The Descent…

I have always considered politics a mirror of our culture.  Right now, if we are completely honest, the image is not pretty.  The image is one primarily of distaste, discord and hatred.  Our politics seeks not to build, but to oppose.  We don’t hear much about lofty goals anymore – we only hear about “Candidate X must be stopped.”  Sure Candidate X may need to be stopped because he or she is perceived to be opposed to some lofty goal, but somehow the lofty goal gets rapidly lost in the conversation, leaving only opposition.  And with the lofty goal lost that opposition quickly turns to something much worse.

We are in a cycle of ugly.  The current and ugliest cycle started with the unconscionable haughtiness of Barack Obama.  His demeanor and approach made plain that he did not view those that disagreed with him as anything other than beneath him.  He was disrespectful and dismissive of any that did not toe the Obama line.   He brought The Chicago Way to national politics.  Debate was not the solution – destruction of the opposition was.

Needless to say, a lot of people did not like such disrespect and disdain flowing from the White House.  Enter  Donald Trump – to the good and to the bad.  Trump the counterpuncher was unwilling to take the bile that came from Obama and levered his counterpunching to a political artform.  But he brought a great deal of baggage with him.  His governance has been on the whole good, even if he has done little to quell the increasingly unreasonable fervor of our political climate.  Moreover, his quite checkered personal history, even if he seems a reformed man in recent times, appears to have opened the door to all sorts of unsavory characters entering the political fray.

And so lately we have had to deal with a non-functional president and are now confronted with a ticket full of the creepy, the hateful and the weird.  Graham Platner currently stands at the front of the parade of unsavory people seeking office, but he is far from the only one.  Opposition has turned to hatred and hatred has come to justify making the clearly unacceptable acceptable.  Somewhere in this narrative we have lost the guardrails that kept things on the road.

Which brings me to this Substack post:

The Reformers understood something about the human heart that our age has worked hard to forget. John Calvin described it as a perpetual factory of idols, a forge that never cools, always at work turning good things into gods. The prophet put it more bluntly. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). An idol is rarely an ugly thing. It is usually a good thing asked to do what only God can do…

That is a stunning quote – and remarkably insightful.  God was the guardrails on our politics and we have instead turned politics into god.

Which brings me to this post by Mark Tooley.  In it Tooley describes the descent of Mainline Protestantism – tracing all the way back to the early part of the 20th century – from believing in a powerful and active God to being the bearers of a weak mythology.  And thus the institutions designed to maintain the guardrails instead destroyed them.

Our political descent mirrors our religious descent.  If we are to once again ascend, it will also be as a reflection.  And so God issues His call to the Church.  Will we answer or just keep walking down the stairs?

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