Outside the Capitol at the Stop the Steal rally, you could see sandwich boards with “Jesus Saves” and homemade signs with Bible verses. And some protesters stormed the Capitol with Christian signs in tow. They raged in the name of Jesus, seeking to take their government back from predatory Washington elites.

Fleeing the mob to a secure location was a very different group of Christians. They included Greg Jacob, Vice President Mike Pence’s lawyer, who, once safely hidden from the mob, opened his Bible to the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. Daniel “refuses an order from the king that he cannot follow, and he does his duty—consistent with his oath to God,” Jacob told the Committee. It was how he viewed the actions of yet another Christian, Vice President Mike Pence, on Jan. 6, when the vice president certified the election despite threats on his life. The lions were coming for him.

Taken in its entirety, the scene was jarring: Christians outside the Capitol hunted Christians inside the Capitol. It was also a premonition of the division that would follow nationwide.

In the past, churches were divided over internal controversies about theology and ethics. Today, the division is working its way from the outside in.

We’ve had a front row seat as pastors at a politically diverse church. For decades, we managed to keep partisan drama at bay, but in 2016, everything changed. Seemingly overnight, partisans on both sides started demanding that we speak about hot political topics, and there was a new one every week.

On the Sunday after George Floyd’s murder, we received Facebook messages from church members on Team Blue warning us that they would leave the church if we didn’t mourn Floyd. We’d already planned to speak about the tragedy, so their messages changed nothing. But after the service, emails from Team Red poured in. They were deeply offended: Are you anti-police? Are you pro-BLM?

Neither side was particularly interested in what Jesus would have said. They wanted us to respond to an awful image—a Black man murdered callously by a police officer—in a way that parroted their political team’s talking points.

Things have only accelerated since then. Unfortunately, Christianity does not seem to vaccinate believers against the viral spread of political partisanship. On the contrary, according to Ryan Burge’s analysis of CES data, Christians are becoming more partisan; in 2012, 18 percent of white evangelicals self-identified as “very conservative.” Nine years later, the number was 33 percent.

The reason why Christians vehemently disagree about Jan. 6 is straightforward: We’re no different than the rest of America. Our politics are shaped less by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount than by the sermonizing of Tucker Carlson. Our ethics are shaped less by pages of scripture than the pages of The New York Times.

How did this happen to us?

The story began in earnest with a church growth movement in the ’80s known as “seeker sensitivity.” Seeker-sensitive churches sought to make church attractive and relevant to non-church people, or “seekers.” They revamped the music, spiced up the sermons, and created spectacular programming for kids.

It worked: Seekers came. Churches grew. But there was a cost. Attracting large crowds meant minimizing offense. Speaking about sensitive cultural issues erected roadblocks on a person’s journey toward conversion, so sermons focused on individualistic, therapeutic concerns: How to improve your marital communication, how to battle anxiety, how to parent like a pro. Jesus’s teachings on ethics, justice, economics, and sexuality were quietly escorted to a secure location.

The consequence of this inoffensive approach was unforeseen at the time but obvious in retrospect. Nature abhors a vacuum, as does the human mind. Because the church neglected to teach Christian ethics and a theology of the common good, the media happily filled the space.

At the same time partisanship accelerated nationwide, politics began to subsume all of American life. Christians who saw their faith as an individualized, private matter turned to secular pundits to guide their thinking on public issues. When it came to politics, cable news trumped sacred tradition. Many pledged allegiance to Team Red or Team Blue. They came to believe that their party’s values aligned with the kingdom of God. The great commission faded behind a bigger mission: get the right candidate elected.

And then, a new church growth strategy replaced the seeker-sensitive model: the proclamation of Jesus as a mascot for your political team. That’s how we got here.

On the Right, pastors like Bill Bolin, Sean Feucht, and Greg Locke draw tens of thousands of people to their churches by ranting against COVID vaccines and wokeness, and catechizing their followers with pro-MAGA talking points. They announce the Kingdom of the Demagogue, declaring that the progressive gates of hell shall not overcome Him.

On the Left, online movements like The Liturgists and The New Evangelicals create digital pseudo-churches proclaiming progressive orthodoxy. They worship a Jesus who was baptized into the waters of wokeness and resurrected into intersectional glory—despite being a first-century Jew.

In a strange horseshoe effect, both sides not only mirror one another but also carry forward the “grow at all costs” mentality of the seeker-sensitive movement. In the past, the price was an inoffensive, politically agnostic church. Today, the opposite is true.

We cannot continue down this path to destruction. The way forward is the reclamation of a theology for the common good. This must be done in a spirit of self-sacrificial love, taking the ethics of Jesus and the political vision of the Bible seriously.

This is not a repetition of the racially prejudiced moral majority or power-hungry religious right. It is a spiritually renewed body politic that pledges allegiance to Jesus and rejects the very lust for power that drove some Christians to storm Capitol. In its place, Christians must love our enemies, seek the welfare of our cities, speak the truth with courage, and make disciples in the image of Jesus, not the donkey or the elephant.

Patrick Miller and Keith Simon are pastors, hosts of the Truth Over Tribe podcast, and authors of Truth Over Tribe: Pledging Allegiance to the Lamb, Not the Donkey or the Elephant.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.