Evangelicalism and Politics Today, with Walter Kim
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Reimagining Evangelical Faith
This chapter explores the challenges faced by American evangelicalism, particularly the conflict between faith and the allure of power, as well as the trend of homogeneity in religious groups. It emphasizes the importance of storytelling in addressing these issues, showcasing transformative personal narratives and the vital work of faith-based organizations in driving community change.
“The Good News is still good news.”
“I'm very pro-democracy, and yet democracy has never been the necessary prerequisite for the good news of Jesus Christ to flourish. … The good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t win and doesn’t lose based on a political party winning or losing.”
(Walter Kim, from this episode)
How does evangelicalism relate to the dominant political powers of our world?
In this episode Mark Labberton welcomes Walter Kim to Conversing. As the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and host of the Difficult Conversations podcast, Walter holds on to deep Christian orthodoxy alongside the most vigorous and necessary intellectual, personal, ethical, and theological reflections, offering a vision of leadership and spiritual-moral imagination to bolster the future of evangelicalism.
Together they discuss:
Christianity, pluralism, and polarization
The fraught meaning of “evangelicalism” in America and what it means to be a “good news person” in this political moment
The human impulse to wield power and the temptation of evangelicals to join with empire
The Christian underpinnings of the American nation’s founding and the necessary ingredients for the rise of Christian nationalism
How evangelicals are retelling and recasting the story of the gospel in today’s political climate
About Walter Kim
Walter Kim serves as the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a role he’s held since January of 2020. Previously, he was the pastor of Boston's historic Park Street Church, and has served other churches in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, and as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He received a BA from Northwestern University, an MDiv from Regent College, and a PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. He hosts the Difficult Conversations podcast.
Show Notes
- Long-term faithfulness to the gospel in the maelstrom of challenges and difficulties
- ”My experience has been one of extremes. … There is the lived reality of polarization, at which I find often myself right in the centre.”
- ”Sober self-assessment … one should always, as a Christian, be self-suspicious: Am I compromising? … Am I responding in faith or out of fear?”
- “Purveyor of the good news in action.”
- “Our labour in Christ is not in vain … ultimately Christ remains Lord and Savior of all.”
- The word “evangelical” and the state of US evangelicalism
- What does it mean to be a “good news person”?
- World Evangelical Alliance General Assembly
- Laussane and a gathering of five thousand evangelicals from around the world
- “It’s not a branding issue. It’s a substance issue.”
- “Global church with a polycentric distribution of leadership and resources”
- “Whatever our maelstrom and vortex may be in America, it pales in comparison to what brothers and sisters are experiencing throughout the world.”
- “I'm very pro-democracy, and yet democracy has never been the necessary prerequisite for the good news of Jesus Christ to flourish. … The good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t win and doesn’t lose based on a political party winning or losing.”
- Religious community vs “the other”
- How does the church relate to dominant powers?
- Image of God is not just an abstract idea
- “The democratization of the image of God to all people—not just to the rulers—was a profoundly prophetic statement.”
- Tower of Babel: A story not just about hubris, but about hoarding power and the ways political imperialism can use religion for its own purposes.
- “This is not a uniquely American problem. … This is a problem of humanity.”
- Evangelicals who have given themselves to empire
- Marring God’s image and remaking God in our own image
- Pluralism and Christianity
- The capacity for self-reflection
- The Christian underpinnings of the American nation’s founding, and the rise of Christian nationalism
- “What’s different now is the pluralism.”
- The necessary ingredients for the rise of Christian nationalism
- Ingredient 1: The belief that America was founded as a Christian nation
- Ingredient 2: A sense or feeling of loss
- Ingredient 3: The answer to regaining what you lost is political
- Descriptive versus prescriptive: Was America founded as a Christian nation?
- Hope in the loving and just reign of God
- No national church: “living under their own vine and fig tree.”
- The reason we don’t privilege Christianity in the Constitution
- Lilly Endowment project
- “The Good News is still good news.”
- “Retelling and recasting the story … as a message of hope.”
- “ This initiative is an opportunity for us to tell the beautiful story of Jesus, while not neglecting the ways that story has been marred.”
- Luke 4: Jesus’s first public speech. “ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoner, sight for the blind, release for the oppressed. And to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.
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