The 69th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod gathered in downtown Phoenix last week. Delegates worshiped, elected officers, considered resolutions, debated amendments, called questions, cast votes, and did all sorts of parliamentary things you’d expect at a convention.

I did not attend. I watched closely from afar. Very closely. And I stayed in close contact with various folks on the floor. Quite a few, in fact. So many, I spent most of last week doing things I absolutely despise: texting and private messaging.

That said, and regardless of anyone’s relationship with my denomination, I suppose what I want to say this morning crosses all denominational lines. Essentially, even as so many of the usual suspects did all they could to insist that the LCMS’s churchly proceedings were somehow above or insulated from the politics of the civil realm, I can promise you that the event was political from the moment the first delegate arrived.

I know right away that using the word “politics” makes some Christians, especially Lutherans, uncomfortable. Politics has become a word that people use when they want to end a conversation. A pastor—or even a pew-sitting Christian—addresses abortion, marriage, education, sexuality, religious liberty, crime, or whatever from the Christian perspective and someone complains that they’re “getting too political.” Even some Christians are quick to respond in this way. I heard pastors actually say that kind of stuff from the convention’s floor microphones.

It’s no wonder that after my online commentary concerning an amendment that would add Charlie Kirk’s name to a resolution—an amendment that was voted down—I received no small number of Lutherans telling me that the Church and politics must never mix. Like, at all. Some, just to stick the knife a little deeper into the apparent loss, expressed a sarcastic sadness that the Charlie Kirk amendment was only voted down by a slim margin rather than unanimously rejected by all. Others spoke out, saying that if the LCMS ever started speaking directly into the political sphere, they’d leave the fellowship.

Curiously, a handful of the objections came pre-wrapped in assurances that the speakers appreciated Charlie and even agreed with much of his politics. They simply did not want the Church to say his name.

For the record, all of these responses are typical of the “absolute separationist” personality. An absolute separationist believes the Church should remain entirely removed from political questions and public affairs, leaving such matters entirely to civil institutions. Of course, these folks tend to insulate their real reasoning with statements like, “A Church engaged in politics is in jeopardy of losing its actual mission.”

That certainly sounds virtuous—that is, until you actually try to live beneath absolute separationism’s maxim.

By definition, politics is the ordering of our common life in this world. It concerns authority, law, justice, public responsibility, institutions, and the decisions that determine how people exist in community together. If politics is entirely removed from the Church’s calculations (as absolute separationism hopes to achieve), then the Church makes a dangerous assumption about Christian life in a world whose hostility toward the Gospel is hardly theoretical. A Church operating beneath that assumption pretends that laws, institutions, and public decisions exert no pressure upon her mission or determine how openly she may carry it out.

And so, I return to what I said at the beginning, which was that the LCMS convention last week stood in politics’ shadow before anyone stepped to a microphone, whether the separationists are willing to admit it or not.

For starters, the convention met in the Phoenix Convention Center, a facility operated as part of the government of the City of Phoenix and supported by public tax dollars. In fact, I learned on Friday morning that the city maintains an actual convention-center department. It negotiates contracts and regulates the building’s usage. And beyond the facility itself, don’t forget everything else the local government provided. Police and emergency personnel stood ready. Roads, airports, public transportation, utilities, parking structures, and all kinds of civil mechanisms carried anyone and everyone associated with the event into and through to its conclusion.

All of this is political stuff, and it made the LCMS convention possible.

But what if different political winds were blowing and no Christians were present in the public square to represent the Church? What if all Christians suddenly embraced the absolute separationist ideology that the Church ought not mingle in politics or represent its concerns there? A local government could become overtly hostile to Christianity and refuse the rental contract. It could prohibit the Synod’s teaching about marriage or human sexuality. It could declare portions of God’s Word discriminatory. It could censor convention publications, arrest speakers, restrict travel, seize property, or surround the building with armed men.

“That’s ridiculous, Reverend,” you say. Tell that to Päivi Räsänen. Finland’s Supreme Court convicted her over the continued publication of a church pamphlet addressing marriage and sexual ethics. I just read last week how she’s prohibited from even visiting certain countries. Political hostility to Christian teaching is hardly a hypothetical exercise.

“But the Church can continue with or without a convention or a convention center.”

Yes, Christ has promised that much. And yet, the point is relatively simple. Good or bad, politics is, in truth, an “unavoidable” that determines a great many things. In a way, the LCMS acknowledged the unavoidable nature of politics when it adopted the resolution titled “To Condemn Political Violence and Encourage Participation in Public Life.”

So many wanted Charlie’s name erased from the resolution lest the LCMS dabble in politics. Even as I might have cried, I laughed instead. The title itself tells you everything you need to know. Its thrust is toward and into politics. It announces that politics has the potential for truly dreadful behavior. And while the LCMS initially embarrassed itself by voting down a relatively microscopic amendment to at least name the man who inspired the resolution—Charlie Kirk—still, whatever reasons the nays may have offered, their votes could not erase what the resolution itself admitted. They unwittingly acknowledged that evil politics—politics left unchecked against God’s established moral order—empowers the wicked. It creates widows. It creates orphans. It creates fearful communities.

