Politically Incorrect with Phil Johnson

Political Activism and the Gospel in a Time of Cultural Upheaval

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One, two, three. Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community.

For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right, well, welcome to another Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, and I am joined with Bud from sunny Florida. And today is Inauguration Day. A lot of people have been, I don't know, I don't know that we could say they've been eased with conclusions, but at least we can now finally put many false prophecies and conspiracy theories to rest.

Trump didn't take over last minute and arrest all the Democrats and put them in Guantanamo and hold on to the United States Corporation versus whatever that was, that was theory going around. And many false teachers have now been officially wrong again, again, again.

So it is also something else, Bud, that you may not realize. Today we're recording on Inauguration Day. It is also the 20th anniversary of podcasting. Today is the 20th anniversary. Podcasting started 20 years ago today.

And so good that we Do we offer thanks for that? I don't know that we do that. But today what we wanted to do, being that we're dealing with the Inauguration, is bring someone in who always, always talks about politics.

It is like his number one topic. Phil Johnson, from Grace to You, welcome.

Welcome. You obviously don't listen to me very much.

Well, yeah, it's like there's Rush and then Phil. I mean, you're right there. It's the same genre.

Well, actually, no Although there is a nest of critics on Twitter who constantly reproach me. They say for my support, my campaigning for Donald Trump. And the truth is, I've never campaigned for Donald Trump.

I don't know where they get that. But whatever, I try to stay as clear from partisan politics as possible.

I think it's because you're a Christian and therefore, by definition, you're supposed to be the cause of all the ills and supporting of Trump.

But I have Maybe I'm also just not a very likable guy. So I'm kind of a lightning rod for all these angry critics who are looking for someone to just pour their animosity on.

Well, I disagree. You are a likable guy. I happen to know that. But I know your view on politics because actually, I've read, well, I have written my own book, but I read your foreword to my book where you actually laid that out in my book, What Do We Believe?

And you gave that lesson of really your life, your background where you were very politically involved and then met Christ. So maybe you could just give a short synopsis of why, because I think you're specifically, the reason we wanted to have you on is your background with the topic we want to talk about today with politics and political activism, a Christian's role, I think your background helps people who are very, very politically motivated and shall we say even addicted.

Yeah, and I was into politics early.

I grew up in the 60s, when student demonstrations were, if anything, more widespread and more violent than they are today. And left-wing politics was sort of the staple of my generation. And I went the other way.

I've always been a conservative, but still hold to a lot of conservative convictions. You can see that both in my theology and if I talk about any particular issues these days, you can tell my conservatism, I don't try to hide that.

But I was into partisan politics, party politics, the nasty stuff. As an unbeliever, I really felt like what's wrong with our culture can be fixed and must be fixed by politics. And one of the things I instantly understood as a brand new Christian was, politics does not hold the solution for what ails our culture, the gospel does.

And my calling as a believer is to preach the gospel, not to campaign for any particular candidate or party. It's difficult to say that and then have people not accuse you of hypocrisy these days, because so many of the issues that are on the table for politicians are moral issues, abortion and homosexuality.

If you're gonna preach the Bible faithfully, you're going to deal with these moral issues that intrude on current political issues and people are gonna say, well, there you are in politics. And my answer to that is, I'm not gonna leave an important moral standard behind just because some politician got ahold of it.

So I will, yes, oppose legislation that utterly overthrows the moral foundations of our society or whatever, but I don't think legislation is gonna solve the problem that is causing our culture to unravel.

I think what we as Christians need to do is focus on the gospel and proclaim the gospel and because it speaks directly to people's hearts and the underlying problem of course is sin and that's a heart problem.

It's not a legislative problem and it's certainly not something that can be fixed by legislation. And scripture expressly says that, it says, look, if righteousness could come by the law, Paul says, then Christ is dead in vain.

So we need to get away from thinking that the fix for what's wrong with our culture is purely political and that Christians need to throw themselves more and more into the political process and get further and further away from preaching the gospel.

That's a huge mistake.

Yeah, how could government be the solution when it's actually the cause of the problem? Yeah, that's right. You know, it's one of the things that I've been seeing. Unfortunately, this trend, and I'm sure you've seen this as well, that especially around election years, we have more and more Christians that seem to be more politically motivated than they are gospel motivated.

