Christian Principles for Realistic Politics

Kevin DeYoung:

Voting for President of the United States begins today in Iowa. For the next ten months it will be hard to avoid hearing about politics. This is welcome news to political junkies and tiresome for everybody else. But whether you are into politics or not, you should care about the political process. And as Christians we should try to think Christianly about the issues and candidates before us.

This can be tricky. On the one hand, I’m concerned that some of us think there is a Christian position on every issue—as if the Bible determines the one and only God-honoring decision regarding rates of taxation or how to respond if Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz. But on the other hand, I fear other Christians are so loathe to seem partisan, or they consider politics so unclean, that they don’t dare bring Christian principles to bear on their political thinking. This too is a mistake. You don’t have to be a transformationalist or reconstructionist to believe that biblical principles ought to shape the way we look at the world (including politics) and how we understand the way things work.

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