How Should Christians Approach Political Participation? A Conversation with Caleb Campbell

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm joined today by Caleb Campbell. He's the author of Disarming Leviathan, Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor. And that'll be really our topic of conversation, at least our jumping off point for our conversation today. He's also been a pastor at Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix, Arizona since 2006 and lead pastor since 2015. He's finishing his doctorate up at Fuller Theological Seminary and also serves as the regional director for the Surge Network. So really excited to have Caleb here and talk about Christian nationalism. We've done this a few different times on the podcast, but it's always great to have yet another perspective. And what I would say is Caleb really brings a great pastoral focus. I loved reading through this book and hearing his insights on how to interact with your Christian nationalist neighbor. So Caleb, welcome. Thanks for being here, man. Yeah, thanks, James. It's a pleasure to be on with you. Yeah. Hey, so why don't we just start out real easy and just ask, what was the intention of writing the book? What was the impetus for it? Like what brought this about? What was the interest? Yeah, so I'm in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, and it's one of the epicenters of Christian nationalism as it's currently being expressed here in America. There's some organizations locally that have headquartered here. And I watched as the movement really drew a lot of folks that I had been shepherding, really drew them close. I watched it divide a bunch of churches, the church that I serve included, about 80% of the folks that were in our congregation in 2016 were gone by the end of 2020. And a lot of it was around issues, either directly or corollary to American Christian nationalism. So just the relational carnage, moreover, the damage to the witness of the gospel, at least from where I sit. And it came out of a pastoral question because the number one question I was getting from congregants in like 2021, those who were still around, was what do I do with my Aunt Betty? You know, we're at the 12-year-old's birthday party and she's yelling and screaming about something she heard on a, you know, news entertainment channel. And the things that she's saying, I just, I don't know what to do. You know, how do I, I don't even know what to say. And so I had initially, the actual root or seed of the book was I was just starting to notice, well, what are the things I'm hearing people say and people in my congregation, what are they hearing people say? And then kind of drafting, like, well, maybe here's a thoughtful way that you could lead the conversation from that, you know, that talking point that they're really committed to and actually try to get down to the heart of the matter, seeing if you can move conversations from head to heart. And for the most part, it was, you know, people that you love, people you're in communion with. It's your, you know, it's your Sunday school teacher. It's your nephew. It's your cousin, you know. And from there, it grew into a book, which I was glad for, but wasn't really expecting. Yeah. So talk a little bit about the title. I found the stuff on Leviathan actually kind of interesting. And so talk a little bit about that background just so people have a context for where you're at. Yes, Disarming Leviathan. So James, as a fellow Bible nerd, which I'm always glad when I find one, the Leviathan is, it's a way to talk about chaos evil. You see it all over your Bible if you see the thread lines and they're not, they weren't apparent to me until I did a bunch of research and study. So like this idea of evil being a predatory beast in the book of Genesis, you're introduced in Genesis chapter three to this like talking serpent figure and it's very crafty and it uses God's words, but twists them ever so slightly to seduce the humans. The next chapter you get Cain and Abel where Cain is meditating on whether he's going to murder his brother Abel. And Yahweh says to Cain, be careful because sin is crouching at your door and it wants to like dominate you. It's this beastly kind of language. So you see this all throughout scripture that a way to talk about chaos evil is as this dominating power force, almost like a beastly power. In the book of Revelation, you get like the dragon and the beast. And then in the Psalms and in Job, you get the Leviathan, which is a way to think about or imagine the disordered powers of chaos evil that work contrary to the ordered ways of Yahweh. So when God seeks to integrate, this chaos evil seeks to disintegrate. So you think about our relationships with God, our relationships with each other, even our relationship with ourself. It seeks to disintegrate. And eventually in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul will refer to this concept as the powers or powers, principalities, rulers, and authorities. He says we don't wage war against flesh and blood, but against the powers. And so I recognize that what the purveyors of American Christian nationalism, what they're selling or propagating is a version of that same disintegrating contrary to the ordered ways of God power force. And throughout the Bible, you see that humans can give themselves over to that power. And it's not only American Christian nationalism. It has many, it has many heads, so to speak, kind of like the hydra, you know, it's, it's, it's the same power force, but it has many different flavors. And so I loved the metaphor. The other reason I loved it too, was because people can give themselves over to it for good reasons. It's seductive. Gregory, Gregory the Great, who was a bishop in