Shane Morris – Family Council

Politics on Sunday Morning: Guest Column

May 30, 2025Shane MorrisChurch, Religious FreedomChurch, Church Statistics, Religious Freedom, Religious Liberty

Talk to the average critic of the evangelical church—perhaps someone who has “deconstructed” and now resents their religious upbringing—and one of the first complaints they have is that Christians are too political. Especially since 2016, it has become common to smear conservative Christians for being more interested in “making America great again” than in making disciples.

This perception of evangelicals (that their churches are too political) is so strong that sociologist Christian Smith cited it in his recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete as one of the main reasons for the long-term decline in church attendance.

Here’s the irony: Evangelical churches aren’t in fact that political by the typical definition of the term, nor do their members want them to be. That public perception is basically a myth.

Summarizing several recent and large surveys, statistician Ryan Burge showed that “very few houses of worship are talking about political issues on a regular basis,” and even the recognizable pastors on social media doing a lot of culture warring are “outliers.”

In its 2022 Health of Congregations Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asked regular church attenders how often their pastors talk about a variety of issues. 90% said their clergy never or rarely talk about election or voter fraud. 92% said their churches never or rarely talk about President Trump. Only 9% said their clergy often bring up abortion, while 58% said the topic never or rarely comes up.

The most frequently discussed “political” topics across all congregations were poverty and inequality, with 66% saying their churches sometimes or often bring up these subjects. But that could just be from reading the Gospels!

Looking specifically at evangelicals, the popular wisdom that they idolize politics doesn’t hold up. Only 9% said that their church is more divided by politics today than it was five years ago—lower than the number of non-evangelicals and Catholics who saw such division in their churches. And just 14% of evangelicals agreed with the statement, “I wish my church talked more about political division in this country,” compared with 86% who disagreed.

Far from rallying their political tribe, most evangelicals appear to prefer their pastor stick with preaching the word of God. Burge remarked:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. … You just don’t see a lot of church going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

When compared with surveys of how the unchurched perceive Christians, the disconnect is glaring. It turns out quite a few non-churchgoing Americans have no idea what goes on inside churches. As Burge concluded:

Doing a lot of public-facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning. The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis.

This raises a couple of interesting questions. Should we be talking more about politics from the pulpit? And if so, what qualifies as “politics”?

As I said recently on Breakpoint, there’s a clear difference between pastors commenting on foreign policy and being willing to oppose the killing of unborn babies. One is nuanced and requires great expertise while the other is a very clear-cut moral issue. Not all issues that get labeled “political” are created equal.

But on a deeper level, maybe we should rethink what counts as “political.” In the sense that loving our neighbors, exercising dominion over God’s world, and stewarding our citizenship are earthly duties of Christians, Christianity could be called deeply and unavoidably “political.”

Without ever bringing up candidates, debating elections, or drawing up tribal battle lines, pastors and teachers who do their job by telling the whole story of redemption are saying a few things in no uncertain terms: that Christ is sovereign over all of human existence, that this world and the way we choose to live in it matter to Him, and that He intends His gospel and its effects to permeate society, culture, and government. That sounds political, by any reasonable definition.

None of this means evangelicals who answered this survey are wrong for wanting to focus on the Word of God, or that we should spend every Sunday culture-warring and discussing the latest headlines. Far from it! What it does mean is that Christianity has unavoidable implications for the here and now, and that even as we keep the main thing the main thing in our churches, we should never forget that our worship has implications beyond them. Otherwise, we’ll be just as mistaken as those who say we worship politics.

Humans Were Meant to Be Here: Guest Column

We are a blessing to be preserved, multiplied, and redeemed.

For a long time, if you encountered a writer warning about declining global birth rates, it was a safe bet you were reading a right-leaning or Christian publication. But that appears to be changing. In the last couple of years, mainstream news outlets seem to have caught on that the problem civilization now faces is not too many but too few babies, and some are sounding the alarm. Recent stories in The Spectator, The New York Times, and The Washington Post all clearly describe why a shrinking and aging society is a bad thing and try to identify the causes behind this population “bust.”

The fear of a population “bomb” haunts mainstream psyche greatly due to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, where he famously declared in the opening line that, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and predicted mass starvation due to overpopulation.

This of course never happened, and in fact, global food production vastly outpaced population growth, making it easier than ever to feed everyone. Facts aside, the baby-banning ideology persists.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post editorial board ran a response to the surge of critical comments they’ve received on stories about declining birth rates. As anyone familiar with the comments section under controversial (or really any) articles can imagine, a litany of bad arguments had been unfolding. One commenter wrote that, “Endless growth—whether that’s of the population or the economy—is an unachievable fantasy.” Another declared, “Now is the time to reject growthist ideology for good.” Many cited climate change, overcrowding and, of course, running out of food as reasons to encourage lower birth rates.

The Post did a surprisingly nice job of refuting these. It pointed out that having more young and creative minds is precisely how mankind has enjoyed an unprecedented technological boom over the last two centuries: “Ingenuity and innovation have repeatedly empowered humanity to overcome ecological constraints,” and have “liberated much of humanity from misery.”

Imposing population constraints on developing nations would also, it said, “amount to a kind of environmental imperialism,” denying to poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America precisely the opportunities for growth and improved living standards that richer, western countries have long enjoyed. And, they added, there is simply no evidence it would help the environment:

Productivity growth can take the world in directions that are benign for the physical and social environment. Growth can mean less pollution, more forests and better health.

Of course, the real reason The Post caught flak from many of its readers wasn’t environmentalism or economics, but something better described as a “mood” instilled in the popular imagination by books like The Population Bomb and in a host of sci-fi movies. It’s a sense, seemingly shared by more today than ever before, that humans are bad, that our activity is inherently exploitative, and that the world would be better off with fewer of us.

In this way of thinking, people are a disease on the planet—a species whose inventions have allowed us to bypass the checks and balances of natural selection and multiply out of control. In short, we don’t really belong here; not in such high numbers. And a large reduction in our population could only be beneficial.

But what if human beings are good, actually? Not in a moral sense, but in the sense that we’re meant to be here? What if this world was specifically designed to support us and thrive under human stewardship? What if the way we continually defy the doomsday predictions of writers like Ehrlich through innovation and discovery shows that we are more than just another species devouring resources?

This, of course, is exactly how the Bible describes human beings. And it’s why, despite the race’s fallen condition, Christians view human life as a blessing to be preserved, multiplied, and redeemed; and the human mind and spirit as resources more inexhaustible than any material we consume.

We bear a certain resemblance to our Maker in that we can, in our limited and creaturely way, also create. Which is why a lack of new humans is not good news, and why I’m happy to see that some mainstream publications are starting to realize this—even if The Population Bomb still haunts their comments sections.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.