When Politics Becomes Heresy is Tim Perry’s loving rebuke and call to repentance. Evangelicals are embracing the logic of ancient heresies, and these heresies lead to each other.
In our interview and in the excerpt from the prologue below, Perry discusses the difficulty he faced writing on such a complex and personal topic.
Tim Perry is lead pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada.
Lexham Press: Hello, Tim. We appreciate your taking the time for this interview. Can you tell us the story behind When Politics Becomes Heresy: The Idol of Power and the Gospel of Christ and describe its basic thesis?
Tim Perry: For many years, I have been interested in the ways in which many Christians have co-opted the heated political rhetoric of our surrounding culture and then tacked on theological or Biblical support afterward. Rather than beginning from the claims of the Gospel and working outward to its public implications, far too many of us have accepted a particular political vision as primary and deployed Christian faith as a means to help realize that vision. Treating the Gospel as a political tool is, I believe, a literal heresy. In my book, I explore the overlaps between this political tendency and classical heresies.
LP: What contribution do you hope to make with your book?
Perry: Many Christian and specifically evangelical books on politics lately have taken a “side” in the culture war–arguing for or against “progressive” Christianity or its “conservative” alternative. I am convinced that using faith as a means to an end, however, knows no political tribe, but can be found throughout.
LP: Please tell us a particularly surprising or enjoyable aspect that you discovered from writing your book.
Perry:. Of all the books I’ve written, this one was by far the most difficult to bring to birth. In part, I’m sure this is because the problem I believe I have rightly identified is a deeply personal one; if I have rightly identified a tendency toward heresy in myself, I am the first who needs to repent. “It’s not my brother or my sister, but it’s me, O Lord,” as the old spiritual (hymn) says. I hope that the personal dynamic comes through to readers.
This excerpt was adapted from the prologue to When Politics Becomes Heresy.
So what is this book?
This book is a lament. The way the political polarization of our wider culture has been mirrored in our evangelical churches is ugly. Pick any hot button culture war issue, and you will find evangelical missionaries who think it is their job to bless it and convert the unconvinced to their cause. And if we fail to convince, then we publicly condemn.
It is a plea. Bring the infighting, well, back in. Whatever debates or discussions we evangelicals have, they need to be brought back inside and not aired on social or mainstream media. Like the Corinthians, whose childish conduct was so embarrassingly public to Paul, we are making a mockery of the gospel when we parade our divisions in front of the world.
It is a call. Let’s relearn our primary language—that provided by Holy Scripture. If we’re going to bring our debates back inside the tent where they belong, we need to learn to talk to each other in ways that, frankly, the world doesn’t understand. Early Christians did this by deploying, among other techniques, the language of the apocalyptic. We need to relearn the language not only of biblical apocalyptic, but of the Bible.
It is a panarion. My long-suffering editor has objected to this word because of its obscurity, but I thought I could at least sneak it in here. A panarion is a catalog of heresies, and this book shows how the old heresies live on in our society. Here a clarification is in order. I am not saying that certain segments of American evangelicalism are literally recapitulating the ancient heresies. I do not believe there are evangelical emissaries lurking in the halls of Congress with bags of money looking to purchase influence or status any more than I am asserting that some evangelicals are saying plainly that the Creator is not the God of Jesus (Gnosticism) or that the Son was the preeminent creature (Arianism), and so on. I am saying that heresy, like history, repeats itself. Its inner logic remains a constant temptation and, if we’re not careful, reasserts itself in ways that are, for those who know their history and heresy, distressingly familiar.
The heretical patterns that are repeated today may not have much to do with particulars, but they are nevertheless present: an unholy desire to remain influential, an overidentification with contemporary culture, a temptation to turn the gospel into a message of moral improvement or social justice, turning God’s kingdom into ours, demonizing those who disagree. These are the core issues that, in the end, make the classical heresies, heresies. The particular false doctrines, which must inevitably fluctuate across time and space, flow from them. And their source? The refusal, even rejection, knowing or not, of the gospel.
Because we have lost our language, the God-given tongue with which to describe ourselves to ourselves, we have also lost Jesus. This book explores the ways the Jesus of the Scriptures and ecumenical creeds has been misplaced. The overlaps between the major early heresies and contemporary, politics-obsessed evangelicalism make this loss evident.
It is, finally, my last love letter to evangelicalism. The Spirit, as far as I can tell, has departed us. We are no longer the movement that inspired the global missions explosions, the Wesleys, or even Billy Graham. We are by every conceivable metric a mirror of American culture: affluent, banal, blind to sin, and deaf to the biblical calls to judgment and offers of grace. When I began this book, I hoped that “walking the sawdust trail” of repentance was still an option. In God’s grace, it may still be. But as the book nears publication, I am less hopeful. The calls to repentance and faith remain in the text no longer to call the movement as a whole to its senses, but to encourage the few who have yet to bow the knee to Baal to remain faithful.