the sixth century said that Leviathan never presents itself as evil. To the righteous, it always presents itself as righteous. And so the people who are giving themselves over to it are oftentimes doing so in earnest. They think this is the way, you know, because that, that evil force that, you know, that Satan takes God's words, the serpent in the garden takes God's words, promises good things that God's already promised, but invites us to pursue those good means through, through those good ends, through unjust means or unrighteous means. And so I, I loved the metaphor and that's, that's why the book. The second reason, James, and this is actually probably the first reason, because it sounds so heavy metal. Like it, it just, it just sounds so metal and I am so proud of that. Well, I think, you know, to echo what you're saying, you know, you look at the temptation of Christ and you see this same mechanism sort of playing into that. You're watching as Satan tempts Jesus to do things that are incommensurate with what it means to be the son of God. What he's asking Jesus to do is redefine what that means. And at the end, when he promises to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, you know, it's easy for us to dismiss and say, well, he can't really give him that. And Jesus knows that. So how is that a temptation? But the reality is what he's really telling Jesus is I can give you all of this. All you have to do is just avoid the suffering. And

You know, Jesus' decline is always, you know, no, I'm not doing that, no, I'm not doing that, I'm going to opt to put God first. But I think that sort of seduction is present in our lives all the time. We can pursue these really great and sort of noble aims. There is disorder in the world. We do need something to reintegrate it. We see all these wrong things around us, and so what are we supposed to do about it? There's a sense in which we're, we get kind of impatient, I think, and want to pursue this more quickly than God would have us, maybe. Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, it's the pursuit of what God has already promised to give us. And it's reaching out our hand and taking what God wants to freely give. But we're going to use our own methods to get there because we don't trust. And James, you're absolutely right. The temptation in the desert, it is the one time that the human finally does it. Right. And it's through Jesus, right? The perfect human. But that story of pursuing the good that God has promised to us by our own means, you get it with the Abraham story, and you look at the destruction that it caused. You get it with the Jacob story and the destruction. It's all through your Bible. Right. And you don't really get a hero who does it right until you get Jesus in the desert. And what American Christian nationalist ideology promotes is, you can't really trust the means of Christ to find safety, belonging, or purpose. We need to go use other means. I mean, the way I understand it is, is it's advocating for good ends by means not of a cross, but of a sword. In the same way that Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he felt anxious about loss, he was losing Jesus. Yes. His instinct is my instinct. It's reach for the thing that I think is the most powerful in his case, a sword. And that's what purveyors of American Christian nationalism are arguing, is things are falling apart. We're losing something. Things are chaotic. So the cross isn't working for us anymore. Let's go get the sword. When you know, you're right. You see this all over the place. I mean, the example I normally go to is Moses' initial rebellion against the Egyptians, which is sort of doomed to fail. But I think almost the more apropos example is when Saul sacrifices and refuses to wait for Samuel and sacrifices himself. And, you know, what he's looking at is a fleeing Israelite army in the moment. He's terrified that he is going to be left with not enough men to fight the battle that he needs to fight. And so to sort of pull everybody back and draw them in, he does something that he's prohibited from doing. And I think that's such an interesting story because I think the dynamic is actually very similar, especially the way you described in the book. You talk a lot about the fears, the anxiety, the quest for security, the desire for safety, the preservation of a heritage, you know, all these different things that sort of create an uncomfortable sort of existence where we're looking out at the world and it feels very unstable and we want to restore stability. And so I think that narrative really does sort of gesture toward what we're seeing in part with Christian nationalism. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in agreement. Well, we're talking about Christian nationalism. Maybe I'll let you describe what Christian nationalism is, because I think there's, this has been one of those things as I've talked about this, people usually have some confusion about when people say Christian nationalism, what flavor are we really talking about here that's problematic? And is it just that, hey, I voted in 2016. Am I a Christian nationalist? You know, is that what we mean or is it something different? Yeah, it is something different. So Christian nationalism, as it's currently seen in America, is not conservatism and it's not Christian social engagement. Now, some people may use it as a synonym for those things, but that would be a poor form or poor usage of it. Christian nationalism as a political ideology at its base is the idea that Christians should be in charge of the government to protect and propagate their way of being in the world. Other forms of nationalism, like ethnic nationalism, you take like Irish nationalism, it's the argument that the Irish