An Open Letter to the MAGA churches of America
To the MAGA churches of America,
To my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ:
You have gone astray. You have become unmoored to your purpose. You have been hijacked by a political agenda that has subsequently torn the church apart. And what is perhaps the most consequential and the most devastating effect of your defection from your first love is that now many nonbelievers equate all Christians with those who worship at the feet of Donald Trump. You who drape yourselves in the American flag are seen as Christians by default. You who proudly don MAGA hats in solidarity with the far right and with such disdain for the far left – both in equal measure – are no longer viewed as the ones lying on the fringes of Christianity, you are now viewed as the mainstream.
It's hard to blame nonbelievers for this mistake. It’s exceedingly difficult to distinguish Christians from the far right when so many within our own ranks stand so close and look so similar. Nonbelievers may paint with a broad brush, but too many believers provide the paint that makes such indiscriminate glossing possible.
Far too many churches in America have tied their fortunes to those of a political movement. They have hitched their wagon to the wrong star. My question to those churches is this: What are you doing? Etched on the gravestone of Leonard Ravenhill are these words, “Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?” What you are living for is not what Christ died for.
You need to turn around and you need to reclaim your purpose and to wake up to what you were made for and what you were redeemed to accomplish. My hope and prayer is that this letter will be a wakeup call for you – for all of us. My hope and prayer is that this letter will allow you who have been hijacked by a political movement to regain your equilibrium by reflecting on what it is you are doing and who it is you are lining up behind.
Donald Trump is a Deeply Immoral Man
There is no need to belabor this point and that is what is so exquisitely sad. Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a deeply immoral man. But the ones who oppose him are the only ones who seem to care. The fact that this man’s sinful exploits are notorious and well-grounded in verifiable fact says more about the sizeable proportion of the church that has established him as their standard bearer than it does the man himself.
Character matters. It should matter more for those who name the name of Christ than should allegiance to a particular political ideology. And when it does not, the fact of the matter crystallizes around what is an inescapable conclusion – many who call themselves Christians have sold their souls for the sake of political expediency. The God of the Bible is no longer the God you worship. The god of the Republican party is the one to whom you have set your affections. You need to repent.
You are defined by the company you keep. You are following the lead of a man who is corrupt, a man engulfed in avarice, gluttony and lust, an adulterer and a liar, and a man who is unrepentantly and unabashedly all of those things and more. The fact that you don’t seem to care says more about you than it does him.
Christ’s Kingdom is Not of This World
John 18:36, “36 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.”
Jesus’ purposes are eternal – not temporal and not material. Please don’t get me wrong, loving one’s country is commendable, even necessary. But, for far too many Christians in America either (i) their love of country exceeds by an order of magnitude their love of God or (ii) they have conflated the two which, it turns out, is much much worse. Jesus is not an American. He never was. But far too many of you have somehow come to the fatal misapprehension that God’s kingdom will be established in America’s heartland and that God bleeds red, white and blue because we happen to be a touch more Christian than the next most Christian country on this planet. That’s a distinction, by the way, that should embarrass us. We are no more Christian than any other country. In many ways, we’re worse.
For the MAGA churches of America, please make no mistake about this – Jesus is not coming back to make America great again. Jesus is coming back to establish His kingdom and when He does America will be a distant memory, the faintest of whispers. His kingdom and His kingdom alone will endure for all of eternity and no kingdom before will be remembered and every kingdom after will be obliterated. Ten thousand years from now when genuine Christians in heaven are all basking in the immeasurable glory of the King in His eternal kingdom, nobody will even remember the United States of America because nobody will care to. How ‘bout them Cowboys? What Cowboys?
Let me state this as plainly as I can. If you are spending your life to make America great again you are wasting it. You are genuflecting in front of and immersing yourself in the worship of an idol that will not endure. MAGA will die. So will Donald Trump. The Republican Party and the star-spangled banner will not exist for long. Only Christ’s kingdom will endure. Only Christ’s kingdom will matter. And only the life spent in service to that kingdom will reap rewards in perpetuity.
