Taking On the Money Changers

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP is inherently about choosing sides. Yes, some might harbor a temptation to take the supposedly safer path of remaining “neutral,” but that's a delusion: Such alleged neutrality always favors the status quo. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, if good people don't choose sides, the “side” with power and wealth will always win. Or as Lutheran pastor Korla Masters puts it in this issue, “Jesus invites ... us to whole lives of asking ourselves which side we are on and whole lives of answering that our entire selves belong to the kingdom of heaven.”

All three feature articles in this issue — and in some ways, everything we publish, month after month — serve as reminders that genuine faith is active faith. Matthew Desmond says that he'd “love to see the churches actually take on the money changers in their own community.” Carmen Celestini argues that it's “critical” that “good religion” is leveraged in defense of democratic pluralism in the face of Christian nationalist threats. And Masters writes that Jesus “invites us to imagine ... all that we will love and risk and dare as we nurture the kingdom of heaven” — that is, to choose the side of Christ.