should be in charge of the government to protect and propagate their way of being in the world. So there's all different expressions of nationalism. There's Hindu nationalism in India being advocated for. Again, it's a certain people, the idea of a nationalism in the way that we use the phrase. It's the argument that a certain people group should be in charge. You put the modifier in front of it, in this case, Christian, that you're defining who should be in charge. However, American Christian nationalism is more than a political ideology. In fact, I think it's something else. It is a political ideology, but that political ideology is a service of the tribal identity and the spiritual idolatry. So I view American Christian nationalism from a missiological lens. I'm arguing that we ought to, if you're an evangelical Christian, look at this missionally. So we want to reach people with the good news of the gospel. And that's our mission. The American Christian nationalist movement is propagating a false gospel. And so what's the posture? Missional. Missiologically, you see it as a tribal identity. When people self-identify as a Christian nationalist, they're trying to describe the group of people that they belong to, the type of person that I am in my community. In this sense, it is a surrogate for an ethnicity. And especially in America, where you have all these, what the New Testament, the Greek word is ethnos, which gets translated as nations. It just means people group, identifiable people group. When Jesus told us to share the gospel through all the nations, he didn't mean geopolitical entities. He meant people groups. And so Christian nationalists in America, when people self-identify, they're trying to find who, the type of people that they are with their own origin story, their own taboos, their own heroes, their own acts of ritual and rites, food, music, even. So an identifiable people group. And so that political ideology is ordered to protect the tribe. Underneath that is a spiritual idolatry, namely a syncretism that syncs up or merges or conflates aspects of Christianity, usually a Protestant version, as it's currently expressed in America, but not always. It conflates or syncs that up with aspects of the Christian civil religion where the two things actually become a new thing. Where in the lived experience of many people, singing amazing grace on Sunday is the same lived experience as singing my country, tis of thee on Monday. And so there's an idolatrous component to it where we're elevating the government or the state or even my people to almost a divine status where you can't question our ancestors, like the veneration of ancestors. You can't question what America has done because that's heresy. And sprinkled in there is another idolatry, namely empire worship. One of the things that the early church did in, you see it in the book of Revelation, especially, they wrestled with this temptation for empire worship, that we would worship the power of the emperor, the power of the economic and military prowess of our state or our government and the people that we are. In fact, I've read some scholars note that early Christians had to detoxify from empire worship as part of their catechetical process, as part of their discipleship process, as they came into the fold of the church. And that's very present here as well. It's an interesting dynamic when you think about the early church because you had, and I don't want to suggest that there's a strong separation between the secular and the sacred, but in New Testament world, you did have a stronger affiliation between the governing authorities and the gods, some sort of religious dimension. And so you can see, I think a little more.

clearly in the New Testament times how you're moving from one religious system, let's say, to another when you convert to Christianity. Today, I do think that we've probably too strongly divided the sacred from the secular and we're ignoring something else that you address in the book, which is American civil religion. This idea that, you know, the United States is somehow special to God in a theologically significant way, or even that God gestures, you know, when we use it under God or God bless America, that we're all talking about the same God when we say that, that it's the triune God. And so I think that there's a real challenge there with Christian nationalism, because one of the things I'd like to circle back to and just ask you, and then I'd kind of like to pull back in and do some stuff on American civil religion. But when you say that Christian nationalists want people to live as Christian nationalists in the world, they want to govern such that people are living in that manner. I've never gotten the impression that that meant they wanted everyone to be Christian. What they want is for everyone to behave in such a way that, quote unquote, Christian values or biblical principles of a certain sort are always driving the society and would never be negotiated. But even that is not sufficiently expansive. So does it always involve, in your mind, do you see it as involving, hey, we want to convert everyone to Jesus, which we could probably say, good stuff, right? Or is it really just, no, Christians should be in charge and then we'll just let the lost people, we're going to put them in a little box of legislation and rewards and punishments and see what they do. Yeah, I think what they're advocating for is not the expansion of the church, but a return to Christendom. Namely, that the way that our government operates and that our leaders operate has this veneer of Christian rhetoric, God talk, you know, we're going to anoint the king. I mean, I'm listening to people talk about a previous president as if he was anointed. Well, that's