Pastors who never apply Scripture to hot-button issues will leave their flocks cripplingly vulnerable when politicians twist the Bible to their own ends.
We have the most influence on people when we are the least manipulative. Perhaps this is part of Jesus' meaning when he told his disciples to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. We believers need to make sure that the quality of our presentation maintains the same high integrity as the message we're trying to communicate.
We are seeing the inevitable results of cultural trends embraced in the 1960s and 70s that caused the “basic laws of social gravity [to lose] their pull."