Citizenship in Heaven Does Not Mean Abandoning Politics on Earth

In a recent critical essay inveighing against the excesses of the Trump presidency and decrying Christians who presumably glory in those excesses, Taylor University professor Ed Meadors argues that “authentic” Christianity must be differentiated “from the fraudulent practices and deplorable propaganda that daily characterizes the misconduct of President Donald Trump, whose self-worship and ‘Christian’ nationalism definitively disassociate all things Trump from authentic biblical evangelical Christianity.”

Meadors’ broadside against President Trump is really two separate essays. The first is a fairly standard overview of Paul’s theology of identity in Christ, which Meadors terms “authentic Christianity” and presents as the core component of the evangelical gospel message. It’s a helpful, if elementary, introduction to a biblical theology of the kingdom of God and our citizenship in it.

Meadors is right to begin with the bold assertion that a Christian conversion leads to a total life transformation, “including one’s politics.” While politics may be a primary identifier to those who have no eternal hope, it plays a decidedly secondary role in the life of the believer. Rather than an end, it becomes a means through which the believer can give evidence of the internal changes wrought by the work of God in their life. So far, Meadors and I agree, as fellow Christians should, about this basic ordering of politics and faith.

However, Meadors is working too hard to map Paul’s analogy of citizenship in the epistles to the reality of citizenship in America today and misses critical historical context for understanding Paul’s citizenship message. Contra Meadors, the bulk of Paul’s audiences did not hear his call to citizenship in the kingdom of heaven as an alternative to citizenship in Rome. Rather, it was heard as citizenship in heaven despite having no citizenship in Rome. Unlike Paul, who was a Roman citizen, many of the earliest believers were not, which significantly changes the message of Paul’s citizenship rhetoric. Paul is not conveying that his readers should put aside their Roman citizenship for something better (indeed, that would make Paul out to be a hypocrite!). Rather, Paul writes that the citizenship which conveys rank and privilege in the Roman world, granting access to the halls of power and justice, represents only the smallest fraction of what it means to be an adopted son or daughter of the King. He’s arguing from the lesser to the greater.

Where Meadors goes astray in the second part of his essay is by executing the non sequitur of assuming that citizenship in heaven has the practical ramification of disregarding the rights and duties of our earthly citizenship. Again, Paul did no such thing, going so far as to take his Roman citizenship to the grave. Literally. Meadors’ application of Paul’s use of citizenship rhetoric primarily serves to support his strident rejection of Trumpian politics and condemnation of his fellow evangelicals allegedly caught up in an idolatrous Trump cult.

The fact that the vast majority of evangelicals in America agree with Dr. Meadors’ rejection of Trumpian excess seems completely lost on him as he rhetorically asks, “Have politically compromised church attenders repented in reverse by exchanging Jesus’ radical imperative to love one’s enemies (Matthew 5:44) for the self-gratifying entertainment of Trump’s denunciation of Democrats and other shared enemies, his promises to deregulate and thereby enrich the economy, his shared ethnic biases, ‘America First’ nationalism, simplistic platitudes, or all the above?”

For all his denouncements of President Trump’s “poker politics,” Meadors’ single, go-to example of the President’s inauthentic Christianity is that dang Trump-as-Jesus meme. To his credit, Meadors is right to condemn it. Where he goes wrong is to presume that somehow he’s in the minority as an authentic evangelical capable of recognizing Trump’s sacrilege as he asks, “Who is keeping Trump accountable?” Perhaps he missed that the offending meme was rather quickly taken down? Perhaps he missed the wide, wide, wide pushback that meme received by Trump’s Christian supporters? Perhaps he missed the fact that 95% of white evangelicals already believe that Trump is not “very religious” (that is, “authentically Christian”)? Perhaps he’s missing the slipping support for Trump among evangelicals?

In other words, Meadors’ own standards of authentic Christianity as being demonstrated in a behavior set that places allegiance to God above the state to the degree that it will “keep leaders accountable” have been and are being met! Yet, somehow, Meadors does not recognize that. He appears convinced that “Trump trump[s] biblical authority” for the majority of his fellow evangelicals. The cutesy turn of phrase demonstrates that Meadors, though perhaps a serious theologian, is not a credible observer of American political culture and thus an unreliable guide for helping believers integrate their theology with their political thought.

Meadors’ overwrought political jeremiad based on oversimplified biblical analogies is a systemic problem among America’s evangelical thinkers and educators—one which is impoverishing seminaries and undermining local churches’ ability to be effective civil society leaders. Theologians like Meadors, and more high-profile leaders like Russell Moore, are little more than blind leaders of the blind, who will not mourn when a dirge is sung, nor dance when a pipe is played. Like many theologians attempting to both make sense of American politics in the age of Donald Trump and speak for the entirety of evangelicals, Dr. Meadors misses the mark and accomplishes little more than demonstrating the need for theologians to be more serious in their political thought and analysis.