lord of all, and to submit to Christ’s lordship, is to subordinate all of our allegiances all under our allegiance to Christ in all that we think, say, and do. May God give us as a church the wisdom and courage to do exactly that in this particular moment in time.
With confidence in Christ,
~ Pastor Todd