When I was in the Worldwide Church of God, we didn’t vote.
We took Jesus seriously when He said, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, then would my servants fight.” We read “put away your sword” as applying not only to weapons but to the ballot box. We preached “render unto Caesar” as pay your taxes, obey the laws—but don’t imagine you can bring the Kingdom of God with a lever in a voting booth.
So we stayed out. I didn’t cast a ballot in any election until 2008. That was the first time I voted in my life.
On this past Tuesday’s episode of Created in the Image of God, I spoke with historian and religion journalist Mark Silk—a Jewish scholar who has spent decades studying how religion and American politics intersect. Listening to him trace the story from Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority to Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition to the Tea Party and MAGA, I felt again the tension I’ve lived with for years:
- How should followers of Jesus engage political power?
- What happens when churches become partisan weapons?
- And what does any of this have to do with the “end times,” Romans 13, and our eroding social center?
I want to pull together four strands from that conversation.
1. From Moral Majority to MAGA: When Churches Became Party Machinery
Mark reminded me that Jerry Falwell didn’t start out as a political activist. In the early days, he was part of a conservative evangelical world that criticized Black churches for engaging in the civil rights movement. They said it violated the “spirituality of the church” to be involved in politics.
Then, Falwell had a conversion of a different kind. He began to see that political engagement could be effective—especially on issues like school desegregation, later women’s rights and gay rights. By the late 1970s, he launched the Moral Majority, a movement that:
- Branded itself as representing a broad “moral” consensus.
- In practice, aligned itself with the Republican Party’s electoral interests.
- Helped mobilize conservative Protestants behind Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Mark’s judgment, as a historian, was blunt: whatever it called itself, this was never really a neutral, cross-partisan moral movement. It was functional Republican politics channeled through religious networks.
Pat Robertson took that further with the Christian Coalition in the 1990s:
- He’d already run for president in 1988 and seen the power of mobilizing churches.
- The Coalition specialized in “voter guides” distributed in conservative congregations.
- These guides were not simple issue-education tools; they were heavily weighted toward Republican candidates.
It was, as Mark put it, “putting a thumb on the scale”—using Sunday morning spaces to deliver partisan marching orders.
Then came the Tea Party around 2010:
- Right-wing populism framed around taxes and government overreach, not explicitly around religion.
- Less church-centric; more driven by media figures like Glenn Beck.
- Yet deeply intertwined with the same constituencies the Christian Right had cultivated.
The line from Falwell → Robertson → Tea Party → MAGA is not identical, but it is continuous. With each step:
- Religion and partisan identity fused more tightly.
- The institutional center moved from denominations and churches to cable networks and movement media.
- Theologies of America itself—as a “Christian nation,” as under siege, as on the brink—multiplied.
For someone raised in a church that forbade voting on biblical grounds, watching this progression is jarring.
We went from “we cannot wield the sword” to “here is your sword—use it as we recommend” in a few decades.
2. Romans 13 and “My Kingdom Is Not of This World”: Context Matters
When I asked Mark how he thinks about Romans 13—Paul’s command to “be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God”—he did what historians do. He put it back in its context:
- A small, marginal Jesus-following community in the capital of the Roman Empire.
- Living under a pagan imperial power.
- Expecting, in many cases, an imminent end to the age.
In that setting, a blanket call to civil obedience makes a certain kind of sense. This is not the time, Paul is saying, to stage your own Jewish-style revolt against Caesar. You are not here to reinstall a theocratic state. You are here as a witness to another kingdom.
But centuries later:
- Europe becomes officially Christian under Constantine.
- The church and empire intertwine.
- Then the Reformation shatters that unity into contending confessions.
- Then American colonists—many of them devout Christians—rebel against a Christian king.
What does Romans 13 mean there?
And what does it mean here, in a mass democracy where “the governing authorities” are, in principle, “we the people?”
There are no simple answers. But Mark’s point is crucial: you cannot pretend that the text floated above history untouched. Every generation has had to wrestle with:
- How to honor the call to submit to authorities.
- How to resist genuine injustice.
- How to avoid baptizing their own rebellion as always righteous.
In my early life, our solution was withdrawal. We saw ourselves like the tiny Roman house churches: Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, so we were not going to pick up Caesar’s tools.
In the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition world, the solution was the opposite: full engagement, driven by a conviction that not taking up those tools was unfaithful.
I now believe both responses are too simple.
Withdrawal can be a way of avoiding hard responsibility. Capture can be a way of baptizing our own tribal desires. Both can forget that our first loyalty is not to any party or policy, but to the One in whose image we and our political opponents are made.
3. Are We in the End Times—or Just Another Violent Chapter?
At one point a viewer commented, “I’m convinced we are in the end times. So many things are lining up.”
Mark’s response was, again, that of a historian. He talked about:
- 19th-century dispensational systems: William Miller and the Great Disappointment; the Scofield Reference Bible; charts that align current events with Daniel and Revelation.
- The fact that, so far, every generation that has announced “this is it” has been wrong.
- His own “secular eschatology”: if he worries about an “end,” it’s more about nuclear warfare than prophetic timelines.
He was careful not to dismiss apocalyptic hope entirely; Christians do confess that history is going somewhere, that Christ will return. His concern is with overconfident system-building: reading every tremor in Texas, Tehran, or Wall Street as a direct fulfillment of this or that verse.
That hit close to home for me. I spent years inside a very detailed prophetic scheme. We “knew” where we were on the timeline. We “knew” which news items proved our interpretation. Every major geopolitical shift could be slotted into the grid.
