Pray that our religious liberty in this great nation is preserved.

Like many readers of Forward in Christ, I live in the United States. I love this country. I've lived in Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, and Arizona. I've visited the other 46 states. But it doesn't really matter where I am in the United States. I only know I swell with pride and deep within my breast I thrill to see Old Glory paint the breeze.

I wonder whether my patriotism changes how the readers of Forward in Christ outside the United States respond to the things I write in these quarterly editorials. Do you view the Wisconsin Synod and its publications as being too, well, Wisconsiny? Too American? Too white, middle class? Too Republican?

Philip Jenkins, writing in The Lost History of Christianity about once-flourishing but now almost completely defunct Christian church bodies in the Middle East, comes to this conclusion: "Churches perished not through their own theological failures or contradictions, their own loss of faith, but through secular politics" (p. 28).

In other words, the Christians in nations like Syria, modern Iraq, and Armenia hitched their wagons to one particular political party or movement, and when that group began to lose its influence, so did those Christian church bodies. Without consideration of what those churches taught, people figured they were losers once their political capital was spent.

Jenkins believes he sees this trend throughout church history, not just in ancient times and not just in the Middle East: "For churches . . . failure often results from a lack of diversification, from attaching one's fortunes too closely to one particular set of circumstances, political or social. Churches might, for instance, try to secure their position by allying with a particular nation or political cause that is a gamble, and in the worst scenario, such a linkage could draw down the wrath of political rivals" (p. 243).

We certainly see this danger at a number of levels in our own circumstances. Political parties are developing sophisticated ways to identify people likely to vote for their candidates and tailoring their messages accordingly. It's not too tricky to identify social issues on which WELS members agree, because they involve clear moral principles of the Holy Scriptures. If a political party picks up on one or more of those issues and tailors its message or platform accordingly, must I then be a member of that party if I want to be a member of WELS?

Let us answer that question clearly: no. American political parties are broader than the social issues they embrace and discard as fits their civic positioning for that election cycle.