Here is a quick test for you:

1. Who is the best NBA player of all time: LeBron or Jordan?
2. Who makes a better burger: Five Guys or In N’ Out?
3. Which label best describes Barbie the movie: Underrated; Properly Rated; Overrated; Grossly Overrated
4. The most comfortable men’s sweatpants are made by: Champion; Nike; Vuori; Lululemon
5. Should you tell your young kids that their Christmas presents are from Santa: Yes or No?

Do you have your answers? Now check yourself to see if you got the correct answers:

1. Jordan (it’s getting closer but the GOAT is still the GOAT!)
2. In N’ Out (I mean, unless you like overpaying for messy, sloppy fare…)
3. Grossly Overrated (sorry, but it’s true – the plot is incomprehensible.)
4. Vuori (the five pairs in my wardrobe prove it.)
5. No (why would you set yourself up for your kids to discover you’ve lied to them all along?!)

OK, it’s obviously ludicrous to assert that my answers are universally correct and should set the standard for everyone else. But imagine if I didn’t stop there. Imagine if I insisted that if you didn’t share my exact answers, you’d fall into the category of wrong or impure such that if we disagree on any of the answers, you and I couldn’t live together, work together, commune together. You’d be required to unsubscribe from this newsletter, stop listening to The Good Faith podcast, and I’d have to refuse to sell you copies of my books.

Applied to sports, food, entertainment, or parenting, such a purity code would be laughable. And yet, this purity code is increasingly being applied to politics. Host a campus event with a political conservative as a speaker and you risk getting canceled by some liberals. Receive funding from political progressives and you risk being portrayed as “tainted” by some conservatives.

That the same code — which is patently ridiculous when applied to most other realms of life — could be upheld by some in our political realm should give us pause. If the immediate justification for this difference is, “Well, politics makes things different,” we ought to ask, “Why? Why should politics make things so different? Why can our understanding of purity accommodate differences in other realms but not in politics?!”

It’s a question I’ve been pondering because we have recently been attacked for our moral purity around The After Party curriculum. Our critics have taken issue with some of our funder-partners by calling them “left-wing” as if this somehow makes the curriculum itself tainted. Note that they are not critiquing the actual content of The After Party material (our curriculum advances a non-partisan approach to politics centered on Jesus, where we are calling for obedience to Jesus’ teaching on hope and humility) but rather than discuss the content itself, their attack zeroes in on the alleged impurity of our funding.

It is important to recognize just how extreme this political purity code is. The New Pluralists, the consortium of foundations that gave the initial support for The After Party, includes some funders that could be characterized as left-of-center. It also includes Stand Together, a foundation of the famously conservative Koch brothers. The New Pluralists also includes the Wal-Mart Foundation, a corporation that could hardly be termed “left-wing” and additional funding for The After Party comes from the Defending Democracy Together Fund, an initiative of pro-democracy Republicans (and former Republicans). But these extremist critics insist that any financial partnership with any progressive funder automatically makes the entire effort morally impure. In their mentality, one drop of progressive funding taints it all.

This extremist mentality reveals the idolatry of partisan identity. Whenever you hear that a particular identity demands a special purity code — one that would be implausible in other “normal” realms of life — consider it a warning that this identity has become an idol. In the ancient world, the worship of pagan idols was usually accompanied with especially severe demands for special handling and cleansing practices. Correspondingly, the Biblical vision of repentance from idolatry involved rejecting this purity mentality imposed by idols. For instance, Colossians 2:20-21 (NIV) declares:

Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’

Jesus — and his followers who “died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world” — practiced a vastly different code. Remember that Jesus, too, was attacked for crossing lines of political difference. He routinely ate with tax collectors, who were politically aligned with the Roman occupying regime. The Pharisees, who were politically opposed to the Romans, labeled Jesus’ association with their political enemies as a violation of their extremist purity code: to the Pharisees, Jesus was guilty of “eating with tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 9:11).

But not only was Jesus willing to let tax collectors pick up the check for his meals, he was open to having his ministry funded by them. We know that his ministry included a “common purse” (administered by Judas per John 13:29). Who were the big contributors to this “common purse?” If the original Jesus movement had to file 990s with the ancient equivalent of the IRS, we would probably see the names of many tax collectors. For example, Zaccheus is named as a major donor (Luke 19:8). Within his inner circle, it’s a safe bet to assume Matthew, the former tax collector, contributed much more than former fishermen like Peter.

Jesus refused to obey the Pharisee’s shouts of “Do not handle! Do not touch!” He recognized that they were making worldly political identities into an idol. Instead of bowing to their idolatrous purity code, he practiced God’s physician’s code. In response to the Pharisee’s critique “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners, he declared simply, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matt. 9:12)

This physician’s code defined what Jesus did throughout his ministry: touch those that need healing and partner with those that share in the healing agenda. The sickness of political enmity still afflicts our world today. The same physician’s code applies to those that follow Jesus today.

As I long-ago revealed to Tim Alberta in chapter 18 of his book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, secular funders are partnering with us because they desire our help to heal the political sickness of our day. No funder of ours has ever made even a suggestion about content and, if they did, we would refuse.

Political enmity and its accompanying purity code divides us from each other. Healing of that enmity will require us to reject such division. We must be willing to touch each other and bless each other across the partisan lines. For us at Redeeming Babel, our higher allegiance to Jesus will apply to our funding practices. For you, how will you apply your allegiance to Jesus this year? Will it shape which extended family member you are willing to invite to Thanksgiving dinner? Will it define how you relate to the neighbor bearing a yard sign of an opposite partisan color? Will it influence your conversations with others in your politically divided congregation?

Join us in following Jesus, the Great Physician, the One who associates with “the tax collectors and sinners” in order to bring healing to our divided world.

Glad to be with you in this work,

Curtis