Read on Twitter
I've seen a few evangelical brothers & sisters saying "not all evangelicals!" this week (and the Trump presidency more broadly) by pointing to examples of individual, apolitical acts of individual christian faithfulness that aren't trump-y. i hear you. but 2 things:
1. please extend the same descriptive courtesy to other Christians when they do stuff you don't like.
2. more importantly, realize that these seemingly apolitical acts (serving poor, giving to missions, etc) are ALL embedded within political frameworks & assumptions.
For example, prison ministry is great! But it isn't apolitical. A prison is a state entity, paid for by tax dollars, and it operates within a political system/cultural narrative about who deserves to be policed/punished.
To do prison ministry without recognizing this risks recapitulating the worst parts of punitive, law-and-order politics & culture (and law-and-order candidates!).
same thing w/ministry to the poor. It's awesome when churches give poor or homeless people food and shelter! But why are those people poor? Why do they lack access to affordable housing? Those are inherently political questions, and they demand political conversations & critiques
also with missions, which is not only a theologically complex topic, but (esp. if you are American) must be a conversation about power & politics that our country wields on the world stage. If you are going to talk about missions, you have to talk about Christian nationalism.
instead of saying #notallevangelicals (as @timgloege has helpfully written about), IMO evangelicals should name and lament our tradition's historical & contemp complicity with some of worst parts of US political life, like the stuff from this week.
We have to say we are sorry. https://religiondispatches.org/itsnotus-being-evangelical-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/
And then, we should keep doing the good Matthew 25-style work that local churches and individual Christians are doing! (visiting sick, prisoners, helping poor, etc).
But at the *same time* we have to attend to the political dimensions of this work - why *certain* people get sick, remain poor, are in prison, etc. And then we have to invest ourselves in tough work of political life that is itself life-giving to those on the margins.
everyone, thanks for all of your engagement with this thread. If you want to learn more about how this all works with regards to evangelicals & criminal justice, I wrote a book about it that I would love for you to read: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238787