okay. So, great. You know, we're using some religious language there, right? So I don't think it's a desire to see our neighbor follow Jesus. It's a desire to conform to a certain vision of what are people, the way that we are, and you need to conform to that. And the force of religion, in this case, Christianity, the force that it adds is you're not questioning me, you're questioning God. So if the leader says, hey, listen, this is the rule that we're going to put, this is the legislation, and this is God legislation. You know, it's like, this is God's tax code. You know, this is God's view of the post office. Like, 98% of government is not even closely directly mentioned in scripture. What's the godly view of the Department of Transportation? You know, like, come on. And so it's functioning not as a desire, frankly, for people to faithfully follow Jesus and be attentive to the spirit in their life. And it's that the community that I'm a part of is governed in such a way that it has the veneer of Christendom, which makes me feel comfortable. Because some of these aberrations, things that I would call an aberration, you know, it's not just that I don't like them, it's ungodly. You know, I don't like rock music, it's ungodly. So get it out of here, right? You can't argue with it. Right. So circling back around now, that veneer of Christendom and American civil religion. So I've done a little bit of work on this, and I ran across Robert Bella, who is big in civil religion, sociologist, talked about civil religion and said, you know, these religious symbols were incorporated into America's history and America's sort of way of life in a way that it didn't appear that it was going to conflict with Christianity. People just didn't notice. I find that to be, I thought it was really insightful. I think he's right that a lot of people just don't notice. And if you're just casually observing it, you might not notice. That's almost more dangerous. You know, we recognize the differences between Christianity and Islam or Christianity and, you know, different world religions or something like that. It's that part where it's so ingrained in our perspective that we can't sift it and sort it out, that we can't tell the difference that seems really problematic to me. So is that, would you say that the veneer you're talking about of Christendom and American civil religion are sort of two sides of the same coin or two phrases to refer to the same thing? Or would you distinguish those? Yeah, I might distinguish them. The American civil religion are these practices, rites and rituals that we all participate in, usually with a veneer of Christendom, but not always. So like the inauguration of a president, that's a rite, a ritual, right? And, you know, and I tune in, I watch it. This is the peaceful transfer of power. That's a value. I like that. And there's a lot of red, white and blue. There's a lot of panning shots of the national mall, you know, state building, Capitol building. Then there's a Bible, right? And then the Bible shows up and there's a hand placed on a Bible. And there's three minutes of commentary by the newscasters about the Bible. Oh, it's from great grandma so-and-so, you know, and then the Bible goes away and then it's back to, you know, America, Americana. So I do think that aspects of our civil religion incorporate Christian rhetoric and iconography, for sure. Yeah. But I do hold them in distinction to each other. I do think Bella's right on one way that I hear it is when we kind of hear this phrase tossed around Judeo-Christian values. Yes. That America is based on Judeo-Christian values. Yeah. And I wonder what they mean by that because I've got some rabbi buddies and we see the Bible very differently. They think evangelicals like me are so weird with the things that we're extracting from the text and applying to our common life together, right? Yeah. He doesn't like Judeo in Judeo-Christian values. He's like, no, no, this is a Christian thing. This is y'all's fault. But it's so seductive because we just kind of say it. Yeah, well, America's got Christian values. Well, America is also based on a bunch of Greco-Roman values. Sure. Like the republic. We're a democratic republic. That's not a Judeo-Christian idea. Right, right. You know, that came from Greece, as far as I know. The Senate, you know. There's no Senate in the Bible. Right, definitely not a biblical thing. And I like those things, right? Like I'm not averse to them or against them, but they're not Christian in the sense of the Bible prescribes democratic republic as the way to govern, you know, modern nation. It just doesn't work like that. And I, but I think that we've been seduced into thinking that everything that we're doing is in alignment with Christian values. The problem is, is that sometimes people actually read their Bible, James. And they start realizing, wait a minute. Wait a minute. It says what? Yeah, with a what now? I mean, you take free market economics, individualistic capitalism, the desire to make the shareholders happy, and then you just do a cursory reading of the Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible. And just see how you feel. Like what's supposed to happen to land that you purchase because someone was down and out every 50 years? Give it back. I mean, that just no assertion needed. Just read it and see how you feel afterwards. If you don't feel confused, read it again. Read about the gleaning laws, you know, to not maximize profit. Read the book of Ruth. Yeah. Like the whole thing is predicated on the fact that they're not maximizing profit. And mammon oftentimes is the God in which we trust. I love what you said, James. We use the word in God we trust. It's always good to ask, which one? Right, right. The generic higher power that gives us whatever we want? Or is this the triune God that we're supposed to be, you know, worshiping no other? Yeah, the foot washer. Yeah. Yeah, and that's the one. That's the one. Well, I think part of what we're running into, at least this is the way I've been thinking about it lately. So I think part of what we're running into is terminological, right? What do we mean by Christian values? That's part A, right? Because when we say Christian values, there is a very real sense in which God's order is broad and transcendent. And so if we're referring to God's order and the order that he's established, so we're talking about broad concepts like justice, peace, hope, you know,

