What Would The Confessing Church Look Like Today?

“It’s a relevant question for the American church in 2025. Whether you are on the left or the right, it is tempting to see ourselves as living through Germany in 1933, confronting the moral equivalent of the Nazis on the other side. There is a moral clarity to it, stark lines dividing the good guys from the bad. Our duty is obvious; the only question is whether we can muster the courage. 

But the analogy can be misleading, and it excuses us from examining our own side. We should be able to spot injustices from both sides of the political aisle.”

“That seems the right question for our time too. American Christians seem divided over who the good guys and bad guys really are and what the historical analogy should teach us. To some, the secular progressive left is the obvious modern equivalent of the Nazis: allowing a Holocaust on the unborn, fostering an authoritarian culture on campuses and in newsrooms, demanding the state’s validation and endorsement for every excess of the sexual revolution. To others, President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are the baddies: preaching belligerent nationalism, demanding absolute loyalty to a singular leader, subverting the rule of law, and rewarding political violence.

What if both groups of Christians are right, in a way? It isn’t hard to find bad guys: They’re all around us. But if we recognize that there isn’t a single bad guy, bad group, or bad party—but many of them—we should hesitate before thinking that we are living through 1933. Maybe the calling of the American church today isn’t to mount a heroic resistance unto death against a singular moral evil that unites all people of good conscience in opposition. Maybe the calling of the church today is to recognize injustices and evils all around us, to maintain our independence, and above all to be an advocate: not for one party or the other, but for lawfulness and peace among political tribes. ”

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.