You know, I said in last week's episode and in the paper I wrote on political activism in a Christian's role, that unfortunately many Christians know and teach or preach the Republican Party's message more than the gospel message.

And to me, it's been a concerning thing to see this election cycle with Trump, even after, with all the stuff with the question of ballots and everything else, so many Christians seem to put so much, it seems, emphasis on Trump having to be there to save America.

Yeah, it's a dangerous temptation because as time has gone by, the focus of American politics has shifted more and more towards issues that, like I said, directly overthrow the moral foundations, biblical moral foundations of our society.

And so it is a temptation to think that this guy who's finally willing to fight against that and speak against that, he's the savior we need. And he's not, that's not to say I don't like all of his policies, but, you know.

He's far from a savior.

That's right, that's right.

And again, I don't wanna be critical of any politician in an unfairly personal way. We're commanded to pray for them and pray that we may live in peace and all that. And part of that is you wanna see policies that, that, you know, at least reflect a commitment to the Lord's standards.

But for Christians to think that this is what we ought to be doing, this is what our culture needs and forego preaching the gospel instead, that's just a huge departure from what we are called and commanded by Christ to do.

Why Legislation Cannot Solve a Heart Problem

Yeah, you know, in the paper, and for folks listening, I'll have a link to Phil's article called Politically Incorrect. It'll be in the show notes, but I wanna engage, have you get your response on, you wrote in your own paper.

And this is from a, this is from actually a Shepherd's Conference message that you had delivered. But you said, quote, if you think the most important answer to the ills of our society is a legislative remedy, if you imagine the political activism is the most effective way for the church to influence culture, or if you suppose the church is going to win the world for Christ by lobbying in the halls of Congress and by rallying Christians to vote for this or that type of legislation, then both your trust and your priorities are misplaced, unquote.

That's a very, I mean, kind of a hard-hitting thing, especially for the church. This is now years after you, this was, I think you said you preached this in 2008, right? I think that's right, yeah. And so this seems even more so today.

Why do you think it is churches are doing this, that they're misplacing their trust into legislation instead of Christ?

Because our culture's movement away from Christian principles and biblical convictions has accelerated in a way that I don't think anyone ever expected or foresaw. If you had told me that, you know, this guy who claims he's a woman, he's been the head of the health thing in Pennsylvania, and now Joe Biden has appointed him to a federal office, I forget what it is, but he's very influential now.

And if you had told me that was gonna happen even five or 10 years ago, I would have said, I don't think America's ready for that. But the culture has so shifted and the downhill slide of our moral fabric has, that's a mixed metaphor, but you get what I mean.

It's accelerated so quickly that it's scary, it's frightening and it seems to be driven, it appears to be driven partly or largely by politics. It's also driven by Hollywood. It's also driven by the academic world.

All of these things are factors, but what it reflects is the church has abandoned her responsibility to hold firm. And the answer to it is not for us to jump into the political process or put ourselves, try to gain control over Hollywood or even somehow gain control through the academic world.

What we need to be doing is standing apart from that and proclaiming the gospel to people, because frankly, people who don't have Christ, they're lost and they feel it. And those who are called will respond to the gospel.

That's what we ought to be doing.

Phil, do you think that this is an effect of the pragmatic success that seeker-sensitive church growth methodologies have had in filling the pews of evangelicalism with so much worldliness, so many professors, not possessors of faith, and this is the logical way to sort of feed them and motivate them?

Yeah, I would put a large part of the blame at the feet of those in the evangelical movement who have imbibed pragmatism. I mean, the idea that, the very idea that politics can solve what's wrong with our culture, that's a pragmatic thought.

That's pure pragmatism. So the more we have been conditioned and indoctrinated with pragmatic values, the more likely we are to succumb to that temptation. But yeah, the only thing I would balk at at what you said is success.

I don't think pragmatic Christianity has had really any kind of success. And even long-term, the numerical success, with their ability to draw large numbers of people, that's eroding now. I don't think that's gonna last very long.

