"Wayward Christian Soldiers"

I'm reading "Wayward Christian Soldiers: Free the Gospel from Political Capitivity", by Charles Marsh, a UVA professor of religious studies. While people (Christopher Hitchens, for example) are worried about what Christianity involvement in politics is doing to our politics, Marsh questions what Christian involvement in politics is doing to Christianity. Have we "turned God into an appendage of the American way of life?" Here's an excerpt:

"Evangelicals in the United States have tried so hard to become relevant that we have forgotten what it means to be peculiar. But what we need now is not more relevance or more connections; what we need is to experience the gospel again in its strangeness and mystery; to be reminded that the only reliable basis of Christian thinking and action is God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, and thus that only God is God...

Remember the first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"? A concrete application of the divine law to our time might well read: God does not need America in order to be God. "

There is a freedom in enjoying a God big enough that politics matters, but at the same time, there is a danger in making God too small--reducing God to some set of ideals that we hold (or hope to hold).