Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock

Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical mega churches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing and the church’s to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute voters guides that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called The Cross and the Sword in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a Christian nation and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the emerging church, which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word Jesus in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word Christian, and you certainly can’t say the word evangelical without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people. Because people think, Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about activist judges.”

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the hypocrisy and pettiness of Christians who focus on sexual issues like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school. “They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval, “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”