In this episode, I take on something that's quietly reshaping churches across the country: political division in the pew. I look at why political identity has fused with religious identity for so many believers, what the research reveals about pastors losing credibility and leaving ministry over this exact issue, and what real church splits are costing congregations right now. Then I turn to Scripture, walking through Ephesians 4:3 and Paul's call to "make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit," to show that unity in Christ was never meant to require agreement on every political question.

If you've ever sat next to someone in church and realized you have no idea who they voted for, and felt afraid to find out, this episode is for you. I want to help you hold real convictions without turning a brother or sister into an opponent.

Interesting Links:

• Religion Unplugged. (2025, January 8). In a divided America, churches find a way to move forward.
• PRRI. (2025). Religious change in America.
• NPR. (2025, February 4). A church ousts progressive pastor who emphasized racial justice.
• Moore, R. (2023). Losing our religion: An altar call for evangelical America. Sentinel.
• Lifeway Research. (2025, July 25). Americans' trust in the church rebounds slightly.
• Lifeway Research. (2025, August 12). Former pastors share reasons behind their ministry exit.
• Christianity Today. (2025, February). Founding congregation to exit Christian Reformed Church.
• Christianity Today. (2025, January). It's time for a new era of Christian civility.
• Carson, D. A. (2012). The intolerance of tolerance. Eerdmans.
• Barna Group. (2025). The tricky mix of politics & pastoring.
• Axios. (2026, May 10). America's pastor pipeline is collapsing.

References to Bible Verses:

Exodus 20:3; Philippians 3:20; 1 Corinthians 1:12–13; Galatians 5:15; John 17:21; Ephesians 4:3; Colossians 2:19; Ephesians 2:14–15; Revelation 7:9; Romans 14:1; Philippians 2:3–4; James 1:19; Ephesians 4:29

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Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jason McConnell. So here's a question worth sitting for for a second. Have you ever sat next to someone in church service, right next to someone you've known for years, and realized you have no idea who they voted for, and you're almost afraid to find out?

That fear is not an accident. It is a symptom of something that's quietly reshaping churches all over this country. Political division has moved from the dinner table into the pew, and it's costing congregations more than awkward conversations. Pastors are losing credibility over it. Churches are splitting because of it.

Some pastors are leaving ministry altogether because they don't know how to lead through it anymore. And today we're gonna talk honestly about why this is happening, what Scripture actually says about unity in the middle of real disagreement, and what it looks like to hold strong convictions without turning a brother or sister in Christ into an opponent.

This one matters because the health of your local church might depend on how you personally handle this topic

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Let's start with where this comes from, because I don't think most of us set out to make politics central to our faith. It, it happened gradually. Over the last decade or so, political identity in America has fused with religious identity in a way that's historically unusual.

For a lot of believers, political engagement stopped being one part of a Christian life among many and started to become functionally a test of whether someone's faith is legitimate at all. So Christianity Today ran a piece last year calling for what they termed a new era of Christian civility, and their point was kind of simple.

As believers increasingly treat political engagement as central to discipleship itself, living peacefully alongside fellow Christians who vote differently gets harder and harder every year. That's not a liberal problem or a conservative problem. It is a human problem, and it's showing up on every side of the aisle inside the church.

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And here's where some of what the research is telling us. Barna Group found that one in three pastors, so thirty-three percent, say political division has actively hurt their credibility with their own congregation. Only one in five pastors feel equipped to lead well on politics and civic engagement, and forty-five percent say that it's an area of ministry they feel least prepared for.

Think about that. Nearly half the pastors in America are standing up front every week, and they know one of the biggest pressure points in the room is the one they don't feel ready to handle. PRRI's two thousand five Census America Religion adds another layer. Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants now qualify as either adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism, meaning political and religious identity have become deeply intertwined for a large share of American evangelicals.

And through all of this, weekly worship attendance has slid from about forty-two percent two decades ago to closer to thirty-three percent today, with smaller congregations increasingly struggling to stay open. Now, none of this means that the church is doomed. It means we're at a moment where the question Jesus prayed about, that his followers would be one so that the world would believe, is under real pressure.

So let's dig into what's actually happening, what Scripture says about it, and where the way forward might be.