In fact, I wonder if it's going to survive the COVID lockdowns. People who haven't been coming to church, are they gonna come back for a stage show? Are they gonna come back for Justin Bieber up there pretending to be a pastor?

I don't see that succeeding in any sense long-term. I think what it's done is, go ahead. I think what it's done has been a huge distraction. And as you said, as you suggested, it has filled churches with false converts, people who think they're Christians because they feel good about Jesus, they like going to church to be entertained, and they've been told that they're Christians, but they don't really have a clue what it means to trust Christ as Lord and Savior.

And to follow him. Yeah, and I don't mean it successful in a positive way, but I mean, pragmatically it was, it filled churches. But you've given them a Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Well, goodness, my country doesn't look like that. I've got to get out there and fight for it. And so that motivates the political activism from the pews in that sense where there's no doctrine.

I think I heard Phil just say that Justin Bieber cosplays a pastor. Yeah, pretty much right. He's going to save Hillsong. But it is something that's interesting to see because you had mentioned this in your message that the least most popular book that John MacArthur has ever written.

Is The Government Cannot Save Us. Yeah, it's called Why Government Can't Save You. And that book and the broadcast of the messages that that book grew out of, when we broadcast that on Grace To You, and we do it periodically around times when the election talk gets very heavy and all that.

It's one of our least responded to requested, least requested broadcast. People don't like it. In fact, there've been a couple, I won't name any names, a couple of very large Christian organizations that pretty much went ballistic when John MacArthur wrote and released that book.

They interpreted him to be saying that the church should just be this closeted, sequestered group of people who pray to the Lord, talk to one another and don't have any impact on society. You could only think that if you didn't read the book.

What John MacArthur is saying is the church needs to get out there and do what we're called to do, which is proclaim the gospel. It's the furthest thing from being cloistered.

But why do you think it is that those messages in that book, it's such little response? When you consider everything he's written, I guess the question is, does it seem like there's a large part of Christianity, even what we would consider a conservative Christianity, that really looked to the government and wanted to be a savior?

Yes, and I think mistakenly so. I think they're not thinking clearly or biblically. And I try to understand the perspective because, as I said, I think we're all tempted to delve into partisan politics at times because think about the issues that are on the table, abortion and transsexuality, homosexuality, and now the sort of marriages where you've got a group of people instead of just a husband and wife, that sort of thing.

These are being aggressively promoted by legislation and politicians and government. And these are issues that any decent biblical-minded Christian is going to feel passionate about. Understand the passion.

What's wrong is the notion that the solution to these problems is purely political as well. And so what we need to do is set aside what we've always done as the church and throw ourselves into politics instead.

And that's been a trend, I think, really, since Roe versus Wade. You can trace it almost back to that. Prior to that, there were, when I was a young Christian, even, there were small groups of evangelicals who were politically engaged in a way that sort of drowned out the gospel message.

You had Billy James Hargis, and I forget the other names, but these were like radio preachers who were ardent anti-communists, and most of them very conservative. You'd probably agree with a lot of their politics, but the way they did what they thought of as ministry was actually a reproach to the gospel.

I think they did far more damage than good, but they were the unusual examples. Billy James Hargis actually had his headquarters less than a mile from where I lived when I went to high school. And I knew, I had friends whose parents were on the staff of that organization.

And what was going on behind the scenes was abominable. It ultimately melted down because of some moral scandals that came to light. And I noticed then as a high school student that that sort of politically oriented religion often goes hand in hand with moral problems because what it reflects is someone who's lost his focus on the biblical issues.

Now he's into politics and worldly matters. He thinks the wisdom of this world isn't foolishness with God. And that's a bad direction for Christians to go.

Abortion, Political Compromise, and the Need for Heart Change

Yeah, and I want to get to the abortion issue. And you brought it up in your message. And before you did, you had some things for pastors and it's who you were speaking to. You had said this, quote, we are pastors and church leaders who formally and confessionally recognize the authority of scripture.

Practically the worst kind of spiritual treason we could ever commit would be to supplant the gospel with a different message or to allow an earthly agenda to crowd out our spiritual duties. That is exactly the risk we take when we pour our money and resources into political and legislative remedies for our society's spiritual problems.

