Are the culture wars a distraction to the American church? Do they pull us away from our real mission, which is to go and make disciples? Worse still, does our frontline participation in the culture wars make Jesus look bad to the rest of the society?

It’s certainly dangerous to mix politics with religion to the point that we put our spiritual trust in a political party, as if getting the right person elected could bring about social transformation and as if one party was actually the party of God.

And it’s very easy to get so exercised over the sins of the world that we spend more time denouncing sinners than trying to reach them. And sometimes we do get downright nasty and self-righteous, making Jesus look bad in the process.

But that doesn’t mean for a moment that we should pull out of the culture wars. It simply means we need to engage in them in the right spirit.

After all, Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world, nor does he call us to escape into the mountains and build an isolated community of saints. Instead, he calls us to go into the world and declare the good news of his death and resurrection and to call others to turn away from their selfishness and sin and false beliefs and turn to God.

So yes, it’s true that our great mission – called the Great Commission – is to go and make disciples.

The question is: How do disciples live?

Once we have become followers of Jesus, how does that impact the rest of our lives? What should our marriages and families look like? What values will we embrace? What kind of people ought we to be?

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in the workplace, in the school system, in the media, in the medical profession, or in sports or entertainment or any other field?

If there is rampant poverty around us, should we ignore it?

If there is social injustice around us, do we turn the other way?

If we are like William Carey (1761-1834), called the father of modern missions, and we move to India and encounter the practice of widow burning, where a widow would be burned alive in her husband’s funeral pyre, do we say, “That’s exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from these heathen,” or do we work to abolish it?

If we are like William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and we encounter the horrors of slavery and the slave trade throughout the British Empire, do we say, “This is far too big for me to tackle, so I’ll just share my faith and pray for change,” or do we pray, share our faith and seek to put an end to this wicked practice?

Both Carey and Wilberforce succeeded, with God’s help, because they saw preaching the gospel and doing good works as two sides of the same coin.

Why must it be either-or?

After all, if God cares about the needs of widows, orphans and the poor – and the whole Bible tells us he does, not to mention calls us to do something about it – then why wouldn’t he care about the needs of a baby in the womb or the needs of a child sold into human trafficking?

And if the prophets of the Old Testament constantly called for justice and morality, while in the New Testament, we are called to be a prophetic people, why should we abandon that call?

I personally believe Dr. Martin Luther King nailed it when he said, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

As to the charge that the American church puts a disproportionate emphasis on social issues, that is actually a myth, as Rob Schwarzwalder and Pat Fagan recently demonstrated. They called this myth “utter nonsense, to the point of absurdity.” (Sadly, President Obama recently perpetuated this myth.)

Schwarzwalder and Fagan point to a report from the Philanthropy Roundtable which indicated that, “In 2009, overseas relief and development supported by American churches exceeded $13 billion. … The $13 billion in religious overseas philanthropy also compares impressively to the $29 billion of official development aid handed out by the federal government in 2009.”

These numbers absolutely dwarf the amounts given by Christians to ministries like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

More importantly, pastors spend far more time emphasizing matters of practical living and spirituality than they do talking about social issues. Just ask yourself how many times you have heard your pastor talk about abortion or same-sex “marriage” compared to how many times you’ve simply heard him preach an edifying message from the Bible. Congregational giving would certainly reflect that emphasis as well.

All that being said, I cringe when I see fellow-believers take on such a heavily political spirit that the great divide is no longer between God and Satan but between Republicans and Democrats, and I grieve when we forget that our ultimate battle is spiritual and that our ultimate mission is, in fact, to be disciples and to make disciples.

But I am convinced that, as true disciples, we are called to impact culture as the proverbial salt of the earth and light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16).

So I wholeheartedly affirm the words of Yale law professor Stephen Carter, who said, “Indeed, radical transformation will demand a sacrifice. But a fundamental demand for sacrifice will not arise in politics. It will have to arise from the church, which is really the only contemporary, genuine source of resistance to the existing order.”

Let the church, then, be the church.