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Let's start with the root of this, because division rarely begins with the argument itself. It begins earlier, with what we've quietly deemed ultimate. Civic engagement is good. Caring about justice, about how our neighbors are treated, about the direction of our country, all of those things are good.

Scripture never tells us to disengage from the world around us. But there is a line between caring about something and worshiping it, and a lot of people seem to have drifted across that line without even noticing it. The first commandment God gave Israel was pretty blunt: "You shall have no other god before me."

It's in Exodus twenty verse three. That command wasn't just about golden idols on a hillside. It was about anything, including a good thing that gets promoted to the seat only God is allowed to sit in. Now, pastor and author Tim Keller describes idolatry this way in his book Counterfeit Gods: "It's not usually a bad thing that becomes idols.

It's good things turned into ultimate things." A political party, a candidate, a national identity, none of these are inherently evil, really. But when any of them becomes the thing that determines whether you trust someone, whether you sit with them, whether you consider them a real Christian, it has quietly become an idol.

Paul reminds us, reminds the Philippian church, living under Roman occupation with all its political pressures, "Our citizenship is in heaven," Philippians three verse twenty. That's not a call to disengage from earthly citizenship. It is a reminder that our primary identity actually sits in heaven and somewhere else.

When two believers can look at each other across a political divide and s- still recognize a fellow citizen of heaven first, that's a sign the ordering is all right. When political affiliation becomes the first filter before brother or sister, something has shifted underneath the surface, and it's worth naming honestly.

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When this idolatry goes unaddressed, it doesn't stay quiet. It shows up in real painful ways, and the last couple of years, last few years have gone-- given us no shortage of examples. Paul had to address this exact dynamic in the Corinthian church, where believers had split into factions around their favorite leaders.

1 Corinthians 1:12-13 tells us, "One of you says, 'I follow Paul,' another, 'I follow Apollos,' another, 'I follow Cephas,' still another, 'I follow Christ.' Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?" Okay, now swap out the names for modern pol- political labels or politicians, and the rebuke lands just as hard today Now here's a real example.

In early twenty twenty five, Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina ousted its pastor after he delivered a sermon following the twenty twenty four election. Weekly attendance at the church had alr- had already fallen from about three hundred and fifty to about one hundred and fifty amid the conflict.

Now that's not an abstract statistic. That's half a congregation walking away from a community they once called home over politics. Around the same time, First Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, one of the oldest congregations in its denomination and one of the original four churches founded by Dutch immigrants back in eighteen fifty-seven, began preparing to leave the denomination entirely.

People on both sides of that split described real grief over it. A hundred and sixty-eight years of shared history fractured. Paul warns the Galatian church with language that feels a little too vivid for a church newsletter in Galatians five verse fifteen. "If you bite and devour each other, watch out, or you will be destroyed by each other."

That image of believers consuming one another, it's, it's not hyperbole anymore. It's documented patterns. And Jesus' prayer in John seventeen makes it pretty clear what's at stake beyond the congregation itself "That all of them may be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." That's John seventeen verse twenty-one-ish.

Now when it comes to the church, division isn't just an internal wound. It's a credibility problem for the gospel itself playing out in front of a watching world.

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So if division is this costly, what does the alternative actually look like? Now it's important to be clear here because unity does not mean agreement on every political question.

Paul writes to a church in Ephesus that was itself deeply divided, Jewish and Gentile believers with centuries of mutual re- suspicion between them, and he doesn't just tell them, "Pretend your differences don't exist." He tells them to work at unity on purpose. "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bonds of peace," Ephesians four verse three.

Now the Greek word behind "make every effort" comes from the root verb spadazo, and in it's-- and it's in the present tense, meaning ongoing continuous action. This isn't like a one-time decision you make and then move on from. It's a discipline you keep practicing week after week, especially with people you disagree with.

And that word bond, um, syndesmos, it's a term used elsewhere in the New Testament for the ligaments that hold the body together and connect it to its head. And that's in Colossians two nineteen if you wanna look that up. Peace in Paul's picture isn't a pleasant mood in the room. It's connective tissue holding the body from tearing apart at the joints.

This unity isn't a new idea invented to solve modern problems. It fulfills something Paul describes just one chapter earlier where Christ breaks down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile to create one new humanity, and that's in Ephesians two, verses fourteen and fifteen. And it points forward to the r- vision of Revelation of a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne, Revelation seven, verse nine.

