One Nation Under God: America Needs Christian Ideas

In a recent episode of the Holy Post podcast, co-host and pastor Skye Jethani criticized the conservative conviction that “policies should favor Christian ideas.” Instead, he proposed that Christians in government should pursue policies that promote “flourishing and goodness for everyone.”

To be a Christian and simultaneously claim that Christian ideas are incapable of producing a flourishing, free, and good society — how small a faith must that require?

What ideas does Jethani prefer to Christian ideas? Secular ideas? Satanic ideas?

Jethani is not the only one with this view. He is among a chorus of evangelical pastors, pundits, and academics who seem more concerned with policing conservative Christians than with confronting the godless, suicidal death cult that is assailing our nation from the Left.

The Left embraces the mockery of God’s created order for marriage between one man and one woman. The Left celebrates aborting unborn babies in the name of “reproductive freedom.” Since 1973, 65 million boys and girls have died by the violence of abortion to the applause of Democrats.

The Left also champions mutilating, sterilizing, and castrating children. Mentally ill, confused, and vulnerable girls and boys are being irreversibly damaged in the name of “gender-affirming care” to the cheers of LGBTQ ideologues.

And on the heels of Leftist rhetoric, mainstream politicians call women “birthing persons” and “chest feeders,” radicalized schoolteachers and administrators force girls into locker rooms with boys, and drag queen strippers throw cash at toddlers.

Faced with all this, some Christians urge silence — worried their churches or platforms might be labeled “too political,” “offensive,” or “unempathetic.”

When I was preparing to be a lifeguard, my training went a little something like this: if someone is drowning, do not jump in the water and drown with them. Throw a life preserver, extend a shepherd’s crook, or make a skilled save while ensuring your own safety. Pull the swimmer out of the water to save their life.

Like the sinking swimmer, the Left does not need affirmation as it drags our country down its suicidal path — it needs firm rejection from the Church and its shepherds. Sinners cannot be saved in their sin, but must be called out of it.

The Church must offend flesh, confront darkness, and model a holier way as a city on a hill and a light in the darkness. The “love of neighbor” is the whole truth spoken in love, an invitation to repentance, and the promise of newness of life in Christ.

The Holy Post and others’ avoidant, “empathetic” approach to political engagement does not offer a broken culture a solid refuge or a light in the darkness. It does not throw a life preserver, but jumps in to drown with the sinner. Willful silence from platforms and pulpits in the face of cultural evil condemns Christian audiences to ignorance, and the fear of man makes a fickle, fruitless flock.

That’s not compassion: it’s apathy cloaked as empathy.

The same fruitless result is reached when evangelical thought leaders obscure simple Biblical truths in mind-numbing “nuances” and an overly “winsome” delivery — believers are left clueless, unequipped, and vulnerable, and cultural evils go unchecked and unchallenged.

A Christian government and a Christian cultural consensus cannot save every soul in our country — only the Holy Spirit’s work of regeneration and faith in Jesus Christ can do that in a person. But together, both can create a nation where objective truth, moral order, and God’s good design provide “flourishing and goodness to everyone.”

America needs Christian ideas. Unborn babies, children, marriages, and families need Christian ideas, and unbelievers need the truth, love, joy, compassion, goodness, dignity, charity, freedom, moral order, and righteousness inherent in Christian ideas.

If the belief that Christian ideas should govern society makes us too extreme for the cool kids’ table at the Holy Post, so be it. If proclaiming Biblical truth about the sanctity of life, children’s innocence, godly marriage, and the created dignity of the sexes is deemed “too political,” then again, so be it. The Church is not called to cultural appeasement — it is called to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

The answer to our nation’s cultural schism is not a thoughtless kumbaya with the Left. It is revival — revival in our Churches, revival of a Christian cultural consensus, and revival of governance rooted in Christian ideas.

Hannah Lape is Legislative Assistant for the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, dedicated to promoting Biblical values and Constitutional principles in public policy.