A Billy Graham Center survey of Gen Z reported that nearly half of respondents agreed that Christian support for Trump has made them less likely to attend church. The survey offers no follow-up on why — whether the objection is to a candidate, to partisanship generally, or to something deeper about how the church understands its own order. James Spencer and Ashish Varma take the finding as a starting point rather than a conclusion.
The conversation reaches back to Constantine and the first council called by an emperor, to Augustine's two cities and the early church's refusal of military service, and to the medieval contest between papacy and throne — arguing that the entanglement of theology and politics is old news, not a recent American invention.
From there: why neither conservatism nor liberalism has room for Christ at its center, why "care for the poor" collapses so quickly into a debate about welfare, what the three people at a Wednesday night prayer meeting say about arguments over prayer in schools, and a reading of Ahaz in Isaiah 7 — a king who had already decided, and dressed the decision in piety.
Go deeper: Christians & Politics
Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.
Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com
Advertising and partnership inquiries: info@thinkingchristian.org
Chapters (part-two offsets assume the recordings join cleanly at 28:00 — verify against the export):
00:00 The survey, and what it doesn't tell us
03:25 "Politically motivated" — who gets the label
06:28 Constantine, Nicaea, and the entanglement begins
10:09 Sacred social order and the scope of government
12:33 When political procedure starts discipling us
14:54 Care for the poor, and why it becomes welfare
16:48 Augustine's two cities
18:56 The early church and military service
22:12 Bezalel: creativity constrained by a given pattern
25:32 Selective use of Scripture as a rejection of authority
26:30 Conservatism has no place for Christ
28:00 Two sides of the same coin
31:00 Where do our ideals actually come from?
36:00 Reparations, history, and what we're actually called to learn
36:30 Engel v. Vitale and the Wednesday night prayer meeting
39:40 The government has no interest in informing you
42:00 Housing, highways, and the history nobody teaches
46:40 When the platform changed and nobody blinked
48:50 Isaiah 7: Ahaz had already decided
53:20 McGilchrist, Deuteronomy 30, and knowing what we don't
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