For many Americans, politics is a religion. Each election is an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. If their candidate wins, the millennium will be ushered in. If their candidate loses, it will be the end of civilization as we know it.
For a long time, this apocalyptic mindset was said to be the purview of the so-called "fundamentalists" and the "radical religious right." In recent days, however, this apocalypticism has shown itself not in the RRR, but rather in the so-called "liberal wing of the Democratic party." (The RRR was, of course, aligned with the GOP.) The anti-Bush antipathy which animates the left (and, truthfully, some of the RRR), is breath-taking. To listen to many Democratic politicos talk, you won't hear the time-honored advocacy of various social welfare programs, or, for that matter, anything that really smacks of a platform. All you get is something like, "Anything is better than Bush." Case in point: my wife was walking our daughter in her stroller in Andersonville the other day, and was accosted by a stranger who flat-out asked her, "Are you voting for Bush?" When my wife indicated that it was possible she might (she gave no definitive answer), she was harangued by the man as to how she should vote for Kerry. Why? Because of all the evil Bush had done. (A few minutes later the stranger accosted yet another person with the same question. This individual must have been of like mind, because the stranger pointed at my wife and indicated that she would be voting for Bush--which is not what she said. Both shook their heads in mystified sanctimony.)
This week, yesterday especially, I posted some less than substantive items poking fun at some of the political goings-on of our present day. It was great fun, I must tell you. Political operatives and their pundits and reporters make such easy targets.
But a warning Huw gave on one of my posts regarding separating church and state struck me again yesterday. Despite my fun, I was distracted by this sideshow circus that is the presidential election. I took my eye off the ball of my own faith struggle. I forgot the eternal.
I remain convinced that all Christian Americans should uphold their responsibilities as citizens, which entails being aware of the issues and candidates, and casting votes in each election. For some Christians, a greater involvement in activism will further their growth and ascetic struggle. For many it will not. The civic arena cannot be abandoned lest the responsibility we have for the welfare of our fellow citizens be shirked for myopic and narcissistic expressions of faith. But neither can Christians look to the civic life for any meaningful transformation of society. The evil that our society does is hard to undue. And we must work hard to redress these wrongs, even and especially in the face of utter futility. But we must also realize that the good we do accomplish is ever only a vote away from being undone.
Is this a pessimistic account of government and the ability of Christians to accomplish their civic ends? Yes. Unabashedly so. Everything human is fraught with sin and pride. Even and especially Christian activist causes. So, too, is the privatization of our faith which has led many Christians out of the public arena and thus reduced and diminished the Christian witness to our country in its times of great need. There is a certain pride involved, I think, in announcing that we have refrained from "forcing our faith on others."
If we as Christians really believe in the sovereignty of God, if we take seriously the passage in Scripture that indicates God raised Cyrus up specifically to accomplish his plan with Israel, then we Christians need not give in to the mindset that if Bush is not re-elected, or if he is, our nation is on the brink of hellish devolution. If the providence of God could somehow work it that a Hebrew girl could make it into a Persian king's harem, and just happened to be the girl the king fell in love with, and just happened to be a relative of a Jewish official, who himself also just happened to have connections to the court, and whose good deed just happened to get recorded in the king's registry, and on the night the king had insomnia his servant just happened to read from the very record of this Jewish man's deeds, and . . . well, you get the point. The myriad number of specific things that had to happen, all interlocked and interrelated, could only have happened by divine design. And who knows that someday, in some unobtrusive local election, a law will be passed that will just happened to be challenged, and therefore just happen to be appealed, and so on, until it reaches the Supreme Court. And in the meantime it will just have happened that a Democratic appointee to the bench, will just happen to side with the majority, and Roe v. Wade is seriously limited or overturned. Fantasy? Maybe. But at least we Christians have a basis for such hope. Everyone else must rely on chance.
This is why Christians must somehow strike a self-contradictory pose working as though their political efforts will somehow, by God's grace, accomplish his ends, and knowing that God is well capable of lifting up and toppling kings from their thrones. Even in a representative democracy such as our own. It all may one day rest on a hanging chad. And if it does, God will have frustrated the machinations of men, laughing them to scorn.
And this, dear readers, is my apology. Of sorts.
Posted by Clifton at July 16, 2004 08:22 AM | TrackBack