A college student stopped going to church. Her parent, a friend of Michael Wear’s, called him with the reason she gave: she could not reconcile the values she was raised with and her parent’s political work. That one family captures the answer to this question. Political hypocrisy does drive people from the church, especially the children of believers. Wear, founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, locates the cause in placement. Christians who put politics above the gospel end up defending in public what they condemn in private, and the next generation reads that gap as evidence about the faith. The repair is to put politics back under the gospel.
The word hypocrisy can name a real wrong or offer a convenient exit. Sorting out which requires three things: the kind of question people are asking now, what the evidence actually shows and what it means for politics to sit under Christ.
The Question Has Moved From God to His People
For generations, the hardest objection in apologetics was suffering: if God is good, why does he allow pain? Lisa Fields, founder and president of the Jude 3 Project, recalls Mary Jo Sharp observing in a Christianity Today interview that the next generation is asking something else. Fields puts the new version this way: “If he’s so transformative, why are people behaving this way?”
The suffering question is aimed at God. The newer question uses God’s people as data. The person asking reasons backward from conduct to claims: if Christ changes people, the change should be visible, and public life is one of the most visible places to look. A better argument for the resurrection cannot settle that, and Fields concedes as much. If believers do not live under the lordship of Christ, their ability to argue that he rose leaves the real question untouched.
Fields hears this in a specific setting. Parents regularly ask her to help with a child who no longer wants to be part of the church. Her answer is hard to hear: “sometimes the number one obstacle to your child being a part of a church is the way you behave.” She adds that many young people are turned off by the way their parents engage in politics. Her claim is limited to what she sees in these conversations, and it is serious enough on those terms. In many families, a parent’s political conduct has become part of the case a child builds against the faith.
This lands with particular weight among the people the Jude 3 Project exists to reach. Fields describes its target audience as including skeptics struggling with the idea that Christianity is a white man’s religion. A skeptic already weighing whether the faith mainly served power will treat Christians’ political behavior as evidence in that case. When believers look like one more faction chasing advantage, they confirm the suspicion instead of answering it.
What the Evidence Shows, and What It Does Not
Wear offers two kinds of support, and they deserve separate weighing.
The first is data. He cites The Great Dechurching, which he says has a full chapter on parents and children. By Wear’s account, among those who say their relationship with their parents prompted them to stop attending church, all of the top five reasons were more or less directly related to politics and culture. That is Wear’s report of another book’s findings, and its scope is specific. It covers people who traced their departure to their parents, a subset of everyone who leaves. Within that group, doctrine was not the main driver.
The second is the story that opened this article. Wear’s friend works on human rights and religious freedom, and Wear considers the friend a faithful person whose politics follow a coherent, faithful logic, even where the two disagree. The daughter rejected that logic anyway. The parent asked Wear to spend time with her so she could meet an orthodox Christian with a different political approach. Then the parent said something that stayed with Wear: they no longer cared much about their daughter’s future politics. They just wanted her back in church with her family.
Wear calls it one of the saddest and most hopeful conversations he had had in a long time. At Christian colleges and around the country, he meets many people in the daughter’s position, “waiting to hear that from their parents,” waiting for someone they love to say they “would prefer to lose on their political ambitions if it meant that their loved one might draw near to Jesus.”
The story carries a more searching diagnosis than the slogan that Christians are hypocrites. The parent was no fraud, yet the daughter still saw a contradiction. Political commitments had grown so central that she could no longer see the faith underneath them. Wear never names the parent’s party, and that restraint matters, because the pattern can form wherever a person’s politics outruns their discipleship.
Is This a Problem of One Party?
Fields opened the political discussion by naming both sides. People on the right, she observed, feel righteous by ranking a couple of issues above the rest. People on the left feel righteous because they prioritize justice and social advocacy. Her real question was how Christians can stop choosing pet issues and weigh the whole range of moral concern.
She also gives a concrete example, which should be read as her claim with her reasoning attached. She imagines children of parents who support Donald Trump concluding that the values they were raised with have gone out the window for political aspirations. To those children, she says, it looks as if “your commitment to your political ideology trumps your allegiance to Christ.” She then points to lies about January 6 and about the 2020 election results. Her concern is what it does to a child’s trust to watch believers “have a strong conviction about things that are not true,” and she asks such parents directly: “how do you think your kids will want to be a part of this faith?” Her argument targets truthfulness. When Christian conviction stops tracking reality, the watching child learns that conviction itself is unreliable.
Fields then widens the lens. Algorithms, she notes, feed each person a curated stream that confirms what they already believe. People on both sides arrive at the table well read, and she puts it bluntly: “They’re just real well read on their perspective.” That observation applies to every camp. Anyone who never encounters the best case against their own view is exposed to the same false confidence.
This is why the distinction the Jude 3 Project draws between faithful Christian engagement in public life and fusing the gospel with national or ethnic power bears directly on credibility. A child can respect a parent’s vote. What drives the child away is a vote that seems to have replaced the parent’s faith.
Politics Is Penultimate
Wear’s central argument concerns where politics belongs. Christians in this country, he says, have followed models of engagement “that have placed politics above the gospel and place politics as outside and irrelevant to the gospel when I think that politics needs to be situated for Christians as within and under the gospel.” Both errors damage witness. Politics above the gospel turns faith into a servant of partisan goals. Politics outside the gospel tells the world that Jesus has nothing to say about public life. Either way, the faith looks smaller than its claims.
From there he makes his most distinctive move. In this moment, “perhaps the greatest contribution Christianity has to make to our politics is not telling our politics what it is, what it must be, but reminding our politics what it is not.” He states it plainly: “our politics is not ultimate, it’s penultimate.”