You know, all those kind of care for the poor, hospitality, a lot of the things you even mentioned in the book. If we're talking about those things, they do tend to seep out of Christian circles. Like those are not sectarian, we might say. Those are things that are part of God's order, that are part of God's creation, that our government, when it does those things, is gesturing toward, I think, the transcendence of the triune God, even if it doesn't know it's doing it, or it doesn't intend to do it. But then we've got these very particular things, right? That are, when we say Christian, doesn't that imply something about what we believe about Christ? You know, isn't there a kernel of this that can't be transferred outside of the church, right? And so there's a terminological problem. But then I also think that we don't deal with that overlap well. In other words, how do we understand the good things that society does and can accomplish? How do we understand those at all? And then how do we distinguish that from the good gospel work that the church is doing that has different aims but may coincide on occasion with what's going on in the secular world? So any thoughts on that? Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, so I think the big question is, how do we then live? To borrow Francis Schaeffer's term, we recognize that we have this good news, this message that the kingdom of God is at hand and that we are called to repent and believe the good news of the kingdom. And then Jesus invites us to live according to the kingdom insofar as it depends on us. So when two or three or more Jesus followers are together, we have an opportunity to practice now what we will experience in eternity, practice the values of the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And that makes sense to me in my imagination when there's like ten of us in my house. Although a lot of times that can be really frustrating too. How do we make sense of it when it's 10 million of us or 100 million of us or a billion of us, whatever it might be, and some of us are serving in government? And so the question that we have an invitation to seek the Spirit on afresh every day is, Lord, how do you want me to live today in accordance with your kingdom, even though I'm working or living in a kingdom of this world? And so I think the categories that we need to be thinking about is, I'm a citizen of the kingdom of heaven first and foremost, and that's shaping who I am and it's shaping my view and it's shaping my vision. One of the big things it's doing to me is making me more like Jesus if I submit to it. So the fruit of the Spirit, are those evident in my life? When I talk about love, does it look like 1 Corinthians 13? And it's doing that to me, like the way of Jesus is shaping me. The Spirit is shaping me. And then I think about, okay, well, how should I vote? How, if I'm a person who's going to serve in government, how shall I then live? How shall I serve in government? How do we go about lawmaking and legislation and enforcement? And that question has to start with, is my character being formed into Christlikeness? And then from there, making arguments or making stands on certain positions. And I think that's the missing component is character formation. A lot of the trouble that we're finding ourselves in, we're going to the Bible looking for the right answer and then demanding that everyone else conform to what we think is the right answer as opposed to saying, okay, how does the Holy Spirit through Scripture going to shape me into the image of Christ? And then I go engage in our civic life together. If Christians would do that, I think it would be awesome if tons of Christians were involved in government, really as public servants. I mean, Jesus called us to be servants to all, and we can do that through government. It's such a fascinating problem. And as I've sort of wrestled with this, where I come out, I come out in a very similar place that you do. I would say the part that I would add to that is, I think we're starting in the wrong place. And so when we go about our decision process, we're looking at it in terms of a problem and a solution. We're seeing something that's wrong in the world and we're saying, how can I fix this? And how can I be faithful in fixing this? But we never actually ask the question, am I supposed to fix this? And we've got to step back even a little further and ask ourselves, which I think you see evidence of in Scripture, but how is it that I am pointing to and glorifying God in this moment? What's the best way? What's the most faithful way for me to do that? And I look back at like Genesis 14 with Abram, when he's done fighting all the kings, and the king of Sodom offers him all of these spoils and Abram's like, no, because you should never be able to say you're the one who made me rich. That's a different sort of logic than we really ever use in making our decisions in public spaces. How is it that we deny other people the ability, and I'm not pro-Trump or pro-Biden, this is just an example. Folks on my podcast