Everyone Has a Plan for America Except the Church

Everybody else in this country has a plan. That is the part we keep refusing to say out loud.

• Muslims have a plan to make America a Muslim nation.
• Marxists have a plan to make America a Marxist nation.
• Secular progressives have a plan to make America a secular progressive nation.

They are not hiding it. They write it down, teach it to their young, fund it, and wait. Patience is cheap when you believe the future belongs to you.

And Christians? We have a plan too. Ours is to make sure Christianity never quite reaches the sidewalk. We run it out of two mouths. The first says, "We don't get political." The second says, "Jesus isn't a Republican or a Democrat, He's not on the right or the left."

That second line is true. I've said it myself. Christ does not caucus. But watch what it gets used for. It arrives at the exact moment a believer is about to say something with a cost attached, and it lands like a hand on the shoulder. Sit down. Don't be that guy. This is the Message versus Meaning problem in the plainest form I know: the words are orthodox, and the meaning delivered to the pew is stand down.

Do that for forty years and you get what we have. A country where the church still owns buildings and calendars and children's programs, and owns almost nothing in the places where the terms of life are actually set. A man can be a member in good standing for a decade and never once hear how the Bible bears on what he does at work, how his children are being formed at school, or what he is voting for. Then we act surprised that his convictions evaporate the first time a coworker frowns at him.

So here is my question. At what point does apathy stop being apathy?

Because there is a line where "we don't get political" quits being a doctrine of prudence and becomes a doctrine of self-protection. Where the real reason a man says nothing about marriage, or the unborn, or what is read to first-graders, is not that he lacks a text. He has the text. He is afraid of the room. He is afraid of the group chat, the HR complaint, the neighbor who won't wave anymore.

Scripture has a word for that condition, and it is not a gentle one.

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

— Revelation 21:8, KJV

Read the order. The fearful come first. Before the liars. Before the idolaters. I did not build that list and I would not have built it that way, which is exactly why I take it seriously. The Holy Ghost put cowardice in company we would never have placed it in.

I am not saying every timid believer is lost. Peter was a coward for one long night and died a martyr. But I am saying this: a professing Christian who has arranged his entire life so that his faith never costs him a friendship, a promotion, or a comfortable evening has some accounting to do. Silence that never once gets tested is not humility. Somewhere in there is unbelief wearing a nicer coat.

Silence has never bought the church one inch of extra room. It only shows the other side where the fence is.

The comfortable assumption behind our ambiguity is that there exists a third position. Not the aggressor, not the resister, just a quiet man minding his own house. There isn't one. Three arenas, no exit: the home, the congregation, and the public square. You will be discipled in all three by somebody. If your church declines the third arena, the third arena does not go vacant. It gets filled by whoever shows up, and they will hand your children a catechism whether you approve it or not.

This is why I keep saying the fight for the Mountain of Religion is not primarily about hostile outsiders storming the sanctuary. Most of our ground was not taken. It was vacated. A generation of leaders decided that peace with the culture was worth the price of never saying the hard part, and the culture took the deal gladly. That's the two-route church capture running its second route, the quiet one, where nobody breaks a window and the institution keeps meeting on Sunday long after it stopped being a threat to anything.

So do not go looking for a protest. Go looking for a meeting.

Ask the men who lead your church one question and ask it kindly: what is a contested question in this town that Scripture actually settles, and when did we last say so from the pulpit? Not a party platform. A text and its application. If the honest answer is that no one can remember, you have learned something important about where you worship, and you have not accused anyone of a thing. Then take the answer you get and say it out loud this week in a place where it costs you a little. Small courage, practiced Tuesday, is the only kind that shows up when the stakes are real.

Everyone else in America is playing to win. It would be strange if the people who claim the King of kings were the only ones not planning past the parking lot.