We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, a man I hear from a lot once put it. Sandals aren’t in style for manly footwear. We don’t burn our draft-cards down at the courthouse, and so forth. I agree. I am a small government, pro-national defense, localist traditionalist who trusts Merle Haggard (and the people who listen to him) to understand the common good much more than the faculty at Harvard or the creative management team at the Whole Foods organic store chain.
But does that mean that the issues our neighbor in Birkenstocks raises are not worth our attention?
Could it be that questions we tend to relegate to “them,” the counter-cultural Left, questions about poverty, the environment, global peace, animal protection, and so forth actually have monumental implications for us as conservative Christians? Maybe they are, in fact, our issues.
In the early 1970s, some Protestant Christians were reluctant to speak out on abortion because the issue seemed “too Catholic” to them. They were wrong.
In our era, some of us seem to assume that Christian conservatism means a libertarian corporatism or, in the words of one conservative, a “global Hong Kong.” And yet, a thoughtless Mammoncentric existence is precisely at odds with a biblical understanding of reality.
Does that mean we then empower a national or multinational government to address all the ills around us? Does that mean that we minimize central issues such as the sanctity of human life? Maybe there is another way.
Over a six-week span of time, I had the privilege of talking about some of these issues, issues I think are too important to leave to the liberals, at my local church. One of the best aspects of this was to get to tag-team teach this every week with my student, co-laborer, and closest friend. Robbie Sagers actually did most of the teaching each week, and his messages were joyful, thoughtful, insightful, and biblical. I came in at the end each week to tie things together.
The series is entitled, “Peace, Justice, and Jesus” and you can listen to any of the sessions or the whole thing here. I hope it leads to some conversations that will spur on Christians and churches to think about our issues in a Kingdom-focused way. In so doing, we can avoid the utopianisms of both Wall Street and Woodstock.
But I’m still not wearing Birkenstocks.
