An impulse against maintaining a Christian cultural witness has caused that witness to become divided. In an open letter, Kansas Pastor Kyle Lammott called for Pastor and U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton to publicly “repent of what you have taught and to withdraw from the Senate race.” The letter comes as Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice urged pastors to “step up” their cultural witness. “The church has to be the conscience of the culture,” insisted Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “Without it, we’re going to continue to drift in the wrong direction.”

“My reasons come from Scripture … the foundation upon which I stand and the authority by which I speak,” reasoned Lammott, who pastors Exodus Church in Wichita, a congregation in the Doug Wilson-led Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). “A shepherd is not at liberty to keep silent while another shepherd leads the sheep somewhere Scripture forbids.”

In 2022, Hamilton taught his Church of the Resurrection, the nation’s largest United Methodist (UMC) congregation, that members of “other religions” would get to heaven through Jesus, even though they did not know Jesus.

To this claim, Lammott responded, “‘Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ’ (Rom. 10:17). A gospel that requires no preacher is not Paul’s gospel. To say that men may be saved by Christ apart from faith in Christ, apart from bowing the knee to His Lordship, apart from believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth, is to deny the gospel outright.”

In other sermons, Hamilton has taught that the Bible contained errors, including one sermon in which Lammott said, “Set Paul against Jesus, as though we were free to choose which of them to follow.”

“Jesus left us no such freedom,” Lammott responded. “‘He who hears you hears me’ (Luke 10:16). Peter placed Paul’s letters among ‘the other scriptures’ (2 Pet. 3:16). Everything we know of Jesus comes to us through His apostles. When a pastor teaches his people to separate the Jesus parts of the Bible from the Paul parts, he has handed them authority over the Word of God, and they will not return it.”

Hamilton also “announced to the press that the [UMC] Book of Discipline’s language calling homosexual practice incompatible with Christian teaching would be removed, and you celebrated when it was,” Lammott charged.

“This is no argument over one difficult verse. God gave us marriage as a picture of Christ and His bride, and Paul says so outright: ‘This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church’ (Eph. 5:32),” he responded. “I know you want people to hear that they are welcome and loved. So do I. But hear what Paul told the Corinthians: ‘And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God’ (1 Cor. 6:11). That is the welcome. Come and be washed. You have kept the welcome and dropped the washing, and the people it costs most are the very ones you mean to help.”

At this point, Lammott upped the ante. “I would ask you to repent of these things even if you were not running for office,” he said. “I am also asking you to withdraw from the Senate race” because “your campaign says you support safe and legal access to abortion, and you have come out against the amendment that would recognize equal rights from conception.”

“You describe this as a moral tension. I see no tension. Scripture counts ‘hands that shed innocent blood’ among the things the Lord hates (Prov. 6:17). David says God knit him together in his mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). When Mary carried the Lord into Elizabeth’s house, the unborn John leaped for joy (Luke 1:41-44). Our Lord spent nine months in a womb Himself,” Lammott argued. “What you call a tension is a break with the whole church, and a defense of the very thing for which Israel was condemned, the blood of her children (Ps. 106:37-38).”

Lammott still bore a burden of proof to distinguish the abortion issue from the other theological points he raised. In other words, when the other issues were cause for repentance, why was abortion grounds for withdrawal from a Senate race?

Lammott justified this distinction by turning to Paul’s discussion of government in Romans 13. “Paul calls the civil ruler ‘God’s servant for your good,’ the one who ‘does not bear the sword in vain’ (Rom. 13:4),” he wrote. “The sword is given to guard the innocent. You are asking for it while promising in advance to keep it sheathed over the unborn. You would take an office you have already said you will not use for the purpose God gave it.”

“The Senate is not neutral ground,” he reiterated. “Nor is your faith a private matter in this race. Most Kansans know your name because you are a pastor, and much of the trust they give you is trust in that calling. James says ‘We who teach shall be judged with greater strictness’ (Jas. 3:1), and it applies here. … If you will not keep faith with the Word you were ordained to preach, why should Kansas expect you to keep faith with her?”

“Elijah stood on Carmel and asked Israel, ‘How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him’ (1 Kings 18:21). That is my question to you,” Lammott concluded. “Pastor Hamilton, I know what this would cost you. Repentance always costs something, and it costs more the more people are watching. But the promise holds for pastors as for anyone else: ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:9).”

By Tuesday, Lammott’s open letter to Hamilton had surpassed 700 signatures.

While not speaking specifically to the Kansas letter, Pastor Rice also emphasized the significant theological issues at play in abortion, marriage, gender identity, and immigration. “These issues are deeply, profoundly theological issues,” he argued. “They go back to the creation; they go back to Genesis 1 and 2. They go back to our understanding of what it means to be a human being, and our understanding of what God's creative purpose is for us as human beings.”

“Our churches must be speaking to them, or people are going to be getting very flawed and very unsound information,” Rice reasoned on “Washington Watch.” He appealed to American history, noting that “any cursory study of American revolutionary period” would recognize how “pastors were called a ‘black-robed regiment’” for preaching against injustice. “You think of the civil rights movement, you think of the movement of abolition. Pastors and Christians have been a voice at critical moments because, as you already said, so many of the cultural and political issues that we face are inherently theological and moral.”

“Those on the theological and political Left did not [withdraw from politics], and they had no intention of doing so,” Rice argued. “In fact, statistics show that people on the political and theological Left are actually more politically engaged than those on the Right.”

Unfortunately, “There’s been a concerted effort to mute the voice of evangelical leaders,” Rice lamented. “It’s come from outside, because there are always people saying, ‘You shouldn’t be allowed to bring religious viewpoints into politics.’ … But that emphasis also has come from within evangelical ranks, as leaders have said … that we could be more effective, more gospel-oriented in our mission and in our message if we just didn’t talk about those things. But that is not accurate, and it hasn’t worked.”

“When you look back at the last 20 years or so … some of the most prominent evangelical leaders were really de-emphasizing engaging in these cultural/political issues,” he continued. “The effect was twofold. One, it silenced our voice at the very time our culture needed our voice. But it also — and maybe even more troubling — it silenced our voice of instruction and discipleship to our own people to help them think about these issues biblically and constructively.”

“What happens if the pulpit is silent on these issues?” asked Perkins. “Where do those people in the pew get their cue?”

“They get it from social media,” answered Rice. “There’s some good information there. There’s a whole lot of bad information out there. But mostly, they’re not getting the discipleship and instruction they need from their local church leaders, who teach us to think about these important issues like marriage, like gender, like human sexuality, like the meaning of human life itself.”

For Rice, such cultural engagement does not mean abandoning the gospel. Rice recently articulated “Seven Pillars of Renewal,” which included “Convictional Clarity, Denominational Accountability, Missional Integrity, Cultural Responsibility, Biblical Unity, Global Intentionality, and Spiritual Vitality.” These called for fidelity to Scripture, missions, holiness, and other spiritual focal points. Only Cultural Responsibility called for political engagement, stating, “the church is called to speak truth courageously into the moral and cultural issues of every generation.”

“Certainly the church should never become the arm of a political party,” Perkins stipulated. “But there is a problem with the idea that pastors can simply avoid political issues. Many of the most consequential public policy debates are rooted in moral questions.”