Worshiping together, differences intact. Now from the earliest days of the church, this visible unity was treated as an essential part of the faith, not optional. The Nicene Creed named belief in one church as a core mark of authentic Christian faith, even in an era of fierce doctrinal disputes. L- traditions have long debated exactly how that unity should be expressed, but nobody seriously has ever argued it doesn't matter.

Paul also gives us the practical bridge in Romans, in Roman fourteen, verse one, "Accept the one whose faith is weak without quarreling over disputable matters." Political strategy in most cases falls into that category of disputable matters. Wisdom questions where sincere belief can land in different places.

It's worth noting that Religion Unplugged profiled congregations in twenty twenty-five that have managed to stay together across real political differences, not by avoiding the topics, but by prioritizing their shared identity in Christ above their political disagreements It is possible. It's just not automatic.

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So here's where I'm gonna try to get practical because none of this works if it stays theoretical. Paul gives believers in Philippi a posture, not just a doctrine. "In humility, value others above yourself, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others," Philippians 2:3-4.

And that's a hard verse to apply in a political argument because our instinct in disagreement is almost always to defend our own position first and listen second. James flips that order. "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry," James 1:19, one of my favorite verses.

Quick to listen, not quick to respond, not quick to correct, not quick to do anything else but to listen. Theologian D.A. Carson has written about the danger of confusing gospel priorities with secondary cultural battles, warning that when Christians treat every political disagreement as a hill to die on, they end up cheapening the actual hills worth dying on.

Not every political disagreement is a gospel is- issue. Many of them are not. This matters for people carrying the weight of leading churches, too. We talked earlier about how pastors feel d- inequipped to navigate this, and the cost is showing up in real numbers. Lifeway Research found that 18% of pastors who left ministry linked their departure to church conflict.

Ephesians 4:29 gives us a simple filter for our words in these moments, speech that builds others up. It says, "According to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." That's a good test to run before you post, before you comment, before you bring it up at a coffee hour.

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So here's a question that comes up on this topic in one form or another.

What should you actually do when the conflict is sitting right in front of you? Well, someone in your small group says something that makes your stomach turn, or your church starts to feel like it cares more about a candidate than gospel. Now, Scripture doesn't leave us without a process here, and the first step is almost always smaller and more direct than we want it to be.

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Now, there is a real difference between a church that has members who disagree politically and a church that has genuinely become too political. Watch for the shift from the pulpit treating policy positions as a settled matter of conscience. Uh, sermons that spend more time on a legislative agenda than on the gospel, or leadership quietly treating political affiliation as some sort of unspoken membership test.

Now, that, that's a drift worth naming before it hardens into some sort of a cultural norm. So when is it actually time to leave a church over this? Now, scripture does give warrant for stepping back, but it may be a little bit narrower than you think. Paul tells Titus, "Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time.

Russell Moore addresses this exact tension in his book Losing Our Religion, arguing that when a church has fused political identity with spiritual identity to the point that the gospel itself gets distorted, that's a different category than a congregation full of people who vote differently than you do.

Now, here's a simple way to check your own heart before you make that call. Ask whether this is genuinely a gospel or, or doctrinal issue, or whether it's a preference or policy issue you've elevated past its proper place. Ask whether you've actually taken the relational steps in Matthew chapter 18 before writing anyone off.

And ask whether you're leaving after prayer and counsel or in the heat of anger If it's the latter, that's usually a sign to slow down before you walk out the door.

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So here's what I would like you to walk away with today. Political division isn't destroying churches because Christians disagree about policy.

It's destroying churches because a lot of us have stopped treating each other like family while we disagree. Those are two very different problems, and only one of them is actually a gospel issue. Now, the core truth is this. Unity in Christ outranks political tribe, and Paul is clear that keeping it takes real, ongoing effort.

It's not going to happen by accident in a culture pulling this hard in the other direction. So here's one concrete thing I think you can do this week. Find someone in your church who you know sees politics differently than you do and have one conversation with them where your only job is to listen and understand, not win an argument.

You don't have to agree by the end of it. You just have to leave it still calling them a brother or a sister. Paul's words to the Ephesians are as needed now as they were then. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. And that's really the assignment.

Until next time, keep loving your neighbors, dive into God's Word daily, and may the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with His peace.

Take care, God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode.