Column Entry, “The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election and the Real Meaning of Jeremiah 29,” by Mark Steiner

Column Title: Faithful Witness: Speaking and Living Truth in Public Life

Column Entry: “The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election and the Real Meaning of Jeremiah 29”

By Mark Allan Steiner, PhD, Christopher Newport University

Column Description: It is all too often true that American Christians, just as the Apostle Paul warned against in Romans 12:2, are conformed to the pattern of this world in ways we don’t realize and are hard to see. In this column, a religious rhetoric scholar and aspiring theologian reflects on how we can avoid this kind of cultural conformity, and how we can speak and live in genuinely countercultural and God-honoring ways.

January 2025 | June-July 2024 | February 2024 | January 2024

January 2025

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election and the Real Meaning of Jeremiah 29

Hi, All. I haven’t done much writing on the faithful witness column as of late, but I have done a lot of thinking (indeed, anguishing) about the U.S. Presidential election and its aftermath, and about the tenor of political discourse in our country. What concerns and saddens me more than the division and vitriol that marks our contemporary political discourse, though, is how conservative evangelical Christians have behaved in their own political thinking and political speech, and how these behaviors are in many ways antithetical to the faithful witness perspective for which I have been advocating. This perspective has as much to do with matters of the heart—what we believe our purpose to be, what we desire, what we expect will be the results of our efforts—as it does with matters of rhetorical skill and nuance. As I have talked about the issue on social media (which I normally rarely do) and with friends, Jeremiah 29 keeps coming to my mind as a resource for thinking about how we as followers of Christ in this country can bring the right heart attitude to our political efforts.

I’ll be honest. I have a natural revulsion toward Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope”), not because of what it says, but rather how it has been made to say things that it doesn’t. The verse—completely stripped from its contexts and made to adorn social media pages, sentimental memorabilia, and other “spaces” in our conservative evangelical subculture—all too often is taken to mean that God is our “co-pilot” that authorizes and fulfills our own “plans.” It’s too easy to convince ourselves that our own plans are good and right, and then use verses like these to “baptize” them so that we think that our own plans are God’s.

I’ve said this before in print and in Sunday school classes I’ve taught: Just reading the ten verses preceding verse 11 in Jeremiah 29 quickly brings to mind the truth that the passage isn’t at all about triumphal blessing of our own plans. Instead, it is about suffering. It is about endurance and resilience in the face of persistent suffering and humiliation. It is about, even more fundamentally, a basic change in how we think about purpose and expectations for how we are to live in the cultural and political circumstances in which we find ourselves.

It’s easy, I think, for us to miss the depth of the pain, humiliation, and abandonment that the Jewish exiles in Babylon must have felt. Many of their friends undoubtedly died when the Babylonians conquered and ransacked the southern kingdom of Judah. They undoubtedly experienced brutality in their forced relocation to a land and a people that looked down upon them and hated them. They undoubtedly endured cultural and political oppression. Even more fundamentally, they undoubtedly felt deeply abandoned by their God, as the land of promise was fundamental to the covenant that God had made with them. If anyone was groaning for retribution and vindication, it was them.

So what does the prophet Jeremiah tell them? He tells them that they will not be meaningfully delivered from their circumstances for many, many years. He tells them to live out their lives in precisely the state of affairs from which they desperately want relief. He tells them to “seek the welfare”—the good, the flourishing—of the polity which is marginalizing and oppressing them. The level of self-denial and communal service must have been so disorienting and counterintuitive that the prophet warns the people not to listen to false prophets that are telling them something more comforting that they want to hear. Their divinely ordained task of faithful witness to the Babylonian “city” surely didn’t come naturally or easily to them.

I continue to be struck by how similar the situation in Jeremiah 29 is to the situation that the Church faces in early-twenty-first-century America. If it is indeed true that we are but aliens and strangers in this world, and that our true citizenship is in the heavenly Kingdom that is yet to be fully consummated, then our perspective on public and political life should be essentially the same as the perspective that Jeremiah exhorted the exiles to adopt. How can we accept the reality that the “city” we inhabit subscribes to values and cultural practices that are deeply hostile to the whole counsel of God? How can we accept that we are not to cynically withdraw from this “city,” nor are we to expect that it can and should be reordered to fit our comforts and our cultural sensibilities?

There is a faithful balance between these two extremes that both progressive evangelicals and conservative evangelicals in contemporary America have largely failed to achieve. The trap that progressive evangelicals seem to fall into is one of both impatience and self-righteousness. In their legitimate concerns to work for greater fairness and justice, it’s easy to get cynical about the lack of progress—a cynicism that is fueled by unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of the work they do. They too easily forget their limitations, and they tend to forget that their goal should be faithfulness much more than success.

Conservative American evangelicals all too easily fall into the same trap that progressives do. Beyond this, though, it seems to me that far too much political thinking and political activism that is done by conservative evangelicals implicitly involves a rejection of the “Jeremiah 29 situation” I’ve described above. It’s too easy to indulge the illusion that they aren’t really aliens and strangers at all, but rightful owners whose responsibility is to “take back” what is “theirs.” At a more basic level, I think what motivates this type of political activism is a deep-seated desire to pursue cultural status and esteem, to pursue comfort, and to avoid suffering. To the degree that this is true, then I think it’s fair to say that this type of political activism reflects much more a conformity to “the pattern of this world” (Romans 12:2) than it does to the broad counsel of the Bible.

So the questions I would ask American Christians of all political stripes are these: What are our expectations for what our lives should be like on this side of heaven? What purposes does God really have in mind for our time here? Are we thinking more about what we want (and then baptizing these desires with scriptural justification) than what God wants? Why are we doing cultural engagement and political activism the way we are, and what are the real desires we’re trying to satisfy? What are the motives and desires that God wants us to have, and what are some of the different means that He uses to change and refine our hearts? I really believe that engaging questions like these, and doing so with an honest and sober spirit of self-examination, is something that pondering the true meaning of Jeremiah 29 can very much help us with.