The counsel that the church should stay out of politics arrives dressed as humility. It sounds peaceable, modest, spiritual — a refusal to drag the gospel into the mud of partisan fights. History gives us a clean test of whether the posture is as innocent as it sounds, and the test does not go well for it.
Before the Civil War split the country, it split the church. The three Protestant denominations that dominated American life divided over slavery years ahead of the nation: the Methodists in 1844, the Baptists in 1845, the Presbyterians by 1858. Senators in both regions read the denominational ruptures as a death warrant for the Union, and they were right. The church held its civil war a decade before the country held its own.
Three positions emerged, sorting largely — though not entirely — along geographic lines. In the South, a theology that defended slavery. In the North, a range from cautious anti-slavery to radical abolition. And in the border states, a third way — a spiritualized neutrality that declared slavery a political question, and politics no business of the church. Each region held minority dissenters who broke from its dominant view, but by and large the lines fell South, North, and border. The historian April Holm, in A Kingdom Divided, makes the case that this neutral position, which presented itself as the most spiritual of the three, was the most political of them all. The border clergy were holding split congregations together — a few slaveholding families on one side, a few abolitionist sympathies on the other — and neutrality was the strategy that kept the building from coming apart.
Holm’s sharpest observation is that the border clergy came to treat the controversy over slavery, rather than slavery itself, as the gravest threat facing their churches. The argument had become the evil; the thing being argued about receded. Neutrality, she writes, acquired “a patina of virtue.” Moderate clergy convinced themselves they stood above the partisans on higher ground — and could not see that the freedom to call slavery a merely political matter was a privilege, one no slave possessed.
I want to be careful here, because the analogy can be abused. The three positions were not morally equal. The Southern church was not merely mistaken; it was grievously wrong, defending slavery not as a regrettable institution but as a positive biblical good. To notice the self-deception of the neutral party is not to make it the equal of the slaveholder, but to notice something more uncomfortable: of the three positions, the neutral one was the only error invisible to the people holding it. The slaveholder knew he had taken a side. The abolitionist knew it. The moderate believed he had escaped the choice, and that belief is what a respectable, peaceable, gospel-loving pastor finds most tempting.
Consider Matthew Simpson. A Methodist college president and editor, he spent years refusing to disclose even how he voted. “My most intimate friend has not heard me express an opinion, even as to my own vote,” he wrote in 1843. Then came the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and he could no longer hold his tongue; he published against it. The harshest attacks came not from the South but from his own moderate brethren. One warned that he would drag the whole Methodist church into “the whirlpool of politics.” Another urged him to drop the matter, since the debate could never make the church “one whit more spiritual.” Simpson’s verdict ran the other way: when the controversy turns on the great questions of human rights, “no tongue should be dumb, no press should be silent.”
I find Simpson’s path representative, and not at a safe distance. My own tradition has a long history of non-controversialists, men who would not be drawn — until some moment forced the recognition that a question was not merely political but moral, spiritual, a gospel matter, and that silence was no longer available. And like Simpson, when such men finally speak, the sharpest rebuke tends to come not from their opponents but from their own side, telling them to sit down and stop rocking the boat.
The neutral position has one more lesson to teach, and it is the grimmest. It did not hold. Neutrality proved not a stable place to stand but a slope. After the war, the border evangelicals who had tried to belong to neither side came to feel persecuted by the northern churches and drifted into affiliation with the southern ones — the churches that went on defending slavery after its abolition. The attempt to stand nowhere delivered them, in the end, to the worse side. A man who refuses to choose does not avoid the consequences of a choice; he only lets the current choose for him.
We are living through another realignment, and the three positions have reappeared. There is again a party that calls both sides over-politicized and claims the high ground by declining to engage. I do not trust that posture — partly because I came out of it. To call a genuine moral question merely political is already to have answered it: in favor of whatever now stands, and against whoever is being crushed beneath it. Neutrality is a position. It has only learned to wear the robes of the referee.