The problem with such systems is not only that they tend to be wrong. It’s that they can:
- Make us hyper-attentive to catastrophe and under-attentive to ordinary faithfulness.
- Blind us to the complexity of history and the genuine agency of other peoples and nations.
- Make us scorn those who don’t share our timeline as lukewarm or deceived.
Jesus did not tell His disciples, “You will know the exact sequence; here is the chart.” He said:
- “Watch.”
- “Be faithful.”
- “Occupy until I come.”
- “You do not know the day or the hour.”
If you believe, as one of my viewers does, that we are indeed in the end times, the essential question does not change:
Are you living as a faithful image-bearer now—
loving God, neighbor, and even enemy—
whether Christ returns in five years or five hundred?
There is a way of living in apocalyptic hope that produces humility and courage. There is also a way that produces panic, tribalism, and a kind of voyeuristic obsession with doom.
Those two paths may look similar from the outside. Internally they are worlds apart.
4. Can the Center Still Hold?
At one point, I asked Mark about the “nones”—those who answer “none” when asked their religious affiliation. In 1990, they were a low single-digit percentage in America. By 2001, about 14%. Today, roughly 30%.
Some of that, Mark said, is a genuine disaffiliation from religious communities. Some of it is a shift in how people understand the question. A person who would once have said, “I don’t go to church, but put me down as Southern Baptist” now feels free to say, “put me down as none.”
Still, the change is real. And it intersects with another trend: the erosion of the “fairly religious middle.”
- People on the strong ends of the religious spectrum remain.
- Very committed evangelicals.
- Very committed secularists.
- The moderately observant—who used to provide a lot of the social glue in towns and cities—are thinning out.
Theologically, we can hear Revelation’s rebuke to Laodicea: “Because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of My mouth.” Many of us (my younger self included) saw that as a mandate to avoid any kind of “middle.”
Sociologically, Mark is more ambivalent. He worries about a society where there is no center—only hardened poles. He spoke of “wild mood swings” and an America that “lurches from ditch to ditch,” with fewer people able to stand in the middle of the road and say, “Slow down. Think. Listen.”
I offered my own metaphor: the SUV of state stuck in the left or right ditch. You need someone in the center, with a tow truck, to pull it out. But there’s always someone on the roof yelling, “Don’t you dare—if you pull us out of this ditch, you’re going to drag us into that one.”
Centrism has its own temptations:
- A false “both-sides-ism” that refuses to name clear wrong.
- A lazy moderation that values comfort over conviction.
But the absence of any center is worse.
In that vacuum, Christian nationalism grows: visions of America as a chosen nation under siege, needing a strongman and a purified church to reclaim its destiny. Mark just co-edited a volume on this phenomenon, and he sees it rising in concrete forms—from Ten Commandments bills in state legislatures to hostility toward minority faiths.
When the only choices on offer seem to be:
- Withdraw completely (my old world),
- Fuse your faith with a party (the Moral Majority model), or
- Join a secular tribe that sees all religion as suspect,
it’s no wonder many people quietly tick “none.”
What we need is not a mushy, contentless middle, but a Christ-centered center:
- Strong enough to critique “our side” when it strays from the way of Jesus.
- Grounded enough in Scripture and history to resist being swept up in every panic.
- Humble enough to let “cracks” appear in our systems so that light can get in.
As Leonard Cohen sang:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Hermetically sealed belief systems—religious or political—cannot be corrected. They can only be defended. And when we confuse those systems with God Himself, we make idols of our doctrines, our nations, and our parties.
People created in the image of God are made for something better than that.
Where Does That Leave Us?
After many decades of study and reflection, I have some pretty strong opinions about exactly where we are in end-time Bible prophecy—but also the wisdom not to proclaim those personal opinions publicly on something so important.
What I do know is this: whatever time it is on God’s clock, the things that have always mattered become even more crucial in an end-time context—and they are also harder to hold on to.
- The fusion of faith and partisanship has damaged the witness of the church.
- The temptation to withdraw or to demonize “the other side” has never been stronger.
- The social center feels fragile, and historians like Mark are frankly worried.
In such a moment, our calling is not new, but it is urgent:
- To remember Christ’s words about being in this world, but not of it, even as we navigate this world’s politics.
- To resist turning churches into campaign outposts or conflating earthly nations with covenanted peoples.
- To stay awake without becoming addicted to apocalyptic speculation.
- To hold convictions with enough humility that we can repent, listen, and learn.
If the SUV of state is indeed stuck in a ditch, it will not be hauled out by those who relish the crash. It will be pulled out, if at all, by men and women who:
- Know they are created in the image of God.
- See that same image in their political opponents.
- And are willing to stand in the dangerous, misunderstood middle—tethered not to a party, but to the One who still says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
That may not make headlines. It may not trend. But like leaven hidden in the dough, it is how the Kingdom quietly grows.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
If this exploration of religion, power, and the vanishing center has you thinking about truth and how we tell it, you’ll want to join me for the next episode. I’ll be talking with John DeDakis, a former White House correspondent and CNN editor who has turned his newsroom experience into a series of acclaimed mystery–thriller novels. We’ll dig into how real-world journalism shapes his fiction, what it means to pursue truth in an age of spin, and how stories can help us test our beliefs against reality. If you’ve ever wondered where the line really lies between fact, fiction, and faith, you won’t want to miss it.