know that. But Donald Trump's son went on the radio at one point and said that his father saved Christianity in America. We've allowed that. And I've read Genesis 14, and I hear that and I'm like, we've gone astray somewhere. We've missed the mark somehow in the way we're even approaching these issues. Just the way we're thinking about them is skewed and wrong in some way, shape, or form. So I know you talk a lot about, like, how should I vote? And I don't know that we want to get into that whole quagmire necessarily, although I'm happy to. But I did find it interesting that, you know, the questions you list are the questions that I would have guessed would be listed. You know, who's the pro-choice candidate? Who's the pro-Israel candidate? You know, those kind of questions were the ones you listed. So how, you know, aside from just straight character formation, let's say we've got the heart and mind of Christ formed within us to a certain degree. How now do we go about figuring out who to vote for? How do you really participate and engage in those micro decisions? Do you see that as just, you know, in your own life? Do you see that as just changing your whole perspective on it? And, you know, you don't worry about the sucker's choice we're usually given when we have to vote for somebody? Yeah. Let me ask you a serious question. 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So I'm not arguing for an Anabaptist position, like a disengagement. Understood. Yep. How we vote, voting and advocacy are power. They're expressions of power. And so to take a step back, so is money. And so when I think about how I'm going to invest my money, how I'm going to spend my money, one of the things that we can do is we talk to people that we trust. We think and pray and we submit it to the Lord. Usually, there's an element of this kind of is uncomfortable, right? The way I'm using my money is kind of uncomfortable if I'm following the Jesus way. Having an others-centric view, not saying what's just in it for me, but what's in it for our community and especially for the least, the last, and the lost. And I think we can apply some of the same principles that many, I think, evangelicals apply to things like money, or at least know that they ought to. Right, right. Myself included. It's a clearer framework. Got it. Yeah. And we can apply that to politics. You know, who is this impacting? Even if I get it wrong, as if there's like a right and wrong always. Most of the time, it's what's the wisest, most loving decision I can make based on the information I have at the time because I'm an imperfect being. And I may get new information tomorrow. And, you know, we are in a two-party system that's telling us you have to pick a side. And Jesus doesn't tell me I have to. And again, I'm not arguing that you don't. I'm just saying the people who want my vote are telling me that. Yeah. But I can enter into that process and I want to think, okay, how does this impact not only my community and the people around us, especially the vulnerable, but also how is this shaping my life?

I mean, one question I have, especially for evangelicals, like evangelical, the evangele is good news. And if there's one thing that we're probably all bound together on is we want to share the good news with people. We want to be about the evangel, the good news. And so one question I have is, does my advocacy for this thing impact negatively the witness, my capacity to evangelize well? One of the reasons why I just find American Christian nationalism such a destructive force is it gives the impression that to be a Christian is to be of a certain posture towards a very acute series of political points. And I've got folks, friends, neighbors, who don't know Jesus, and they think that's what it means to be a Christian. So they're rejecting a false or distorted view of Christianity because so many Christians have made sure that their neighbor knows where they're at on a culture war issue. And they've given the impression this is what it means to follow Jesus. And, you know, like I had one guy, he asked me, he's really curious about Christianity, and he said, you know, we had this great conversation a couple hours long, and he said, hey, you know, if I go to your church, will I be lynched? I said, well, why do you ask that question? He says, well, I'm a Democrat. And his impression was that to be a Christian meant that you were of a certain partisan group. Because of what he was seeing on TV and through social media and stuff. Yeah. It's definitely a challenge, I think. And this is where I'm not, I don't advocate for an anabaptist position either or an isolationist position. I tend to think that that's a little too rigid to adopt as a full-time philosophy, let's say, or to authorize as the only biblical teaching. But I think if I'm hearing you right, and don't let me put words in your mouth, there would be a time to disengage when engaging damages the church's witness. In other words, disengagement could very well be a tool in our tool belt to exercise because there is the politics of the day are not given. In other words, like when you were saying that, you know, the parties are telling you you have to make a choice, but that's not really, you don't have to make that choice. And so what I'm not saying is, hey, Christians, never participate in politics and government or anything like that. I don't actually think that's true at all. But I do wonder sometimes in this context, and I think this is just something that rolls through my head an awful lot, is there any way for us to participate in the political system, the voting, the campaigning, the, you know, all of that, you know, support one candidate or another and not harm our witness? It's very difficult right now. And I mean