Is the Church a Mallet or a Mirror?

Introduction

Living in America means constantly navigating the relationship between Christianity and politics, between church¹ and society. Whether it’s prayer in schools, religious liberty laws, or debates about “Christian nationalism,” we’re surrounded by competing visions of how the church should relate to the world. In this post, I want to explore two fundamentally opposed ways of thinking about this relationship: seeing the church either as a “mallet” for reshaping society or as a “mirror” that helps the world understand itself as world. While the former view dominates much of contemporary American Christianity, I’ll argue that it fundamentally misunderstands both the church’s identity and its mission.

Church as Mallet²

The view that the church should shape culture is prevalent today and it is responsible for real governmental policy in the United States.

Real Life Examples

This view of the church sees God’s people on earth as a force for spreading so-called biblical values, even to people who are outside the church. Take for example the law that has just taken effect in 2025 in Louisiana that requires schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Or consider that Oklahoma now requires “the Bible be used in all classrooms.” According to Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction,

We’ve seen the radical leftists drive God out of schools, drive the Bible out of schools, and we have to make sure that our kids have an understanding of what made America great … We believe in American values. We believe that the better our students understand American history and American exceptionalism, the better off our state will be and the country will be. So, we are very proud to teach that to our students.

These policies reflect the church as the mallet, the shaper of culture from chaos and evil into something orderly and just. Shouldn’t we expect societal decline without pressure on culture from the church? After all, don’t most Christians believe that, without the Bible, there can be no foundation for justice or morality? The world is amoral and the church has the resources to instruct the world about how to be moral, how to be good. Actually, no.

Shaping the world to be more like the church

We think these this way of relating to the world is good for the world, but it is, on the contrary, theologically dilutive. We think the church can “rub off” on the world, but even that consideration proves that the world has already deposited its way of relating into us. Where does the church end and America begin in Walters’ quote above? From where does the idea that a society separate from the church can be positively influenced by “Christian” ideas and beliefs? Liberalism, even pluralism. But how else to describe the belief that a society benefits from some Bible here and a few Christian principles there, as if these are some of the many ingredients for a healthy society and democracy?

I’ll go one step further and say that the type of influence the Oklahoma and Louisiana policies are attempting to leverage is superstitious, and there is historical precedent. Forgive the following digression that is inevitable because it touches on my area of research.

Bible verses and superstition

A primary focus of my PhD was New Testament Textual Criticism. That means that I have spent a lot of time reading ancient Greek manuscripts of early Christian writings. But these writings were not only preserved in manuscripts. One category that doesn’t get nearly as much attention is what we often call “amulets.” One example of an amulet would be a strip of papyrus onto which someone has written a small scriptural passage.³ This would be folded up and worn on someone’s person. Why? One common reason was to ward off demons or curses. Whereas Jesus rebuffed the Devil with his memory and interpretation of scriptures, some people treated the written words as having talismanic power.

How different, really, is the Louisiana Ten Commandments policy from superstitious or magical beliefs about talismans? The problem, as the policy makers put it, is that God was removed from the classroom, which is why schools are churning out bad citizens.⁴ Ironically, laws passed by a country supposedly founded upon uniquely Christian principles prohibit state-sponsored religion. So, to get God back in school, we put the Ten Commandments in the classroom so that by osmosis, by proximity to scriptures, students will absorb biblical principles. And the proponents are very quick to point out that biblical principles are American principles.

I don’t trust the state, the world, American society, with communicating or in any way instructing itself about the church. Why would anyone? On the contrary, only from within the church community can theological and ethical instruction take place. Only from within the church can disciples be trained. But perhaps the problem is that the church incubates disciples and what we actually want are for the majority of people in our society to be good citizens rather than a marginal group to be good Christians.⁵

Church as Mirror

If it is a theological mistake to see the church’s relationship to the world as “mallet,” as an influencer and shaper of culture, then is it instead to be invisible? Withdrawn? Avoid, as much as possible, any contact with the world? Clearly not, otherwise, why did Jesus spend so much time talking about how his disciples should live and treat those both inside and outside the community? We are to love our neighbors, which clearly includes people from nations or communities currently at odds with whatever nation or community in which we find ourselves. We are also to love our enemies, which clearly includes people who are not in the church (and probably some who are!).

I am influenced by Stanley Hauerwas and do not apologize that this entire post is a reflection on several of his writings:⁶

Therefore the first social task of the church—the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus—is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as world. That world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it still is bounded by God’s goodness. For the church to be the church, therefore, is not anti world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.⁷

In might be helpful to know that, for Hauerwas, the distinction between “the world” and “the church” is not “a prior metaphysical definition,” but rather simply that “the world” is “all of that in creation that has taken the freedom not yet to believe.”⁸.

“Wait!” someone is probably saying, “Do you think the church should retreat from the world? Are we supposed to become Amish and fulfill the Great Commission simply by modeling a better version of community?” First, how much do you know about the Amish? Some people might be surprised at the opportunities the Amish have had for public witness and even political involvement. But more importantly, no, I reject that we can retreat from the world. The world is creation and God has promised to redeem it, so we ought not to abandon it.

Therefore calling for the church to be the church is not a formula for a withdrawal ethic; nor is it a self-righteous attempt to flee from the world’s problems; rather it is a call for the church to be a community which tries to develop the resources to stand within the world witnessing to the peaceable kingdom and thus rightly understanding the world. The gospel is a political gospel. Christians are engaged in politics, but it is a politics of the kingdom that reveals the insufficiency of all politics based on coercion and falsehood and finds the true source of power in servanthood rather than dominion.⁹

And how do we retreat from something we often carry with us everywhere we go?

The world in us refuses to affirm that this is God’s world and that, as loving Lord, God’s care for creation is greater than our illusion of control. The world is those aspects of our individual and social lives where we live untruthfully by continuing to rely on violence to bring order.¹⁰

Conclusion

I use the terms “mallet” versus “mirror” to help us understand current tensions in American Christianity. While the mallet approach seeks to shape society through legislation and cultural influence, it risks diluting the church’s distinct identity and mission. The mirror approach, on the other hand, calls the church to be itself—not to withdraw from the world, but to reflect what God’s creation (of which the world is part) is meant to be.

This doesn’t mean becoming politically disengaged or culturally irrelevant. Rather, it means engaging with the world in a way that maintains the church’s distinctive witness. When we try to force Christian principles onto society through state power, we’re not just misunderstanding the relationship between church and world—we’re misunderstanding what makes the church the church.

In the end, the church best serves the world not by trying to control it, but by being a living demonstration of what God intends for all of creation. That’s a challenge that requires much more of us than posting commandments on classroom walls—it requires us to be the church.