Yesterday was completely shocking. The conservative press and most Republicans truly believed Romney would win. Barone is right about one thing: the political cultures are tightly sealed, and never really touch. That in itself is bad for the nation.
There seems to be another Christian reaction to all this, mainly from evangelicals: that all this fussing is really idolatry, because isn't Jesus King anyway? It's a retreat. And the dirty little secret is that your hermeneutics do this to you. After all, where does the dissonance created by disunity go? There's a patch like on a spare tire on the ecclesiology as it is. To avoid the hard questions about dogma and the implications of an invisible "Church," there's a pretty high tolerance of theological agnosticism, beyond the barest creedal committments, and those are ad hoc.
If those are fideistically derived, moral absolutes in a pluralistic public square is definitely a bridge too far. People who aren't explicitly relativist are de facto, because they're just worn out. Theological convictions appear to arise from mere preference and tribal loyalty; why wouldn't public policy?
I know theologically conservative and politically liberal people by the bushel. I know a girl who supported Hillary in 2008, and at the risk of being rude, I thought, "That makes no sense." How people rationalize their faith in Christ with the systematic murder of human beings is a bit of a mystery, but then again, I can't convince Fred of my theology of grace; maybe I can't convince him about abortion, either. They sound like Rodney Kings of Christian political engagement: "Can't we all just get along?"
Challenging them on a point like this elicits a defensive reaction regarding some policy of the opposite party, as if imprudently dropping a bomb somewhere is morally equivalent to the deliberate killing of another human being. Or the subtle suggestion that Jesus cares just as much about marginal tax rates.
Which is not to say that I think God is a Republican, or that I have personal animus toward President Obama. Far from it. And that's really the point I came to talk about.
Did you watch Obama's victory speech? As theater, it was beautiful; it was moving. The emotive power of the words he used is still there, even if Obama standing there saying them is the proof that they've been emptied of their meaning. There's no way to be smug about that, because any normal person would want to join him in the goal, even if we're not sure what it is.
All that is to say, if we don't recover natural law, not to mention answer the urgent call to Christian unity, political engagement is liable to be seen as a matter of taste, just like our respective theologies.
I hated the fact that I wanted to see the president succeed, knowing he lives in a moral malaise that makes it impossible. We don't have a "common bond" if we cannot define the words that describe it, nor put forth the effort to create a shared one. And that should fill us with profound sadness, not anger.
There seems to be another Christian reaction to all this, mainly from evangelicals: that all this fussing is really idolatry, because isn't Jesus King anyway? It's a retreat. And the dirty little secret is that your hermeneutics do this to you. After all, where does the dissonance created by disunity go? There's a patch like on a spare tire on the ecclesiology as it is. To avoid the hard questions about dogma and the implications of an invisible "Church," there's a pretty high tolerance of theological agnosticism, beyond the barest creedal committments, and those are ad hoc.
If those are fideistically derived, moral absolutes in a pluralistic public square is definitely a bridge too far. People who aren't explicitly relativist are de facto, because they're just worn out. Theological convictions appear to arise from mere preference and tribal loyalty; why wouldn't public policy?
I know theologically conservative and politically liberal people by the bushel. I know a girl who supported Hillary in 2008, and at the risk of being rude, I thought, "That makes no sense." How people rationalize their faith in Christ with the systematic murder of human beings is a bit of a mystery, but then again, I can't convince Fred of my theology of grace; maybe I can't convince him about abortion, either. They sound like Rodney Kings of Christian political engagement: "Can't we all just get along?"
Challenging them on a point like this elicits a defensive reaction regarding some policy of the opposite party, as if imprudently dropping a bomb somewhere is morally equivalent to the deliberate killing of another human being. Or the subtle suggestion that Jesus cares just as much about marginal tax rates.
Which is not to say that I think God is a Republican, or that I have personal animus toward President Obama. Far from it. And that's really the point I came to talk about.
Did you watch Obama's victory speech? As theater, it was beautiful; it was moving. The emotive power of the words he used is still there, even if Obama standing there saying them is the proof that they've been emptied of their meaning. There's no way to be smug about that, because any normal person would want to join him in the goal, even if we're not sure what it is.
All that is to say, if we don't recover natural law, not to mention answer the urgent call to Christian unity, political engagement is liable to be seen as a matter of taste, just like our respective theologies.
I hated the fact that I wanted to see the president succeed, knowing he lives in a moral malaise that makes it impossible. We don't have a "common bond" if we cannot define the words that describe it, nor put forth the effort to create a shared one. And that should fill us with profound sadness, not anger.
Comments
I think "imprudent" is an awfully generous choice of words for something done just as systematically as abortion. Unnecessary wars and abortion are both great evils.