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I Am What I Am, But...

Especially with regard to political opinions, I am not especially known for speaking temperately. I'm not ashamed to call myself an ideologue, but I will steadfastly protest the notion that I am reflexively partisan, or noxiously so. To me, the only thing worse than a person who believes that his opponents have nothing interesting to say, is another type of person who lacks the energy and enthusiasm to debate and dialogue, and instead says, "Can't we all just get along?" Have I ever lost my cool in a discussion? Of course I have. But I come with the fundamental conviction that whoever I'm talking to is telling me the truth about what he believes, and I also believe that we share some common core of values or convictions that could form the basis of some agreement, even if we actualize that in very different ways. What frustrates people like me in politics is when a particular opinion or policy choice that differs from someone else's is used as a reason to dismiss me or others as backward, evil, uncaring, or otherwise inhuman. Read that sentence again. Everyone in the general nebula or sphere of my political opinions knows what I meant by that. I shouldn't have to prove my good intent to you in order to be heard. Not if our politics is a conversation, as we often claim it is. Even if it is undeniably true that this national "conversation" is tense and always involves the highest of stakes, we absolutely owe it to each other to listen and assume good faith. If you want the truth about it, I'm a conservative broadly speaking because I listened, and because I did not assume that my good intent determined the rightness of my policy choices. In fact, the only way that we escape the harsh light of reality--which in politics comprises not only intents but outcomes--is to assume bad faith on the part of those who oppose us.
Forgive me; this was not meant to be a political post. In fact, I still intend it to be about something else. Our government and its doings has such a pervasive influence on the daily lives of people that theology cannot responsibly be done without some reference to the civic life of the nation. Also, Christians of all stripes have been taught from time immemorial that they have a cultural mandate to reclaim the earth including this nation for the cause of Christ. Whether this means that the church, variously conceived, will wield some temporal power is unimportant. What is important to recognize is that a spiritual motivation, or at least the appearance of one, does not release one from the obligation to listen, bargain, and compromise, when necessary and appropriate. In the United States, however, we have a political apparatus that is so large and becoming so unresponsive to the needs of the people that listening on the part of the elected class is no longer even necessary. As citizens, we have become so fragmented in our daily lives, filled as they are with numerous distractions and amusements, that they begin to form ever more isolated subcultural systems. And our political life has become nothing more than an aspect of one of these subcultural systems. One could reasonably argue that our parties themselves have become isolated subcultural systems. Whether that is true or not is not germane to the problem: they are not interacting. We are not interacting. There is no sense that when the contest is over, something has been achieved which will benefit all people. We don't seem to care as a whole whether that benefit to the whole can be measured in an appreciable way. We respond to the minimal awareness that some frustration is being expressed by some group or another by asserting that they have some base motive that is obviously apparent to all "right-thinking people."
 We do not need civility in American political culture, or at least we do not need another unheeded call for it. Rather, we need to rebuild the foundations for our political discussion. We need to spend some time defining the common core of what binds us as a nation, and no longer take for granted that we know what it is. Only then can we move forward. But, quite frankly, we ought not move forward until we do have such a discussion.

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