The Illusion of Neutrality: Power, Politics, and the Three Estates

The pulpit is not a sterile, politics-free zone.

With American Christianity deeply divided and denomination membership in freefall, the IRS has quietly eased its long-standing ban on political speech from the pulpit. Predictably, some wish the government would leave the muzzle on for fear of bad behaviour: pastors morphing into campaign emcees, sanctuaries decked out with rally bunting, and sermons turned into stump speeches. However, such consternation reveals more about our modern American religious temperament than pastoral steadfastness or the duties that come with vocation.

Within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), a longstanding and deep quietist streak endures. It is a peculiar willingness to “lose down here,” as if cultural and political defeat were a mark of sanctity and the highest ideals of the Sermon on the Mount. Yet Christ calls His disciples to be “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” (Matt. 5:13–14, BibleHub)—a public vocation, not a hermitage. What passes for humility often conceals what Rev. Dr. Harold Ristau calls “a kind of sanctified indifference to our responsibilities in all three estates” (Ristau, 2023).

Political Piety & Self-Neutering

Claiming that politics has no role in the pulpit (or to be above politics) is itself highly political. It defends what could be called Jeffersonian Apartheid—a wall between Church and State that would have surprised Luther and the Reformers, and that the Founders themselves never imagined. As Ristau observes, “The public space has never been theologically or morally neutral.” (Ristau, 2023) When Christians equate neutrality with holiness, they adopt Enlightenment individualism as if it were a theology of sanctity—that myth of separation fuels Christian policies of retreat, defeat, and weakness.

We are not the church of Jefferson, but of Luther. True freedom, as Scripture teaches, is not blissful autonomy from divine authority but ordered participation within it—“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matt. 28:18, BibleHub)—anticipating the return of Christ Jesus to restore all things. Every refusal by Christians to speak into the public square concedes authority to someone else. The question is never whether the Church will be political, but whose politics she ultimately represents—those of Christ, or those of the world and the devil.

Pastor David Ramirez, in the Lutheran debate on Christian nationalism, puts it more plainly: “I’m not worried about my confirmation kids becoming obsessed with Christian nationalism as much as them going off to college and forsaking the faith for worldly reasons.” (Ramirez & Biermann, 2025) The danger, he explains, is not too much zeal but too little faith—mistaking civic retreat for Christian piety.

Power, Politics, and the Three Estates

According to the Lutheran tradition, God governs creation through three estates—the Church (ecclesia), the Family (oeconomia), and the State (politia)—each established by God and given different forms of authority for preserving life and serving others.

Each estate operates under God’s sovereignty; none is autonomous or absolute. When one usurps another—when the State redefines marriage, the Church substitutes ideology for the Gospel, or the Family abandons its moral vocation—power becomes disordered and politics collapses into a domination contest.

As Rev. Paul Williams explains in Church, Family & State, “The Two Kingdoms are not two self-contained silos, but both under God’s rule… Faithful Christians must preserve and even advance Christian culture in the public sphere.” (Williams, 2025) Politics is, therefore, always downstream from power—but all power is ultimately subordinate to Christ, even when it is exercised in unholy ways. The State, rightly ordered, remains “God’s servant to execute wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4, BibleHub). Its vocation, like that of the Family and the Church, does not enjoy sovereign immunity from Christ’s commands, and the church does not enjoy abdication from its duties to rein in the state.

Dr. John Stephenson echoes this in Aphorisms on Christendom in the Shadow of ‘Christian Nationalism’: “Entire nations passed into the blessed condition known as Christendom, whose governing institutions and culture were suffused with the ethos that flows from the sacral union of Bride and Bridegroom.” Christendom, rightly understood, is not theocracy but ordered life under divine vocation.

Likewise, parents and children together embody divine order: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1, BibleHub). When the Family abdicates this formative calling, it yields its children to catechesis by unscrupulous and immoral agents of the State.

The Politics of Accommodative Neutering

An imbalance in the estates—where divine order gives way to cultural pressures—does not remain abstract but plays out in real-time compromises that erode the Church’s voice and obligations. This dysregulated power is evident in recent ecclesiastical decisions, such as the Church of England’s October 3, 2025, appointment of Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dame

It is not the triumph of “gender justice” and Enlightenment progress but an act of theological capitulation, if not the detonating of doctrinal suicide vest for the CoE and all the UK. What is hailed as progress is merely regression to a pagan past that is a type of inverse martyrdom of St. Alban. It is a mirror of Stephenson’s lament that “abandonment of Christendom leads not to neutrality but to feverish embrace of the religion of Canaan.” (Stephenson, 2025)

Having forgotten that all power is derivative—received from above, not constructed from below—the CoE becomes a smudged mirror of the culture, losing its means, motive, and opportunity to bless that society with the bread of life.