that right now. It's difficult, not forever, not in the past, but right now, man, it's hard. It's hard to justify. Yeah, I have encouraged people to think about stewardship, to think about voting and political engagement through the lens of stewardship. Where does my energy, where does it actually have impact? And it's almost always, not always, but almost always exponentially more so at the local level than the national level. We're all hung up on the, you know, the red team and the blue team, who's going to be in the White House. And those are really, that's really important, right? Right. I might be able to influence a hundred people and maybe three of them might sway their vote on that particular contest because of something I do, maybe. Yeah. Here are things I can do is I can go meet my local state representative. I can go to the local school board and say, how can I help? I can advocate for people who generally folks in power are ignoring. There are, I think that what we suffer from in the evangelical church, specifically in white evangelical spaces predominantly, is a complete lack of imagination on how civic engagement actually is. We've reduced it down to a ballot, which those are important. But like you go three lines down the ballot, you don't even know who those people are half the time, right? But you can, their office is down the street. You can go meet them. And you can, you can, as a Christian, say, my faith compels me to be involved in this common life together. How can I help? I mean, one of the things that I have found to be so powerful is when we have this organization here in Arizona called School Connect, and they connect churches with local schools for acts of service. Arizona, we like suck at school funding. Like we're low, like I think we're number 48 out of 50. And I love our teachers. My kids are at the public school. Nothing against private or homeschool or anything. That's just a decision we make. And I love teachers. Like they are doing such important work. But these schools are underfunded. I mean, even in some of the like ritzy parts of town, they're underfunded. They're like, yeah, we can't buy new paint for the fence. So School Connect has helped rally the church to say, hey, this school is right down the street from where your campus is. We're going to help broker a relationship. And then the only thing we're doing is we're here to serve. Well, we've been doing that for over a decade. So you know who they're interested in hearing from when we talk about spicy issues like bathrooms and book banning? They'll answer the phone call of the people who've been serving. Yeah. They're not interested in listening to the angry, ragey Christian who just showed up out of nowhere with a protest sign about the book that they've gotten. Right. And that, I mean, my encouragement to anyone is if you're wondering the right posture for civic engagement, it's Philippians chapter 2. Whatever power we have, we take on the form of a servant. And in doing so, we get so many great opportunities to help influence our community because we're doing so saying I'm in this with you and I'm here to serve. I'm not here to make you serve me. It's really interesting. I mean, I've been doing the podcast now for a while and this sort of broad theme keeps coming up. Don't ignore the little things, right? Don't ignore the little things. The little things actually matter a great deal. I had a lady come on who does ministry to military wives and families. Yeah. And she said, you know, just giving, just watching their kids for an hour so that the mom can go to the grocery store by herself and not have to wrangle, you know, her kids while she's doing grocery shopping. It's like, that's a miraculous experience for them. That's a fantastic thing. It's such a small moment of our day, but it has this huge impact. And that's kind of what I hear you saying too is don't ignore these small acts of service that we can do in our local communities and the influence that we can generate simply by doing that. We're a worldwide movement. We're a nationwide movement. If we would just all do these things and actually contribute where we can contribute, we would have far more influence through service than we would through political leverage. Look through church history and tell me when the church had a robust witness that drew people in. It was when they had open hands of service, not closed hands of domination. Yeah, yeah. I know we're getting close to time and I'd like to give you enough time to answer this last question. I always ask my guests one last question before they go. And so I'm interested in your answer. What topic do you think Christians need to be thinking about to be and make disciples more faithfully in America today? So I was just talking with a friend of mine this morning over breakfast who is a missionary in the Middle East. And the topic is spiritual formation. So discipleship in many, not all, but many evangelical spaces has been reduced to matters of the head. Yes. Doctrine, which is important, catechism, inductive Bible study, all good things. Right. What seems to be lacking, and I speak as an evangelical pastor who's been at the church I'm serving at for 22 years, since 2001. Oh, geez, 23 years. Been on staff since 2006, lead pastor since 2015. So I speak as an insider to this movement that if we hold right doctrine, but we do not attend to the presence of Christ in our lives and in our midst and enjoy the presence of Christ in our life, not only individual life, but especially in our corporate life together, we may find ourselves malformed into being able to pass the theology exam, but missing out on what that theology is pointing to, which is union with Christ. And spiritual formation is the intentional practice.

