Jesus Christ - who spoke nary a word during his earthly ministry about the right to keep and bear arms, the need to protect American interests abroad, or the importance of a $500-per-child tax credit - explicitly commanded us to love our enemies. Sadly, in a volatile political climate dominated by talk radio, opinion polls, and bumper-sticker sloganeering, many American Christians need to be reminded of that basic truth.

While plenty of us hate the sins that are so rampant in our nation and look to the political arena as one forum in which to address them, too few of us love our fellow sinners in the self-sacrificial way demonstrated by our Lord. Some of us have even allowed self-interest and partisan ideology to supplant the authentic demands of the Gospel, with the result that many American churches have become polarized along political lines. But we - who have it on good authority that this Republic is not the kingdom come, and that even our political foes are beloved of God - should know better.

That, at its best, is the point of Cease Fire, the new book by evangelical author Tom Sine. Sine is troubled by the Christian voices he hears joining in the shrill rhetoric at the fringes of the current culture war, and he challenges both progressive and conservative Christians to instead forge a "third way" that eschews and transcends the false hyperbole of the left and the right. If we want to transform our culture according to God's will, he argues, "we don't begin by characterizing ourselves as victims or denigrating our foes as demons but rather by confessing our own sins and blessing those who oppose us."

Stated at that level of generality, Sine's thesis is unquestionably correct: the challenge and the promise of the Gospel cannot be reduced to political ideology. However, the remaining and difficult task for Christian members of a democratic polity is discerning how exactly we ought to act as salt and light in the public square. While Sine's heart may be in the right place, his book leaves much to be desired in its analysis of how Christians do and ought to behave in American political life.

Although Cease Fire also addresses and criticizes the rise of the "p.c. left," at heart it is the author's lament about how the religious right has "hijacked" American Evangelicalism. Sine makes some fair observations about how, for some American Christians, the hunger for mere political mobilization has outpaced serious theological reflection on political issues. But, by speaking monolithically of "the religious right" throughout his book, Sine unfairly censures the efforts of all Christian conservatives based on the excesses of certain fundamentalist strains of American evangelicalism.

For example, after having some easy fun with the dated predictions of certain fundamentalist end-times theorists (who anticipate the emergence of a single, worldwide government under the personal control of the Antichrist), Sine asserts that such a conspiratorial view of history lies at the heart of the worldview of the religious right. In his words, "the religious right has erected not only its entire critique of what is wrong but its agenda for setting things right on this apocalyptic scenario." The assertion is a reckless overstatement. Many evangelicals and conservative Catholics - whom Sine explicitly subsumes within his "religious right" category - possess an eschatological vision no more detailed than the expectation that Christ will come again; and even that hope does not dictate the particulars of their social and political efforts, which are, more probably, the products of less grandiose judgments of prudence and self-interest. Yet, having dismissed the "conspiratorial view of history," Sine goes on to pooh-pooh its supposed corollaries, such as the notion that there is, at present, an American cultural elite hostile to religious faith and family values. In short, Sine uses what may be warranted critiques of certain segments of American evangelicalism to dismiss, without analysis, more nuanced social questions with which his book does not wrestle.

The problems of Sine's broad-brush treatment are further compounded by the fact that he does not analyze the substance of any current political issues. What few political assertions he makes are conclusory. For example, he warns that the ascendancy of the religious right could lead to a reduction in both UN peacekeeping efforts and federal welfare spending. Without further analysis, however, those alarms tell us plenty about Sine's own political predispositions, but little about where Christian conservatives may have gone wrong. It is easy to state (as Sine does) that Christian political action should be rooted in more than the latest pronouncement by Ralph Reed. But that is a very different thing than demonstrating how Ralph Reed's latest pronouncement is unwise or un-Christian. Sine's own brief proposal for a "third way" of Christian political action amounts to little more than an abstract algorithm that calls for issue analysis, Scripture consultation, and public discussion.

Ironically, while Sine challenges Christians to transcend political and confessional boundaries in their social efforts, his analysis reveals an apparent unfamiliarity with the best contemporary Christian social theory from outside his own political and confessional circles. For example, given his repeated emphasis on the need for social thought based on biblical principles rather than partisan ideologies, one might expect to find a serious discussion of the author of Centesimus Annus and Evangelium Vitae, whose encyclicals have drawn praise from many disparate quarters. Yet John Paul II merits only a single, passing mention (as compared with, for example, progressive evangelical Tony Campolo, whom Sine mentions no fewer than twelve times).

These criticisms in no way impugn the temperamental and spiritual priorities for which Sine pleads in Cease Fire: Christian communion and community should run deeper than political divisions, Christian social action should be rooted in the Beatitudes, and Christians should engage all people (including political opponents) with love and respect. But beyond these generalities, Cease Fire offers little insight into the culture war currently raging in America.

[Originally published in the May 1996 edition of Crisis Magazine.]

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