Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”
Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness. The list is so widely accepted within these subcultures that it is hardly ever questioned.
The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues—some of which, including abortion, I have written about and take seriously—but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.
Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. And he would insist that the Bible defines his politics, not the other way around. But is that actually true?
In addition to the issues on which he chooses to focus, there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?
According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?
[Peter Wehner: American Christians face a choice]
Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”
The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.
Why the silence?
One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out. The ceiling for fiscal year 2027 remains 17,500, and has the same priority. In 2024, by contrast, the United States resettled more than 100,000 refugees.
The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.
Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America. Many of those grants were eventually reinstated, but massive harm was done. Some trials can’t be completed, because of the loss of follow-up data; many research groups that come apart can’t be reassembled.
Now, ask yourself this: Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering.
I don’t claim that these three issues exhaust the concerns Christians should bring to public life, or that mine is the only faithful way to rank them. Thoughtful Christians will weigh things differently. But measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.
That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people. The question is not whether the Bible speaks to matters of justice and healing. “Nothing about Jesus is more certain historically than that he healed,” the novelist and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner wrote. It is whether Christians will let Jesus’s ethic define our politics.
So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat.
Another factor is an entire media and institutional ecosystem that has every worldly incentive to focus relentlessly on cultural flashpoints, because doing so raises money and drives viewership, clicks, and engagement. Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.
Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.
The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.
All of us, to varying degrees, are guilty of this. No one has ever read the Bible unfiltered; everyone interprets it. How we do so is shaped by the traditions we embrace—Southern Baptist, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, nondenominationalism, Calvinism, Arminianism, fundamentalism, progressivism—and by much else besides.
Our family’s origins; the era in which we live; and our nationality, temperament, education, social circles, and psychological makeup shape what we are able to see and not see, and how we process the world. We bring our life experiences and our mental maps to the biblical text, as we do to everything else. The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew.
In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun. Virtually no Christian reads it that way today. The text did not change; our knowledge of the world did.
The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history.
Every reading of the Bible, and every conception of God, is to some significant degree culturally conditioned. This is a basic reality, and it was true even of the biblical writers, who wrote in the languages, genres, and assumptions of their own times. “If we are to speak of God giving the Scriptures to people,” the eminent Bible scholar John Barton has written, “it can only be in and through the human process.” None of this diminishes Scripture. God’s choice to collaborate with human beings dignifies them in a way that treating them as stenographers would not. The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.
This unwillingness comes from an understandable place. Many Christians fear that conceding the existence of cultural conditioning invites subjectivity into interpretation. But subjectivity is already there; the only question is whether we admit it. Pretending otherwise doesn’t eliminate our biases. It simply hides them, and in doing so makes interpretive mistakes much harder to correct.
Part of what makes our own subjectivity so hard to see is a belief, common in many Christian communities, that the Bible is almost entirely self-evident. A friend who attended a respected evangelical seminary once told me that 95 percent or more of scripture is clear—not difficult, not complicated, plain on its face to anyone who reads it. If that is true, then most disagreements are not good-faith differences over interpretation; they are matters of willful blindness or disobedience. If one’s own reading is simply what the Bible says, then anyone who reads it differently is rejecting God’s word.
This mindset has done enormous damage, turning honest disagreements into loyalty tests, dividing churches, and telling believers who have difficult questions that they must choose between them and their faith. And at times, it has led to far worse.
When people are certain that their reading is simply God’s truth, dissent becomes more than a mistake. It can be seen as a grave error that needs to be punished. As great a figure as Augustine defended the state’s coercion of the Donatists, a schismatic sect, and used verses from the Gospel of Luke to justify it. Thomas Aquinas went further, holding that heretics who persisted after receiving repeated warnings could rightly be handed over to the state “to be exterminated from the world by death.”
Centuries later, Voltaire fiercely criticized the intolerance and cruelty that this outlook had produced. In 1766, a 20-year-old French nobleman, the Chevalier de La Barre, was accused of failing to remove his hat as a religious procession passed, singing impious songs, and damaging a wooden crucifix. He was tortured and beheaded, and his body was burned at the stake along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique nailed to his chest.
The claim that the Bible’s teachings on important matters are clear and obvious is belied by the fact that, as the Bible scholar Kenton Sparks and the sociologist Christian Smith have documented, nearly every significant interpretive question yields a variety of readings. Devout Christians have reached different conclusions on baptism, church governance, the Lord’s Supper, and whether the miraculous spiritual gifts have ceased. There are disagreements about the end-times, the nature of the atonement, the role of women in ministry, the balance between works and grace, and whether Genesis offers a literal or figurative account of creation. There are differences over pacifism and just war, how to understand predestination and free will, whether a person can lose their salvation, the age of the Earth, and the nature of heaven and hell. There are thousands of Christian denominations, many of them born of disputes over what scripture teaches. As William Blake put it, “Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”
[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as a virtue]
The apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, said that “now we see through a glass, darkly.” If that was true of Paul, it is surely true of the rest of us.
None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order. The political theology of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, which sees the Church as a witness within a plural society rather than a power over it, reflects the way of Jesus more faithfully than does that of Doug Wilson, a leading proponent of Christian nationalism who calls for “mere Christendom.” No one can begin to remotely comprehend the ways and words of a God who created the heavens and the Earth and a reality beyond time. But some come closer than others.
One of the things that I see more clearly now than I did when I was younger is that discernment matters at least as much as familiarity with Bible verses. It is an immensely important virtue, and an underrated one. Discernment encompasses wisdom, and it protects us from distorting scripture, which is what Satan did in the wilderness when he quoted the Psalms to tempt Jesus, getting the words right and the meaning wrong. Discernment allows us to look beneath the words to grasp their purpose. It is not primarily an intellectual skill, though intellect is involved; it is formed by practice and character, as the writer of Hebrews says of those whose powers of discernment have been “trained by constant practice.” It helps us perceive reality and understand what the moment requires of a faithful person.
Discernment also requires humility, a willingness to learn from others rather than merely argue with them, in the conviction that “iron sharpens iron” and that no one sees the whole truth alone. Humility keeps our views open to refinement. But it rarely comes easily, especially for those raised in faith communities that prize certainty.
“When you grow up believing that your religious worldview contains the key to absolute truth and provides an answer to every question,” the Christian author Rachel Held Evans wrote, “you never really get over the disappointment of learning that it doesn’t.”
The philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, in his book Atheist Delusions, writes about the extraordinary revision of the moral and conceptual categories brought about by early Christianity. According to Hart, there emerged from darkness into full visibility “the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of infinite value.”
A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.