THERE IS A PROBLEM IN THE way we think about political change today. Somewhere along the line, we started believing that politics is the primary lever for fixing a broken world. That if we could just vote in the right people, pass the right laws, and repeal the wrong ones, then society would somehow snap back into place. But that is not how real change works. Politics does not lead culture. It follows it. And culture is shaped by something deeper still–faith in God, or lack thereof. Always has been, always will be.
We pour time, energy, and hope into politicians, political parties, and court rulings, thinking they will somehow reverse the moral free fall of our nation. But politics is not the source. It is the reflection. It is the mirror that reveals who we are as a people. Politicians are not moral giants. They are crowd-readers. They watch the polls, they study the trends, they keep one finger in the wind and the other on their re-election strategy. Rarely do they lead unwaveringly with principle. They lead with permission. They do what they think they can get away with and are expected to do to remain decently popular. And that is dictated by the people. If the public has no appetite for truth, do not expect politicians to dish it out.
If politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from faith, then the only way to truly change the direction of a society is to go to the source. That means the church. That means the pulpit. That means you and me.
The state of our culture is a direct result of the weakness in our faith communities. It is time to stop pretending otherwise. Weak Christian leaders have filled pulpits across the country, more concerned with being liked than being right. More worried about offending politicians than offending God, they have traded orthodoxy for optics. Churches have been built that resemble social clubs and self-help seminars instead of sanctuaries where truth is preached without apology and sin is named without hesitation. And the people sitting under that kind of leadership have become just as weak, confused, compromised, and incapable of withstanding the cultural pressure bearing down on them.
What happens when you have a generation of weak Christians? You raise up a generation of weak business leaders, weak educators, weak influencers, and weak political leaders. People who lack conviction, who are terrified of confrontation, who go along to get along. The decay we see in our political systems did not start with ballots. It started with Bibles collecting dust and pulpits going soft.
Look around. The world is lost, but that is no surprise. The bigger tragedy is that churchianity has become silent in the face of that loss. We have abdicated our responsibility to be the conscience of the culture. We have allowed truth to be replaced by tolerance. Confusion grows in the world while clarity fades in the church. And still, we keep asking why things are not changing.
We cannot expect the culture to uphold standards that the church no longer teaches. We cannot expect the world to hunger for righteousness when we have been busy watering it down to make it more palatable. And we absolutely cannot expect politicians to fight for values that we have failed to model. We have a political crisis because we have a faith crisis, not the other way around.
If the church would rise to its calling and stop trying to blend in, the culture would take notice. The culture would begin to shift. And when the culture demands something better, politics will fall in line. That is the natural order. That is the chain of influence. Faith shapes the people. The people shape the culture. And the culture shapes what politicians can and cannot get away with.
That starts with a church that has a backbone and with Christian leaders who are more afraid of compromising the truth than they are of losing their platform. It starts with Christians who stop apologizing for believing the Bible and start living it without hesitation and allow themselves to become the hands and feet of Jesus.
We do not need more woke pastors–we need men and women of God who fear Him more than they fear headlines, hashtags, or human opinion. We need to stop outsourcing the fight for righteousness to Washington or Ottawa or Parliament Hill. The battle was never theirs to win. It is ours and it always has been. The revival we need is not going to come from a political movement. It will come when the church starts looking like the church again. When we put truth over trend. When we choose holiness over popularity. When we fear God more than we fear man.
Faith first. Then culture. Then politics. That is the order and that is the truth. Until we get that right, nothing else will be.
