One of the things I regularly preach to my students is that the political choices so frequently foisted upon us are not the only choices we have. Given that Christians are called to be in the world but not of the world, our rejection of the limiting status quo is not a sign of squishiness or defeatism, but is rather us embracing our calling as disciples of Christ in a world whose very fallenness rejects Him. Christians can (and, I would argue, should) be political, thought not necessarily in the way the world usually defines it.
Enter Jake Meador’s latest book, What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World (2022, Intervarsity Press). Like Meador’s award-winning debut, What Are Christians For? is a needed reset of the way we, as Americans, think about the world around us. Meador persuasively argues for nothing short of a revolution in the way Christians—especially, but not exclusively, American Christians—do life together. The result is a book that is equal parts challenging and encouraging, prophetic and personal. It rejects earthly categories and confidently embraces a politics determined to upset the status quo. It is, simply put, a book for our time.
A cold definition of politics is “who gets what, how.” And while this is useful for explaining the conflicts inherent in political action, a better, more encompassing definition may be “how we order ourselves,” or even “what we do, together.” Meador’s understanding certainly falls into the latter set of definitions, which allows his discussion to hop from big idea to big idea, touching on nature and place, racial identity, life, and the sexual revolution, to name just a few. This focus lends a sense of gravity to the book. Meador is not offering prescriptions to contemporary problems here; his focus is broader, more consequential.
Consider his discussion of the disconnect between place and identity in Chapters Two and Three. He argues that, as a result of technological advances and human ambition, it is too common for people to have misplaced our connection to the world around us. “We have lost the inheritance,” Meador writes, speaking of our God-given relationship to the natural world, “and replaced it with a blind grasping after power and security and wealth.” The implication in these (and later chapters) is a call for creation care, for land and the animals it sustains — not because it suits our long-term interests as people, but because our God-ordered stewardship over creation demands it.
Meador is gifted at drawing on personal experiences to illustrate his points and provide grounding for sometimes elusive ideas. Later in the book he tells the story of how his father nearly died from undiagnosed conditions, only to face a lengthy and often frustrating recovery. Meador’s purpose is not to seek sympathy or to shine a light on sin’s infection of every aspect of human existence, but rather to show how his family responded to dreadful circumstances in a simple, faithful way.1 Indeed, he couches the book’s thesis accordingly: “Ordinary people living faithful lives together in a place,” he writes, “bearing up under what cannot be helped and laboring to resolve what we can, offer us a vision of how a renewed Christian society could begin.”
The final chapter of his book is about as close to specific recommendations or prescriptions as Meador comes — and that’s being generous. This is not a manual for Christians wanting to know, say, how to vote or which candidates to support. Instead, Meador’s conclusion is a call for Christians to reorient our concerns around care, rather than accomplishment. This brings him to a provocative and relevant question:
How can we speak about the gospel and live as Christians in a society that thinks it is post-Christian but was never actually all that Christian to begin with?
Flowing from this, Meador encourages readers to consider how to order their lives around simple yet challenging practices — how we can serve people in our midst, how we plant roots in our communities, and the like. “When our lives have a certain degree of elasticity to them,” he writes, “we are better able to love and serve one another because a large part of loving and serving is simply a function of availability.” This may seem easy, but putting into practice is anything but. Doing this requires a shift—indeed, a total transformation—in how most American Christians (myself included) think about life. These foundational questions have immense implications for all aspects of our lives, including politics.
Christians have been blessed with an abundance of thoughtful and eloquent writing on faith and public life in the past several years.2 As you may know, I’m writing a book that deals with many of the questions at the heart of these books, including Meador’s latest. Specifically, I’m writing to acknowledge the challenges facing Christian political and cultural engagement in the years ahead, while also identifying opportunities for Christians in the midst of these challenges. Without giving too much away, I am ultimately more concerned about our posture in politics rather than specific policy outcomes — not because the world needs winsome Christians, but because we have a Savior whose posture was anathema to the established political order.
I am therefore thankful to be writing my book after having read What Are Christians For? Meador’s work is timely yet timeless, speaking to the concerns of our age while drawing on the wisdom of the past in speaking to a hopeful future. While Meador did not write a book exclusively about politics, politics is nevertheless directly implicated by his work. And that makes for a more interesting (and rewarding) book in the first place. Those of us tired of the rancor and divisions plaguing politics will not find tidy solutions here, but we will find a better way to think about our place as Christians in a fallen world deeply in need of redemption.
Meador is decidedly not holding his family up as an example of righteousness. But by drawing on a familiar and formative experience, he is able to better illustrate his argument.
See the aforementioned In Search of the Common Good; Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own; Jeff Bilbro’s Reading the Times; Kaitlyn Schiess’s The Liturgy of Politics; and Jonathan Leeman’s How the Nations Rage, to name just a handful.