So, I have a frustration, and I’m not going to make you wonder what it is: I don’t like “social statement” Christianity. Maybe once upon a time it had a purpose, but I think in a Post-Christian era that time has mostly passed on.

The inciting incident for this post is the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s recent vote to label Christian Nationalism as a “theological error.”¹ The statement itself is not something I have a problem with; I wrote last month about the dangers of Christian Nationalism in America. Yet I find myself wondering who this statement is for. All too often statements like these feel to me like they’re less about writing a wrong and more about positioning oneself in the culture war or to make one’s in-group feel good, and I am just exhausted with the culture war.

Social Statements and You

If you’ve not been around mainline Christianity very much, you may not know what I’m talking about when I say “social statements.” These are a product of the Christendom era—a time in which the various organizations of Christianity (what we’d now call denominations, but that term didn’t really apply for most of Christendom) had significant influence since all the people of a nation, from its highest ruler to its lowest peasant, were nominally Christian. If a church put out what amounts to a press release saying “This thing is good” or “That thing is bad”, people would (theoretically) listen.

This is how one denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, defines their social statements:

ELCA social statements are teaching and policy documents that provide broad frameworks to assist us in thinking about and discussing social issues in the context of faith and life. They are meant to help communities and individuals with moral formation, discernment and thoughtful engagement with current social issues as we participate in God’s work in the world. Social statements also set policy for the ELCA and guide its advocacy and work as a publicly engaged church.

From Understanding Lutheran Social Teachings

One of the more prominent sharers of something like social statements is the Roman Catholic church, though I don’t necessarily include them in my critique. Papal encyclicals² serve a bit of a different function. The strictly episcopal structure of the Roman Catholic church means that when the pope issues a letter like this, it is considered binding doctrine that is answering a theological question more than Protestant social statements tend to do.

Historically Contextualized

In their original contexts, these social statements were quite helpful. They are largely a product of the nineteenth century and were a popular step for Protestant denominations in the midst of the new “social gospel”³ movement. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a confluence of two important trends: there was a great deal of societal injustice, wealth inequality, and general human suffering and Christian churches still held a good deal of influence to affect change in that society. Christian denominations, riding their perceived success in effecting the abolition of slavery in the United States after the Civil War, turned their attention to other perceived societal ills, even culminating in what might be the American church’s most infamous success: the (temporary) prohibition of alcohol nationwide.

In their time, social statements might have been helpful. They made very clear what various denominations were about and what change they hoped to see in the world which reflected their understanding of what the reign of God looked like and how we bear witness to God’s reign. The aforementioned ELCA website lists social statements on Criminal Justice, Education, the Environment, Human Sexuality, and several more. But, in a late-modern era and a Post-Christian West, I’m not sure how much usefulness these social statements continue to have.

Relationships and Christianity

There are a few reasons for this in my mind, and I’ll cover what I think are the more minor ones first. The Post-Christianity of Western Europe and North America means the more liberal side of the church’s influence is waning if not mostly gone, so while social statements may still be of benefit to a denomination’s members, they feel quite performative to me and do little more than additional ammunition with which to fight the culture war.

Another problem is in the social gospel itself. The two world wars, especially, severely limited the optimism and progressivism (in the sense of ‘making societal progress’) on which the social gospel and social statements is based. There is simply less hope in the world for things to get better, especially as we continually see humanity seeming to want to go “backwards” to a era with less rights for marginalized and minoritized people.

But I think the biggest problem with social statements is they have shifted the focus so far away from individuals to society as a whole that any relational component has been lost. Christianity is all about relationship, after all—whether relationship to Jesus or to other humans. Social statements create so much abstraction in order to address society as a whole that the relationship component gets lost. Or to put it in another way, social statements are all about “for” when we should really be focused on “with”

Being For or Being With

Theologian Samuel Wells in his book A Nazareth Manifesto constructs a paradigm with two components: working/being and for/with. I’ll summarize them as follows:⁴

• Being for: I equate this to social media-style activism. It’s announcing that you agree with a topic or support some principle or another in theory but assuming someone else will do the actual work. It raises awareness of an issue, but does little else to effect meaningful results.
• Working for: I might call this “mission trip” activism.⁵ Someone with resources is using their resources to do work for another. At times this is what is necessary: if you hire a lawyer, for example, that lawyer is working for you. It is less helpful when trying to actually effect a change, because it often ignores the perceived needs and desires of the community you’re trying to help. (Hence why I call it “mission trip” activism.)
• Working with: This is similar to the model suggested by Saul Alinksy in his Rules for Radicals. It’s certainly better than being for or working for, but (according to Wells) it tends to continue to encourage a “savior” mentality. One group is still bringing from their resources to another, only now the second group has some say in the matter.
• Being with: This is the part of the paradigm in which relationship and hospitality are at the center. The primary goal is not to share resources or even to help, but to love and welcome another human being because of their worth as a human being. The beauty of being with is that it often includes the other categories in the paradigm, as the developing relationship will inevitable show places in which resources can be shared or awareness needs to be raised, but the core criteria is relationship. It’s about building relationships and paying attention first.

Being with is, if you haven’t already guessed, hard. It requires authenticity, openness in all parties to vulnerability, and a willingness to put aside a lot of one’s preconceived notions, especially on the part of the person with more resources. But, in Wells’s argument, it is the model which God the Son gives us in choosing to be with humanity in the Incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. Wells is inviting Christians to refocus on building relationships first rather potentially jumping into the work without really knowing the people one hopes to help.

The Christian and Society

Does this mean that I think we should throw out social statements altogether? Not necessarily—but they must be rooted in the relationships of being with. Otherwise, they’re just fighting the culture war or, worse, condescending to the very people they seek to help by assuming the church knows better what they need than they do. The focus should always be in building relationships with the people around us, especially the poor and the “least” of our world, bringing an openness to discomfort and vulnerability, to truly get to know and love the people whom we might seek to help.

I think that’s a more difficult path than just saying “I stand with xyz” or “abc” in a social statement (or on social media). It’s a path that requires a great deal of trust and authenticity, because often the folk on the other side of someone trying to be with them have been burned many times before by people appearing to do the same thing. From my perspective, this is where I trust the Holy Spirit to offer guidance on how to interact with the people who cross my path, because sometimes the first step in being with might, counterintuitively, be to know when to walk away. It’s only when everyone is ready to trust and be authentic and vulnerable that a relationship will begin. And that’s when we can start to be with one another.

1. John A. Bolt, “PC(USA) Labels White Christian Nationalism ‘Theological Error,’” Presbyterian Outlook, July 13, 2026, https://pres-outlook.org/2026/07/pcusa-labels-white-christian-nationalism-theological-error/. ↩︎
2. For a short description of what encyclicals are, see this Wikipedia article. ↩︎
3. The social gospel movement had five major themes, according to historian David J. Bosch:
   1. An emphasis on social progress.
   2. A focus on the “fatherhood” of God and the “brotherhood” of all people.
   3. The conviction that non-Christian religions are not inherently evil.
   4. Social involvement taking priority over evangelism.
   5. A shift away from focusing on individuals and onto society as a whole.
   David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, American Society of Missiology Series 16 (Orbis Books, 2011), 328–31. ↩︎
4. Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 109–16. ↩︎
5. By “mission trip activism,” I mean the tendency of especially American youth groups to go to places with the infrastructure in place for American teenagers to do “third world” tourism, often painting a recently painted building or doing other sorts of busy-work to gain the feeling of having done something for people in need when one really hadn’t. ↩︎