I’m back.
I decided ten months ago to drop off the social network
grid. I stopped blogging and Facebooking. Cold turkey. I’d been blogging
regularly for six years (still tweet-resistant). But eventually I found
myself slipping into a narcissistic, subtle-but-creepy self-promotion. With
only myself to blame. Like Dr. Jeckyll sitting in Regent Park months after
trashing his darker-side drug, he congratulated himself for his good works and
compared himself to his neglectful and nasty neighbors. Then suddenly with a
wave of nausea, he was horrified to find himself slipping into the shape and
personality of Mr. Hyde. Who needs a drug when pride can do the job?
Yep, that’s me. I needed a digital cleanser. And so I’ve
been absent for a good while. I think I’m ready to return with hopefully a
better heart.
But I have to admit there was a secondary rationale from
which I wanted to protect myself.
As the presidential election cranked up, it gave me an
excuse to avoid reading comments and links that made me embarrassed to be a
Christian. And I didn’t want to jump into the fray. I’m old enough to have
lived through many presidents and election cycles…and here’s the most common
phrase I’ve heard from evangelical Christians and political groupies over all
those years (drumroll, please): “This is
the most important election in the history of our country.”
Really? I’m not sure how every
four years we can have “the most important election in the history of our
country”, but that’s what we’re frightened with. I’m totally into Christians
being involved in politics, and though I’m fairly Wesleyan in my theology (at
least this week…), it doesn’t negate the sovereignty of God. At some point when
we’re filling in the little oval or punching the chad in the booth, we have to
believe (without succumbing to spiritual nihilism) that God is bigger globally
than the party of our choice and is Himself nudging the world toward His
purposes. At some point when we’re praying for our country’s leaders and
decisions, we have to trust God has heard us and taken our petitions to heart.
Otherwise, what’s the use of praying?
Under an oppressive Roman government, in a pseudo-republic
where self-obsessed caesars operated dictatorially, the apostle Peter
emphatically wrote:
Submit yourselves for
the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king,
as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those
who do wrong and to commend those who do right… Show proper respect to
everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king. (1 Peter
2:13–14, 17).
Frankly, I don’t always see “proper respect” or
“honoring”—or even civil disagreement—happening with some evangelical
Christians when it comes to politics. Elections seem to bring out the dark
side: name-calling, blaming, rudeness, factions, disrespect, and really bad
theologizing. Have we bought into the idea that if we can get “our guy” holding
the reins of power, then we can legislate in our favor with a “power-over”
approach, while somehow sidestepping the subtly cancerous effects of power and
money?
In his classic book To
Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the
Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter describes how politicization has
trumped all approaches to change. Everything has become political.
He describes how each side uses a common story to forward
their agenda, rooted in the French word ressentiment.
Ressentiment encompasses more than
the anglicized word resentment; it includes envy, rage and revenge that informs
a political psychology.
Hunter writes:
“Ressentiment is
grounded in a narrative of injury or, at least, perceived injury; a strong
belief that one has been or is being wronged. The root of this is the sense of
entitlement a group holds. The entitlement may be to greater respect, greater
influence, or perhaps a better lot in life and it may draw from the past or the
present; it may be privilege once enjoyed or the belief that present virtue now
warrants it. In the end, these benefits have been withheld or taken away or
there is a perceived threat that they will be taken away by those now in
positions of power. . . Over time, the perceived injustice becomes central to
the person’s and the group’s identity. Understanding themselves to be
victimized is not a passive acknowledgement but a belief that can be
cultivated. Accounts of atrocity become a crucial subplot of the narrative,
evidence that reinforces the sense that they have been or will be wronged or
victimized. Cultivating the fear of further injury becomes a strategy for
generating action. It is often useful at such times to exaggerate or magnify
the threat. . . And so it is, then, that the injury—real or perceived—leads the
aggrieved to accuse, blame, vilify, and then seek revenge on those whom they
see as responsible. The adversary has to be shown for who they are, exposed for
their corruption, and put in their place.”
It’s funny. From the conservative evangelical position, entitlement is usually a word leveraged
against the other side. It’s a
weighty buzzword to blast people supposedly taking advantage of the system. But
we rarely think of ourselves—or our
side—as having a sense of entitlement. Perhaps it’s the classic “two-by-four in
your own eye” that Jesus warned us about.
But here’s a thought: when we feel our powerbase slipping,
though entitlement may be the last
word we apply to ourselves, what if it’s really what we secretly feel? Could
that be what is behind the “taking-back-our-country” language that emerges
during elections? Is it our fear of losing some sort of power we assume we
have? Is it a longing for what we feel we’re entitled to?
Kierkegaarde warned Christians of the marriage of Church and
state… and the dangers of blurring politics and faith, leading to a
watering-down of the gospel. Shocking his contemporaries, he wrote:
“What Christianity
needs is not the suffocating protection of the state; no, it needs fresh air,
it needs persecution, and it needs God’s protection. The state only works
disaster, it wards off persecution and thus is not the medium through which
God’s protection can be conducted. Above all, save Christianity from the state.
By its protection it smothers it to death.”
Okay, this has turned into a diatribe. All this to say: I’m
getting back online after an extended hiatus. I’m still mostly avoiding FB, but
I’ll check in periodically.
Gee, this could’ve been a lot shorter. But that’s what I
meant to say…
The LORD Almighty has sworn,
“Surely, as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will
stand.” (Isaiah 14:24)