Persecution Grows the Church
Many have argued that as America goes, so goes the church. The stronger America is – the more prosperous it is, the more religious freedom there is – the greater the impact globally of the church in America. How is that going so far you think? America is at the pinnacle of her power and the church in America has experienced a wealth of religious freedom and yet we are as weak as we have ever been. Ease and prosperity have corrupted the church in America. So much so that we are no longer impacting the world for the cause of Christ. Our number one export is no longer genuine biblical truth because we no longer export the gospel, we export an ersatz, damnable version of it – the prosperity gospel. We have exported the American Dream and not the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have sold a bill of goods to the world and the day of reckoning is coming.
Moreover, those who mistakenly believe that prosperity and a lack of religious persecution strengthens and grows the church of Christ have forgotten history. Wealth and strength do not grow the church. Persecution and hardship do. Tertullian had it right when he wrote, “We are not a new philosophy, but a divine revelation. That’s why you can’t just exterminate us; the more you kill the more we are. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. You praise those who endured pain and death – so long as they aren’t Christians! Your cruelties merely prove our innocence of the crimes you charge against us…. And you frustrate your purpose. Because those who see us die, wonder why we do, for we die like the men you revere, not like slaves or criminals. And when they find out, they join us.” When you take a look at where the true church is growing globally, you will invariably discover that it is growing in the very places where governments are the most vehemently opposed to Christianity.
Even if you do not accept the premise, even if Tertullian has it wrong and persecution does not in fact grow us in numbers, hardship does grow us in strength. Strength of faith, strength in hope and strength in the love of the brethren as we are forced to close ranks within a family united as one through common suffering. The church in America is more fractured than it has ever been – racially, politically, ideologically, even denominationally. Suffering has a way of clarifying purpose and uniting the church in essentials. We should not work tirelessly in the political realm to keep the boogeyman of religious persecution at bay. If anything, we should welcome it. For the sake of the gospel. For the sake of Christ’s church.
The Church is Called to the Great Commission
Matthew 28:18-20, “18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
This is what we are called to. This is our north star. But, what you have done as the MAGA churches of America is you have partitioned yourselves off into permanent and impenetrable silos burnished and branded with a political ideology that has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Consequently, you can no longer fulfill the Great Commission because your identity is so intertwined with the political right and because your disdain for the left is so dreadfully conspicuous. By identifying yourselves with a political movement – indeed by embodying it because you have swallowed it wholesale – you have immediately alienated at least half of the population and by doing this you have limited your capacity for spiritual harvest to only the half of the population that agrees with you politically and ideologically. You are not called to make disciples of the Republican Party. You are called to make disciples of all nations. You are failing miserably. The sad reality is that you are not even converting people to your cause, let alone your Christ.
Michael Jordan famously stayed away from politics throughout his illustrious basketball career. For such a high-profile black athlete to so flagrantly absent himself from the political arena was unthinkable and deeply disconcerting to many within the African American community. Their consternation was exacerbated by the reason Jordan gave for his detachment. In 1990, the U.S. Senate race in his home state of North Carolina came down to incumbent Republican Jesse Helms, a notorious racist, and Democrat challenger Harvey Gantt, an African American. Jordan refused to endorse Harvey Gantt. When asked for an explanation, Jordan famously quipped, “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
Everyone needs the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are called upon to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ and to extend His grace and His mercy to a world badly in need of salvation. The stakes are eternal and they could not be any higher. Yet, the MAGA churches of America insists on limiting their reach for reasons that are temporal and for purposes and ends that will ultimately fade.
You either live for eternity or you don’t. Your purpose is to win souls for Christ or it isn’t. Can you sincerely claim that you are genuine disciples of Jesus Christ when all of your time and all of your energy is bent towards the establishment of an earthly kingdom – the fiefdom of Donald J. Trump? And can you honestly say you are being obedient to the Great Commission when you care nothing for the souls of those who disagree with you politically?
If a Democrat would not feel welcome in your church then you have taken a wrong turn somewhere. You were created for a greater purpose – greater than the aggrandizement of a narcissistic buffoon. You were made for more than just the establishment of an earthly kingdom. You were made for eternity. Act accordingly. One day you will stand before the One who bled and died for you. Will He be pleased with what you spent your redeemed life doing?