And so that comes right into some of the problems that we see that you had dealt with. And one of them being abortion. And I couldn't help but to think because you brought that out that here's the one thing that we've kind of seen, abortion, and Christians have gone behind it and it hasn't ended.

And so you kind of asked like, are we successful at that? But the question I have for you is, has that actually become a distraction? Have we so focused on the abortion issue that we allowed the other side of the political aisle to take the cultural issue?

And we're focused on just one part of a cultural thing and they've taken over everything else where even if we win on the abortion issue today, we're never gonna get back the cultural without Christ doing something.

Yeah, but yeah, I think I grasp what you're saying and probably agree with it. I'm not saying we should be less concerned about abortion, lest anyone read me that way. Whenever this subject comes up, someone will say, well, again, you just think people should be cloistered, they shouldn't be concerned about these things and who cares what the government's position on abortion is?

I'm not saying that. If there's legislation to vote for, I'll vote for it and all that. What I'm pleading for is for Christians not to think that the ultimate answer lies in some kind of political solution because it never does.

And we ought to have learned this lesson from history. You can survey church history and whenever the church has gained a political clout and managed to use legislative means to try to enforce the will of God or the opinions of the church on the rest of society, that's never been successful because if you're trying to enforce, I mean, this is the whole lesson from the Old Testament law.

Again, righteousness doesn't come through law. If it did, then Christ is dead in vain. It's Christ who changes people's hearts and you can make a law outlawing abortion. I hope for a law like that, but that isn't gonna solve the underlying problem which is corrupt hearts who just love sin.

The most recent, I think, modern example of this would go back to the, I would go back to the prohibition era when Christians, in fact, this was, I think, what laid the groundwork for today's evangelicals to be so politically engaged.

Our great-grandparents were all agitated over the effects of drunkenness and liquor and so they managed to get liquor outlawed in the United States. Did that solve the problem of drunkenness and crime?

It actually inflamed it, which is what Paul says about something as simple as covetousness. I wouldn't have known covetousness unless the law said, thou shalt not covet, but the law took advantage of it and stirred up in me all kinds of covetousness.

The same thing happens when you try to address a moral issue with law and just leave it at that. If you haven't changed a person's heart, if a person's perspective and values haven't changed, then outlawing abortion is gonna save some lives and again, I'm all for that, I want that, but that's not the goal as a Christian.

The goal is to get the gospel out there so that people's hearts are changed so that mothers don't want to kill their babies and we have the means to make the gospel known and instead, we're suppressing the gospel message and there are Christian groups who literally do this, suppress the gospel message so that they can maintain an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church or the Mormons who link arms with us against abortion, but at the cost of silencing the gospel, no.

And yet, I rarely find modern evangelicals who understand why that's a bad idea.

Well, I love that when I see guys who go outside of abortion clinics and you'll always see the Roman Catholics there and they're gonna pray their rosary beads and the thing that's interesting is you'll see some that will actually not speak out against Catholicism, but I like to see the guys that will not only preach the gospel to the women going in, but to the Catholics that are there and I remember one friend of mine who said, he had one of the Catholic people come up and say, why are you, we're on the same side on this, why are you calling us out?

And he said, because you need the same gospel. They want to just, let's be all on the same side because somehow, if we have a majority of people, we can win. Well, we actually have a majority. I mean, there's a simple reason they have never legislated abortion because they know that it would get them in trouble.

Like they keep it in the courts, but the Congress could get together and just say that they're actually gonna vote it, but they won't do that because they know that the majority is not formed. It's not really a majority issue, I think.

And I think one of the things I see with the abortion issue, more than any other, and this is why I noted it when I saw it in your message was, we see people who, I mean, I would say that Trump was probably the most pro-life, at least in what he tried to push forward, is probably the most pro-life president we've ever had.

And yet there's tons, a lot of Christians that wouldn't vote for him because he wasn't pro-life enough or in their mind wasn't even pro-life. And over that one issue, I think you end up giving up the whole culture because we now have with Biden, we're gonna have a cultural war that is far greater than we would have had with a Trump.

And I just wonder if we've become a one issue party or as the Christians, some Christians have become a one issue voter. And if that then is, you know, how that ends up affecting the way we view church when it's just everything is this one issue.

