In October of 2000, when I was in the fifth grade, I walked into my Southern Baptist church, opened my bulletin, and found a voter guide. The guide was a simple chart, outlining the positions of both Al Gore and George W. Bush. Four years later, at the height of evangelical influence in presidential politics, I opened my bulletin to find the same chart, comparing George W. Bush to John Kerry. Later, I learned that those guides were not inserted on the whim of my pastor or congregational leadership. It was a handout distributed across the country as part of a campaign to get evangelical churchgoers to the polls. 

In the years that I’ve been a United Methodist, I can’t recall ever opening my bulletin to find such a guide. There’s a good reason for that. Mainline churches are, by and large, more diverse in our political opinions; our membership doesn’t fit neatly into a political category. Mainline pastors, as a group, tend to be a bit more progressive than their congregations, and so when they engage in political events, it’s seen as individual engagement rather than work on behalf of the parish. Meanwhile, clergy of more conservative denominations have distinct advantage: conservatives attend services more regularly and have greater acceptance of their pastor’s leadership. The alignment between evangelical pastors and their congregations means that when those clergy speak out, they are viewed as speaking on behalf of the parish.[1]

To put it bluntly, mainline congregations are not well-suited to being a force in the divisive landscape of national politics. Even when we make space for unity amidst disagreement, we inadvertently focus on the divisions of our national politics. The voter guides published by my Southern Baptist congregation largely reflected the values and political beliefs of the people sitting in the pews. It was an encouraging and effective reminder to go and vote. Publish a similar guide in any of the mainline congregations in which I’ve served, I suspect that you’ll see more infighting than meaningful dialogue. 

That does not mean that mainline congregations should abstain from engaging in politics. Rather, mainline congregations should try a new approach to joining in the political arenas: be local.

Being local in politics is an ever-increasing challenge. The digital age has brought about, for better or worse, a centralization of news stories. We don’t get our news from local papers—we get them from national news outlets. Politics, too, has become a form of entertainment. We tune into presidential debates because we want to be entertained, not because we expect information. In fact, research shows that the intellectual rigor of debates, including the amount of meaningful policy being discussed, has steadily dropped since 1992.[2] Our natural instinct is to point towards a national stage. As a result, our citizenry is largely uninformed about the issues facing our local communities. 

While we might not be  an effective voice in national political discussions, reorienting our congregations to our lived—and local—realities can be a gift of our mainline churches. The ways in which we grapple with racism, educational policy, our response to immigrants who are our neighbors, and how our neighbors make ends meet are not abstract concepts. They are the stories of people living next door and down the street, the people we sit next to on Sunday mornings in our pews. Yet, when we talk about these issues and the people experiencing them, we often talk about them as people whom we’ve never met. 

In his book, A Nazareth Manifesto, Sam Wells points out that Christians often like “being for” a cause. For instance, we lament the issue of homelessness while never engaging with the homeless citizens in our own communities. “Being for” deprives us of meaningful relationships that can shape us and shape others. In a contentious election where our attention is drawn to whatever controversy exists in the moment, our job should be to reorient one another from advocating for to knowing and telling the real stories of real people in our real communities. 

We are more likely to spend our time and energy fixing what is broken when we can see it shattered in front of us. When we see that children can’t read at grade level, when members of our community are laden with medical debt, when our neighbor risks losing his farm, or a young parent can’t earn a college degree because they don’t have access to reliable internet, our congregations and communities can find creative solutions that solve immediate problems. In turn, we begin teaching an ethic about the way that Christians should live into the social and ethical realities of the Kingdom of God. 

Engaging locally in this political season will mean some changes for many of us. Mostly, it means not responding to every cringeworthy item a candidate says. We might feel that it is our duty to respond and denounce the statements that offend our ethical sensibilities, but we should remember that when we do, we are feeding the over-nationalization of issues. In exchange, we are spending less and less time on those things that impact the people of the communities we serve. It also means spending more time focused on local issues that often neglect. It might mean showing up to the school board and city council meetings that get overlooked in our focus on national politics.

It’s cliché now, but it is nevertheless true that all politics is local. Mainline churches are not equipped for the heavy work of a national campaign. We are more than equipped to point to the communities around us and ask the people in our pews, “What would Jesus have us do?” Embodying the ethics of Jesus happens in our local communities. From the ground up, we can share the Kingdom of God.