Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo frames his partisanship as a kind of reluctant obedience: he is not choosing a team so much as following the sheer weight of biblical evidence. The move is clever because it shifts the argument away from today’s tired “faith vs. politics” cage match and into a numbers game that sounds almost irrefutable. “Over 2,000 verses” isn’t just a factoid; it’s a rhetorical battering ram, meant to dwarf culture-war proof texts with the sprawling, repetitive insistence of Scripture on poverty, justice, and material care.

The intent is pastoral and political at once. Campolo is giving permission to religious listeners - especially evangelicals trained to see Republicans as the default “values” party - to reconsider their voting identity without feeling like they’re betraying their faith. The subtext is a rebuke: if your Christianity is intensely organized around sexuality, abortion, or religious liberty, but hazy about hunger, wages, housing, and healthcare, you’ve outsourced biblical priorities to partisan habit.

Context matters. Campolo emerged as a prominent evangelical voice in the late 20th century, when the Moral Majority and the Christian Right fused conservative politics with a particular brand of Christian identity. His line functions as counter-programming from inside the tent: a reminder that the Bible’s moral imagination is aggressively economic and communal, not merely personal and punitive.

It also dodges a trap. He doesn’t claim Democrats are righteous; he claims Scripture is insistent. That distinction lets him critique the church’s political alignment while staying anchored in the language his audience treats as ultimate authority.