Yeah, well, and let's face it too,.

It's been difficult to be a Christian and be politically engaged for more than a decade now because it seems like both of the major American political parties have been devoted to nominating the most deplorable candidates they can possibly come up with the most disliked people in America become our presidential candidates.

I don't understand that, but that's the way politics have gone. So it's pretty hard for a Christian to throw himself into that process and think and even convince himself that he's doing God's work when our best choice, literally our best choice is someone who's morally depraved.

And that's not a new problem. I mean, that is the nature of secular politics. I don't know of in the history of America, if there's ever really been a thoroughly devoted godly candidate for president possible.

And I don't know history that, I don't know the older history that well, but until that happens, I'm not gonna champion someone who's immoral as if he were the savior of what's wrong with our country.

I vote for a person based on whether I like his policies or not. And that's what you're really forced to do because if your main concern is the guy's character, there really isn't anybody that a Christian can in good conscience campaign for and vote for.

Preaching, Gospel, Service, and Christ as the Church's Priorities

Yeah, every four years, I always have to say I'm voting for president, not pastor. And you just have to understand those roles. So after this break, what I wanna do is I'd like us to talk about the solution.

You laid out four points in that sermon. I think it would be helpful for folks if we could go through some of those so we know, okay, where do we go from here? So let's talk about that right after this break.

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Okay, so Phil Johnson, from grace to you, we're glad that you're with us. And as we're talking about where we go from here, you gave four points of an outline for pastors at the Shepherds Conference. Just to remind us where priorities are.

The first that you had was preaching not lobbying. Is how we make truth known. Could you expand on that a bit and help us see why that's so important?

Yeah, you know that sermon's so old that during your break, I had to call up my notes on my computer and try to remember what I said. And it's a pretty good outline. Preaching not lobbying is how we make the truth known.

God chose by the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. That's what Paul expressly says in 1 Corinthians. And one of the most difficult things to convince a contemporary evangelical of is that preaching is God's chosen strategy.

It's not just one of, you know, like we could come up with a better plan, right? And there are lots of people in evangelical leadership who are convinced that we could come up with a better plan. And lots of them think the better plan is politics, political lobbying.

You know, let's throw our resources into this or that party or some kind of lobbying effort. And in fact, that is not the means God chose to get the word out to save those who believe, the scripture says.

But preaching is, which seems like a foolish strategy. And Paul even acknowledges that. It was a foolish strategy in the first century as well. It isn't that people then were more open to hearing someone preach that they are hopeless sinners who cannot save themselves.

They hated that message just as much in the first century as they do today. And Paul acknowledges that the gospel itself is a stumbling block. It sounds like foolishness to the enlightened people of the world.

And yet he said, the foolishness of God is wiser than men. And God hates the wisdom of this world. And so he chose a foolish strategy, preaching to save those who believe. We need to embrace that, understand it.

And the scripture is very clear about it. And I don't understand why contemporary evangelicals, frankly, have such a hard time with that. But if you ever say that, just what was the outline point again, that preaching not lobbying is the means God chose for us to get the truth out.

You say that to the typical evangelical today, you're going to get a whole lot of pushback from people who are going to accuse you of being hopelessly naive and out of touch with this culture. And you're not engaging the culture if all you're doing is preaching and all that sort of stuff.

It's, in my view, disobedience to something that is very clear in scripture.

Yeah, why do you think that is though, that as you've said, even in Paul's day, this was not popular. It's even more so, I think, in our day with all the entertainment we have, you have all these churches that put dramas on instead of preaching.

Why do you think it is that it has always been something that people don't think preaching is the right mode for communicating truth?

Well, because let's face it, there's something in following human flesh we don't like to be preached to. None of us like to be preached to by something that's going to convict us and all that. But until you get through that hard exterior and with the truth, you convict the heart.

And the Holy Spirit does that. His job is to convict people of sin and righteousness and judgment. And what's ironic about that is those are the very subjects that today's church growth gurus tell you, you shouldn't put in your message.

Don't talk about sin and don't talk about judgment and don't talk about righteousness. Talk about self-help and felt needs and things people want to hear. And so they're counseling pastors to scratch people's itching ears when, again, Scripture's very clear on this.