“The aim of the conciliatory Christians has been to avoid conflicts with the liberal democrats and to adapt themselves to the existing system, which they thought sufficiently spacious and friendly to include Christianity together with other religions. The aim of the Christians who have capitulated is to be admitted to the liberal democratic club, and in order to do it, they are willing to accept any terms and concessions, convinced that remaining outside the club or being refused entrance would bring infamy on them.” Ryszard Legutko in The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Power is Always in Someone’s Hands

Some, like Scott Keith at 1517, argue that “the pulpit isn’t the place for endorsements.” (Keith, 2025) But this asserts a Hello Kitty mirage of the church: the pulpit afloat in a pastel pink apolitical void, a plastic princess castle mightier than Monte Casino. The pulpit is constantly being molded by one authority or another. As Dame Mullaly shows us, and Stephenson reminds us, “There is no neutral public space; all time and space is under the Kingship of Christ” (Stephenson, 2025) or it is under someone or something else’s dominion.

Indeed, when the Church refuses to call evil by its name or to identify public idols, she is not maintaining purity; she is renouncing her role. It is naïve to think that power ceases to exist when the preacher goes silent; it simply passes to others willing and able to wield it. The issue is not whether the pulpit should ever address politics, but how—always under the Lordship of Christ, not under the authority of or with the permission of the State.

The 1517 essay further assumes that the left-hand kingdom is morally self-regulating—a polite bureaucracy with the best interests of Christians in mind. But Luther’s Two Kingdoms never implied abdication. The Christian’s duty in the civil realm is not optional; it is his or her vocation. To refrain from political participation under the banner of “gospel purity” is to misread both kingdoms and to disorder the Three Estates.

God’s left-hand rule requires action. We are to shape law based on the justice that even the soil cries out for (Genesis 4:10, BibleHub). The left-hand kingdom does not run on a celestial autopilot, its magnetic north always defaulting to mercy over sacrifice (Matthew 9:13, BibleHub). To refuse to participate and remain silent on critical political issues is neither wise nor holy, it is dereliction. All we do in such situations is gift power to those who wield it without regard for Scripture or natural law.

In democratic societies, the State invokes lofty neutrality as the means of suppressing competition, especially from moral agents. The Church’s complicity in this illusion (preferring cultural respectability to godly obedience) betrays the faith it is called to defend. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29, BibleHub) remains the dividing line between fidelity and fear.

Within the Family, neutrality appears as the abdication of parental formation, essentially outsourcing conscience to institutions that are anything but neutral. As the Christian Nationalism Debate participants observed, this “hidden power” now catechizes Lutherans through cultural liturgies—corporate ethics policies, state schooling, and digital media—that define virtue and vice apart from Scripture. When the Church declines to contest those powers, it does not remain pure; it becomes compliant, complicit, and compromised.

Christ’s Lordship over Power and Politics

The LCMS stands at a crossroads: fearful of being mistaken for the political right, yet captive to the moral left. What passes for moderation is often mere indecision, or a reluctance to confess that the lordship of Christ is inherently public and covers everything. “Faith in God’s providence has never justified retreat from vocational obligations in the public sphere,” Williams warns (Williams, 2025).

If neutrality is an illusion, faithfulness begins by confessing Christ as Lord of all powers. His dominion is universal, and He is, therefore, the King of Kings. The Gospel does not create a private spiritual enclave but announces a public truth: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matt. 28:18, BibleHub).

The church wields no sword, yet she must command the conscience lest it become so calloused that it is impervious to the Word of God and the hearer’s heart is left harder than Pharaoh’s. Her most effective preaching comforts those blessed with true repentance and remorse for their sins, but it also exposes injustice and restrains tyranny and violence. She reminds the State that its power is not messianic; the Family that its calling is sacred, not sentimental; and herself that her mission is salvation, not popularity or appeasement.

That is politics rightly understood—the ordering of life under the authority of Christ, whose Word judges both Caesar and congregation alike: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21, BibleHub).

Downstream from Power, Upstream to Christ

Politics is always downstream from power—but all power flows from Christ. The Church’s task is not to capture the culture and statehouse for partisan ends but to reveal their actual King and to recover and insist of submission to Him. Her confession—“Jesus Christ is Lord”—remains the most radically peaceful and effective political act in history because it relativizes every earthly authority.

Until the Church recovers that confession in every estate—the pulpit, the home, and the public square—she will continue to mistake withdrawal for wisdom and passivity for faithfulness—precisely the errors that Williams, Ristau, Stephenson, and the Christian nationalism debate have laid bare within our own Synod.

☩TW☩

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Sources Cited

• A Defense of Christian Culture in the Post-Pandemic Era – Harold Ristau (Ad Crucem News)

• Aphorisms on Christendom in the Shadow of “Christian Nationalism” – John Stephenson (Ad Crucem News)

• The Three Estates Revisited – Paul R. Williams (Ad Crucem News)

• Church, Family & State in Contemporary Culture – Paul R. Williams (Ad Crucem News)

• Church, Family & State (Ad Crucem Books 2025, Amazon)

• The Lutheran Debate on Christian Nationalism – Ramirez & Biermann (Ad Crucem)

• The Parasitic Moral Hazard of Usury (Ad Crucem News)