His image for this is exact. Christians carry ultimate truths into public life, such as the conviction that every human being bears the image of God. But “when we enter politics, we are taking the role of translator, not stenographer.” A stenographer records words exactly. A translator carries meaning into another language and knows the rendering is imperfect. Turning a theological truth into policy is always that kind of translation, done with the limited tools of self-government. “Politics is contingent, it’s mediated,” Wear says.
Here the link to hypocrisy comes into focus. A Christian who treats policy positions as a direct transcript of God’s will experiences every political loss as a loss for God, and then almost any tactic can be justified to prevent it. Values get suspended just this once, and then again. Wear argues that when politics becomes an ultimate statement of identity, the moral weight people carry into it stops fitting. Fields names the same dynamic from another angle: people seek their identity in something “too small to hold it.” A person whose identity rests on an election cannot afford humility, and without humility, no one sees their own contradictions.
Wear grounds this in Dallas Willard’s definition of God’s kingdom as the range of God’s effective will, where what he says to be done is done. Each person has a small kingdom too, the range of their own will. Kingdom politics places the political actions within our reach “under the jurisdiction of love,” willing the good of others through them. The prayer Jesus taught fits that picture:
“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)
The prayer asks God to bring his rule and names no human government as that rule. A believer can pray it sincerely while voting and organizing. What the prayer forbids is mistaking one’s own small kingdom for God’s.
What Anger and Fear Do to a Witness
Wear’s account of anger and fear draws heavily on Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, which contains a chapter on fear and another on hate. The source matters. Thurman, a Black theologian, wrote about how fear and hatred work on people living under oppression, and he treated both as threats to the souls of the very people who had every reason to feel them. Wear takes from that tradition a lesson for all of public life: we overestimate what anger and fear can do for us, because “we think that we’re using them when they’re actually using us.” He notes that Thurman acknowledged the creative energy anger can supply and then judged it corrosive. A church that wants credibility with a generation shaped partly by that heritage has a resource in it. Thurman’s work shows how to name injustice clearly while refusing to let fear and hatred set the terms.
Wear reserves his strongest language for political actors who cultivate fear when they know it is unnecessary, because frightened people can be moved. In his words, “that’s not just destructive to our politics, that’s destructive to people’s souls.” Fields adds an apologist’s observation: it is easier to manipulate an angry person “than it is to manipulate somebody that’s calm,” because anger crowds out reason.
Rejecting a politics of anger and fear, Wear insists, “is not to say that we should not be compassionate towards those who are angry and fearful.” Fields describes anger as a secondary emotion that often grows from disappointment and unmet expectations, and she warns that if you are repelled by it, “you’ll miss that this is a human being that’s probably in pain.” In apologetics, she notes, a person’s first question is often not their real one. The young adult who says they left over hypocrisy may be exactly right, and may also be grieving a parent they no longer recognize.
A Life That Prompts the Question
Fields grounds the argument in the verse apologetics takes its name from:
“Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (1 Peter 3:15)
The verse assumes someone is asking. Peter writes to believers facing suspicion, and the next verse speaks of a good conscience, so that those who falsely accuse their “good conversation in Christ” may be ashamed (1 Peter 3:16). In KJV English, conversation means conduct, the whole way a person lives.
Read in context, the passage ties the spoken answer to a visible life. Applying it to modern politics goes beyond Peter’s original situation, but the principle carries. Fields states the application sharply: “we never get those questions because we don’t actually live different than the culture, but we impose our answers when people are asking us questions.” A witness whose public conduct copies the surrounding culture’s tactics gives no one a reason to ask about hope.
Evangelism, Wear adds, “does not happen in an environment which is isolated from how Christians show up in other spaces.” People watch believers in politics as closely as in gospel presentations, and “if the grounding reality when we’re engaging politically isn’t the grounding reality when we’re walking them down Romans road, they’re gonna pick up on that.”
Doesn’t the Gospel Stay True However Christians Behave?
It does, and this is the strongest objection. The resurrection is no less historical because a parent excused a politician’s lies. Someone who leaves over hypocrisy may reason from a real wrong to a false conclusion, since the failures of Christians are real and grievous without being the failure of Christ.
The objection relocates the problem without removing it. Claims of transformation invite evidence, and the church cannot answer a reasonable inference by declaring the evidence inadmissible. Wear even finds hope in the way young people now ask about politics and doctrine together. They are recognizing, as he puts it, “if I am going to commit my life to Jesus, it’s my whole life.” That is a serious reading of the gospel’s reach.
Putting Politics Back Under the Gospel
Wear’s practical counsel is modest. It is generally safe to assume that a long-contested issue persists “not because it’s a direct contest of good versus evil, but because there are competing valid interests at play.” Advocacy groups often see their job as making opponents look as awful as possible. So “if you feel strongly about an issue, one of the things that’s an obligation is for you to actually seek out information for why people disagree with you.” The exercise may leave your view intact, but it will usually sharpen it and expose interests you missed.
He also commends silence and solitude. Amid constant motivated appeals, these disciplines remind a person that they are more than the sum of their inputs. In silence, Wear finds himself doubting that his political opponents are what media and political forces have made them out to be, and “you start to remember that other people have souls too.” Willard described apologetics as a helping ministry, and Wear extends the idea: “Christians can engage in politics as an act of loving service.”
The deepest test is the one Wear’s friend came to late. Would you accept a political loss if it meant someone you love might come near to Jesus? A parent who can say yes, and say it aloud to that child, has already put politics in its place. For a son or daughter who has been watching, that answer is the evidence they were looking for.