God chose this other means and the Holy Spirit's job is to convict and convince people of sin, righteousness, and judgment. So if you preach as Scripture says you should, people who are called will respond.

And the church I belong to is proof of that. We have no shortage of people coming to hear two hours of preaching every Sunday morning. Two hours of preaching on a Sunday morning. And the average person today will tell you, well, it doesn't leak.

We've been doing it for years and people do respond. And we're right in the heart of the entertainment community. Our church is less than 10 miles due north of Hollywood. So I just don't buy all the cultural stabby that some of these church growth gurus pretend to have.

They're wrong.

Well, I love when John MacArthur will refer to the book that was written on homiletics, on how to preach, and they have a chapter on him and basically say he does everything wrong. According to their style, everything's wrong.

But yet, everyone wants to hear him. I think the thing that I find interesting with it, with what you've said, is we actually listen to preaching for the formidable years of our life, right? I mean, we sit in classrooms where someone lectures to us, and yet I don't see people saying in the school systems that, well, we need to have dramas because we need more entertainment.

We have this like in every other area. So it's just puzzling to me that somehow preaching is just not the proper means of communicating truth. We need other things. I mean, we're speaking specifically with politics.

And I think that they're, you know, we know that with 501c3s, the argument is we can't speak on politics, but we shouldn't shy away from political things, political matters, because they are, they do deal with moral issues.

And yet, when we look at this, there was a second point that you had. So first, preaching, not lobbying, is how we make truth. But your second point, gospel, not law, is what changes sinful hearts. And I think this, you were referring to it earlier, I think this is the major problem people have with John MacArthur's book that we referenced earlier, or my article that gets me in trouble every year on political activism, a Christian's responsibility, because this is the main point of it that we're trying to point out.

Why do you think that's such a stumbling block for people?

Well, again, I think we have fallen hearts and sinful hearts. We think worldly wisdom is important, and we lean towards law as opposed to gospel. Those are all tendencies that scripture counsels us to, as believers, to reject and fight against.

So I can't give you a why other than to say, I think we need to recognize that these are sinful tendencies that should not be encouraged and certainly shouldn't be adopted and embraced by people who pretend to have expertise in church growth.

No, this point, this is a central point, I think, to where this issue is of why people get so tied up with politics, with a politician they think is going to save the day. If we just get the right politician, we can end abortion.

The issue I always see with this, and I think you brought it out in your message, was the fact that people start to lose the sense of what the gospel message is and start arguing for political things or laws, and they spend more time, it seems to me, researching all of Trump's policies and the good he did for the country over their study of scripture.

Is that a trend that you notice as well, and why is the gospel so important in discussions of politics?

Yeah, and that's the lure of politics, I think. What it does is distract, and it's just one of many things that distracts from the simplicity of the gospel message. The foolishness and stumbling block of the gospel just doesn't fit with partisan politics because in politics, politics is all about compromise and winning the favor of people and votes and stuff like that.

So you have to be concerned with public relations and political correctness and all of these things that, frankly, they all work against the truth. So I don't want to be clear. I'm not saying that no Christian should ever have a career in politics.

If the Lord has called you to that, it's as valid a vocation as anything else. What I am pleading for is for Christians not to imagine that a political solution exists for what is wrong with people and what is wrong with our society.

We have the gospel, and to set that aside and put more emphasis on anything else, politics just happens to be the one that's the big temptation right now. But if you were coming to me saying, no, as Christians now, we need to be philosophers.

We need to cultivate the wisdom of this world and understand it and all of that, I would say, again, that's a legitimate vocation if you want to do it, but if it crowds the gospel out from your thinking or your message, then it's counterproductive.

It's counterproductive. Imagine if we could elect a candidate and or a slate of candidates, it's enough senators to outlaw abortion tomorrow. And so abortion is suddenly illegal in America. Do you think that's gonna usher in a period of peace and acceptance of that law?

That's simply gonna inflame the hearts of people who think somehow that abortion is an important right that they need to, they'll fight harder until you've changed their hearts, until people understand that, yeah, this is murder and it's a sin against God.