Looking at My Heart: A Convergence of Politics and Faith

I have a moment to write some things God has been impressing upon my heart. Our world is amid much contention. There are many words and accusations being thrown around from one person to another. In the midst of this, I’ve sensed God speaking quite clearly to my soul. Below are my convictions… a summary of some of my thoughts and a compilation of a few articles or posts I have read from others who have reflected my musings better than I could reflect them.

In Luke 13, we read that someone comes to Jesus asking how many people will be saved. “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” Jesus answers by asking this person the more important question, “Man, or woman, are you saved?” That is relevant for us today. We are so concerned with what other people are doing or preaching. And we ask, “God, are you going to let them get away with that? Are you going to stop that? Are you going to rebuke them? Are they right?” But God often answers, “Check yourself. Don’t look at them. Look at yourself, and listen to Me. Do you know Me?”

That is what Jesus said to this person through his parable, that He didn’t know who the person was. The person persists, “Oh you must know me! You’ve preached on my street before!” And Jesus responds, “yeah, but we don’t have a relationship. People will come from the east and west and north and south to recline at my table. Many of the first will be last (i.e. those who think they know me because they follow all the rules they think I am so concerned with and keep themselves so white-washed and clean), and many of the last will be first (i.e. those who are dirty and wretched and know they are wretched. Those who have murdered and had to choose abortion and have used drugs just to get by…those who know they are weak …. Who know their limits and that they can’t make it in this world by being good enough…. And feel awful about it. Those people who are not proud; those people will be at my table). And then Jesus goes on to lament over Jerusalem, saying that He has longed to gather them like a hen gathers her chicks, but that they have killed the prophets and those sent to them. Amazing. They have rejected the very ones who came bringing the words of life because the ones bringing life came in dirty clothes… or because they came as a member of the wrong political party or church.

I recently posted an article from the Gospel Coalition to my Facebook entitled Our Idols are Exposed in Times of Crisis. In this article, Eugene Park challenges people to self-reflect, to look at themselves and their souls in the midst of this crisis, and to let this be just that…a crisis, but not of the world….but of a the soul. What have we loved that is not God? What do we serve that is not God? How have we failed entirely at our attempts to be so ‘godly?’ He does not necessarily pose these questions point blank, but these questions are what I find myself asking after reading his wisdom. I would encourage one toward the same reflection.

And in terms of politics and its integration with faith, I recognize that to be one remarkably delicate and complicated subject. Guy Wasko, pastor of Sanctuary Church in NYC, posted this on his Facebook recently. I asked his permission to share it with my family members because he gathers together a few pieces and writes well… there is no need for me to re-invent the wheel trying to state it better. So thank you Guy for allowing me to use your post to share with those who may read what I write… He quotes Benjamin David Grizzle, and writes, 

“Sad to read, but hard to disagree.” Then he goes on to post from the Atlantic, an article I found insightful and fair. 

I do not look to pin all our problems on one political party or one politician. Our issues are a complicated matrix. We are here because of a long serious of choices, mistakes, and decisions. But I also do not believe that we should not hold current leaders accountable to the high standards that their offices require simply because we think previous leaders were not held to those standards enough during their times in office. I believe we should live in the present and seek to do the right thing now while owning and learning from our mistakes in the past. I would encourage one to read this article from The Atlantic. Quotes below are from it.

“The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

“It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively.”

And lastly, here is an article from the Irish Times, written by Fintan O’Toole (once again, thanks to Guy that I found this). It states well some of the things I have tried to figure out how to put into words…

Some may claim I have gone so far left as to never return … I understand why you may think that. And I respect that my thoughts are much different from the Megin who grew up and lived in Augusta, Georgia. Honestly, I do not post this because I am trying to argue my point in order to be right. I post because these are my heart-felt convictions. I think these discussions are important. I think there is a lot of hurt in the world. I believe we often get caught up in the fact that we feel like no one has paid attention to our own hurt, and that prevents us from being able to listen to other people’s hurts. I have no doubt that every single person, every single side of the argument, comes with intense pain and having experienced injustice. I believe there needs to be repentance all around. But I can’t stand for a lack of humility that can’t address the reality of scores of people around the world. The time is now to put down our weapons and work together… the time is now for His Kingdom to come down to earth… perhaps we do that by repenting of our wrongs toward one another and trying to go forward, honoring each other’s pain and hurts, and striving to be better this time around… Woudn’t that be grace? If we had another chance to be better… to be the humans we were CREATED to be…to steward the earth well and walk in communion with Him? Wouldn’t that be amazing? We can’t get there if we don’t stop fighting. And we can’t stop fighting until we are ready to be humble. I’ll do my best to be humble. Will you join me?

Being a disciple is the call to come and die… to die to ourselves… our ways of thinking… our right to be right… to put all the pain of the injustice we’ve experienced… the deep wretched trenches of injustice on JESUS! Being a disciple takes radical commitment. “Unless I am willing to have my whole life first deconstructed and then reconstructed by Jesus, I will never be a disciple.” -Sinclair Ferguson, To Seek and To Save

Irish Times Article:

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

“THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.”