Thankfully, Charlie Kirk understood that Christians cannot abandon the public square. He spent his life urging believers to speak, organize, vote, persuade, and refuse the lie that separationism leading to political silence is somehow a higher form of faithfulness to Christ. It isn’t. And a voting delegate who refuses to admit this, especially when it comes to what happened to Charlie, has already somehow missed the fact that the Fifth Commandment just walked into the room. Martyrdom or not, God forbids murder, including the assassination of people because of their political views. And yet, who enforces the restriction? The Church? The Church names the sin and forms the conscience. But the magistrate restrains the murderer and bears the sword. The same commandment lives in both spheres of Church and state.

The same is true of nearly every modern political question. Before any of them became political, they were already Christological. Life, marriage, authority, justice, truth, mercy—they all belong to Christ before any legislature, court, party, or candidate could take them up. Christ owns the whole world, and His people have no reason to surrender any part of it as though it were outside His authority or beyond the reach of Christian vocation.

I’ve said it a thousand times, and I’ll keep on saying it: Caesar doesn’t somehow take ownership of something just by placing it on a ballot or talking about it during a legislative session.

And one more quick thing.

Lutherans should know this better than anyone else because Lutherans already possess a theological vocabulary capable of handling it. We are inheritors of Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine, which, of course, he lifted straight from God’s Word. We own the church-and-state framework that even the Founding Fathers commended as the best extrapolation of the concept.

As Lutherans, we confess that God rules through two kingdoms. Through the right-hand kingdom, He establishes and ordains His Church to preach and teach the Gospel, forgive sins, gather His people, and create faith. Through the left-hand kingdom, God establishes and ordains earthly government to restrain evil, preserve order, punish wrongdoing, and protect earthly life. The distinction preserves the Gospel from coercion. It also prevents civil government from pretending it plays a role in saving souls.

But nowhere in this biblical distinction is Christianity removed from public life. Rather, the Bible, and therefore the Two Kingdoms doctrine, teaches that Christians live under both kingdoms at the same time. It also teaches that they often interact with one another, accommodating and upholding each other in certain ways, each helping the other maintain its divinely ordained purpose.

I already pointed out the convention itself was an example of how the left-hand kingdom touches the right-hand kingdom. In other words, the Church cannot avoid dealing in political things. But even with that example, I don’t just mean that she must deal in legal contracts and pay taxes for this or that. I don’t even mean she must occasionally push back when laws threaten life, redefine marriage, corrupt children, punish Christian confession, or reward wickedness. I mean she must already be active in holding the civil government to its ordination. She must already have a hand in shaping the entirety of the political landscape. She doesn’t do this to make the government a theocracy. We are not Dominionists. Ultimately, she does it to preserve a society that supports her purpose. She must be allowed to preach and teach the Gospel unhindered.

To do this, at a minimum, the Church must carry political things to her people. She must teach her people about the issues and how to engage faithfully with them in the civil realm.

For as much as the absolute separationists would hope, the two kingdoms are never completely sealed away from one another. And to believe otherwise—to pretend politics does not intersect with the Church or that it is someone else’s or another institution’s sole concern—is to miss the fact that politics has already entered the sanctuary, the home, the school, and the lives of God’s people. And a pastor’s silence relative to politics doesn’t safeguard the Christians in his care. It simply allows Christians to receive their teaching from another source. And trust me. The world has a truckload of catechists vying for the opportunity. The world is more than happy to teach Christians what they should believe about life, gender, morality, justice, freedom, and all kinds of other topics deemed too political by some.

Now, I’ve already gone on long enough. But before I finish, no, the Church must never become an auxiliary of a political party. I’m not arguing for that, and I don’t know any confessional Lutherans who are. Admittedly, too many in mainstream evangelicalism do drift wildly in that direction. But regardless of what you’ve heard about Charlie Kirk, I know for a fact that was not his argument. He did not believe that the Church should surrender her doctrine, worship, or mission to a political party. He simply urged Christians to bring their faith into public life, and then he demonstrated it.

I suppose I’m compelled to clarify this, not only because I knew Charlie, but because the warnings raised against naming him at my own denomination’s convention—that doing so might make the LCMS look as though it officially endorsed one party over another—were wildly misinformed opinions likely learned from very bad sources. In short, they pinned Charlie to a position he didn’t hold.

Actually, I guess maybe I’m not done yet. Forget about the Dominionists in mainstream evangelicalism for a second. I know plenty in the LCMS who go in the extreme opposite direction, treating political withdrawal as though it were the quintessential mark of confessional purity. Interestingly, some of the delegates who resisted naming him seemed to think they had insulated themselves from this criticism by first offering a testimonial. They appreciated Charlie Kirk. They agreed with much of his politics. Some even admired his courage. Then came the ecclesiastical disclaimer: his name still had no place in the Church’s mouth. It was the familiar rhetorical maneuver by which someone cites a favorable association as proof that the conduct now under examination cannot possibly mean what it plainly means.

Yes, the Church’s proclamation belongs to Christ alone. Her sacraments belong to Christ. Her hope rests in the resurrection of Christ. But you’ll never convince me that politics exists beyond the Church’s concern, especially when her members still live in cities, counties, states, and nations. Laws govern them. Their children attend schools shaped by elected boards. Their livelihoods are affected by public policy. Their church properties depend upon civil protections. Their unborn children live or die under political decisions. Their freedom to confess Christ publicly can expand or contract according to the people elected to office.

As I told someone very plainly yesterday on the phone, no, politics will never save the Church. But only a fool would believe that the Church’s absolute retreat from politics doesn’t somehow give the state the room to build the machinery by which the Church is persecuted.