Derek and Christopher have both been pondering the issue. Also relevant is this post on Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society from Fr. Chris.

I’ve wondered from time to time if part of the problem isn’t that the church has lost the idea of vocation. Instead of equipping lay people for ministry in the world (including, for those who are called to it, politics), we seem to have shifted to a model where the institutional church is seen as the primary locus of Christian political activity, as a kind of social service agency/political advocacy organization. By contrast, a more vocational model might focus more on spiritual and moral formation in the context of classic Christian practices like worship, prayer, Bible study, and works of mercy.

This isn’t to say that churches shouldn’t speak and act corporately on issues of social concern, but maybe they should be more selective about it. It’s too easy for the church to become identified with a partisan political agenda when it insists on speaking about every issue under the sun, especially ones where sorting out the right position depends on a lot of contentious judgments about matters of empirical fact. The church speaks most powerfully, it seems to me, when it can speak with moral clarity rooted in fundamental Christian principles.