of seeking to attend to the presence of Christ now, and then to allow him to form me more and more into the image of Christ. I think Paul was hitting on that a lot when he would write these letters to these churches who were a mess and who had poor doctrine, you know, and he would give them good doctrine, but he was constantly saying like, take off that old self. That's not you anymore. Put on the new self, right? Let Christ dwell within your inner being. And I think a lot of evangelicals, myself included, are averse to anything that sounds like that because it sounds a little unwieldy. It sounds a little mystical. I mean, we've done spiritual formation practices in our congregation. Sometimes people will be like, what is this Catholic stuff? You know, like thinking deeply about a portion of scripture and reading it over and over again. It's like, is this some kind of Catholic thing? Or my favorite was, we did like a moment, just being quiet for three minutes. And I was like, what is this liberal stuff? I was like, what are you talking about? It's being quiet. How is that liberal? I couldn't believe it. But again, that speaks to that. It's just a gap, I think, in the evangelical church. And so I think the next season of life for the church in America in evangelicalism, I think that the Lord is presenting us with an invitation to focus on spiritual formation, not against doctrine and theological formation, but in sync with those things. Yes. Yeah, they have to be thought of in the same breath. We just can't continue to think that because we know the right things, that we're also being formed in the right way. That's right. Yeah. That's great, man. I find that so interesting. I mean, I've done a fair amount of reading and thinking around technology. And one of the areas, and I mentioned this on the podcast before, but one of the things I got to thinking about was, think about fasting as a spiritual practice and the amount of time you would have had to dedicate or would have had in dedicating to a fast in like Jesus's day. You lose the meal prep, which was not trivial, right? You lose the eating time, which wouldn't have been trivial. Like there's probably cleanup time there somewhere in there. Like there's a lot of time there. I mean, I ate lunch in five minutes today. You know, you nuke it, you eat it, you're back to work. You know, a lot of times you're doing it just at your desk. And so even our, some of those tried and true spiritual practices, because of the vast conveniences we have available to us, we are in an economy that pushes us to go as fast as possible. And finding more time to dedicate to these spiritually formative practices, I think is going to be a real challenge for the church today. Because even those basic, hey, let's take some time to fast. Okay, I'll skip my fast food drive-through and not eat. That gave me 10 minutes with Jesus. You know, it's a very different culture we're living in right now. And I think it's a real, it's an important challenge, but I appreciate you bringing it up. Just one last question for you on that note, on spiritual formation. I think you said it, but individual and corporate. Yep. Right. So it's a me personally, but it's also us together in spiritual formation. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you can't do most of the commands in the New Testament if you're not with people who are nothing like you, who are also following Jesus. Like be long-suffering with one another. You got to be with people who being with them feels like suffering, right? The local assembly of Jesus followers, when you see it in the disciples that Jesus gathered, but also in the book of Acts and on, they have nothing in common, which Ephesians 3 and 4 says, puts on the manifold wisdom of God, puts it on display so that even the powers and rulers of the cosmos, you know, the gods of this world see it. And so, again, one of the things evangelicals did is we homogenized the church. We said, we're going to target one group of people and we're going to build a whole church around them. So we're malnourished because we're not faced with another Jesus follower who thinks fundamentally differently than we do on whatever the thing is. And so we have no muscle for it. Yeah, there's not a lot of friction that goes on. Yeah, it's like going to the gym and not sweating. If you're not experiencing resistance, if your muscles don't ache after, you're not doing it right. And it's the same for being part of a local church. If everything was happy, shiny, wonderful, you know, sing songy, Pollyanna, you're probably in a cult. Like, whoa, we don't have any disagreements. It's like, well, why don't you have it? You should have disagreements, right? Yes, the hive mind has told us what to think, so we don't have to. Oh, yeah, man. Well, and James, I mean, one of my biggest pet peeves is when I hear people say like, well, a Christian can never think that. A Christian could never believe that thing. It's like, you know, like a political thing or a culture war thing. Like, it's because you've not met one, but they do exist, you know? Yeah, they're out there. They're out there. And it would be great if you shared communion with them for a decade, not so that you changed your mind on that position, but so that you had a broader view of what the kingdom of God looks like. Yeah. Yeah. Really important stuff, man. Well, Caleb, we're with the hour is done. That went by really quickly. It was like a vapor. It was a vapor in the wind. Yes. No, man, I appreciate you being on here. And for everybody out there, go grab the book Disarming Leviathan. You can check out Caleb's book Disarming Leviathan. We'll have a link to IVP's website. They're giving us 20% off if you purchase the book with a code. So all that's in the show notes. And you can also check it out. Check Caleb out and everything else he's doing at disarmingleviathan.com. Disarmingleviathan.com. So Caleb, thanks for being here. And really appreciate you being on, man. This was great. I had a good time. Yep, me as well. Thanks, brother. All right. Take care and we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Hi, I'm Rachel Adams, host of The Love Offering Podcast, where we explore how to live out the greatest commandment, to love God, love others, and even love ourselves. Each week, my guests and I share stories of how God's love transforms us and overflows into the lives of those around us. Whether through small acts of kindness or powerful moments of faith, we're learning how to make love our greatest offering. Tune in to The Love Offering Podcast available on lifeaudio.com and all podcast platforms.