As I have mentioned, I have greatly appreciated one specific thing about the turmoil and stress of these months, as divisive as the season has been, for the reason that it didn't give people a lazy choice (although some, not all, of the third party voters were definitely taking a moral shortcut). People had to actually rouse themselves up and rethink their positions, the dormant, deep-grooved tracks of decades of political thought were broken up and people began skidding around on the rapidly cooling obsidian surface of volcanic upheaval. Some of them fell and hurt themselves, others found their feet after years of lethargy and gained new inspiration.
The Church may never recover in some senses, and I believe it may be a very good thing. Those situations which cannot be sustained must end, and the untenable position the American Church had found itself in-- longing hopelessly that a culture formerly amenable to or at least respectful of scriptural truth could remain so and act like it long after this was no longer the case, and placing that hopeless hope in politicians to "take us back" when most of the country has no desire to do so--is collapsing like a deck of cards in the wake of Trump's election. There is no looking back to half-imagined glory days, Post-Trump. There is only looking ahead to what the Church can do in the future, and that is fertile ground for the Kingdom.
But over the course of the election itself, I watched carefully as friends and acquaintances revealed the ways their political and religious convictions intertwined, often without realizing how they'd gotten them all mixed together. Some were sincere Christians who had, through a process I described in that previous post, learned to look at the world in a secular humanist way, and remained oblivious to the underlying contradictions this produced with some of their other convictions.
But that way political and religious conviction tend to intertwine in one's worldview is something that really came out strongly during this election, and that's what I want to focus on today:
1. Convictions are Convictions
We are taught from an early age to think of our religious convictions as belonging in a separate, sacred category, distinct from secular beliefs we hold important, for example the superiority of capitalism to communism (or vice versa). Over the course of this election, however, I observed numerous people lamenting, or accusing, that this was in fact not the case at all, and people were idolizing politics, putting it in the place of religious conviction.
They were correct, of course, that people were doing this, but misguided in thinking it was only a few people or their opponents that were entangling their convictions in this way. Your convictions all give rise to and are derived from your complex worldview (in a self-sustaining cycle which can evolve over time, either concreting in place or migrating to very different views about the world over time, based on one's experiences and influences), are all held together, and there is no automatic sorting of most to least important going on, though there is a lot of unconscious sorting.
Jumbled all together are your sincere beliefs that Jesus is Lord, that the Green Bay Packers are the best football team, that good people don't dress like that, that smoking is a sin or merely an unhealthy habit, that we ought to love and be loyal to the nation we grew up in (or not), that men ought to treat women in a certain way, that The System is basically fair or basically rigged, and et cetera ad infinitum.
The idea that, as Christians, since we agree on the divine convictions, division with regards to the others is to some extent surface level and not bound up in our identity, sounds very positive and exhortative but doesn't reflect reality. Not because people are just that stubborn and refuse to honor God first, but because of how your convictions don't sort themselves out automatically.
It takes constant effort to raise some convictions to the top, and push others down, especially in the presence of outside influence. You may rationally know that "Jesus is Lord" is infinitely more important than "The Green Bay Packers are the best football team," but on certain big game Sundays you may feel quite conflicted. That doesn't mean you're a terrible person or a lousy Christian, it just means you've relied on the rational importance of a conviction to make it outweigh all the others, when actually the ads you've been seeing, the fond memories of game/buffalo wing nights past, the water cooler conversations, etc, have all slowly promoted that conviction and not others. As the Mark Twain quote at the beginning suggests, you may not really know how that conviction and others became your own, but absorbed them unconsciously from other people or outside influences.
Put simply, however, the way you know which convictions are really on top, is how excited you are about them. Granted, a well-disciplined person can force himself to follow his rational ordering of his convictions, e.g. dragging himself to church when he'd rather be at the football game (but not admitting that to himself, since it feels like a sinful sort of cognitive dissonance). A less well-disciplined person will simply go to the football game and perhaps feel some guilt mixed in with the fun, but probably not so much that he can't ignore or rationalize it to himself.
On the other hand, someone who is truly excited about meeting God together with the saints, that literally would not rather be anywhere else, should he choose for whatever reason to go to the football game instead, will probably not feel guilty about having fun there. He knows the enthusiasm for his convictions matches the order he thinks they ought to be in, and indeed much of the chronic guilt we feel as believers comes from knowing that not to be the case, and some of the cynicism we accumulate is an attempt to justify that it is not, and also perhaps a way to stop short of resenting those for whom it is. On the whole, rather than hate them as living reminders that we lack the conviction we ought to have, we'd prefer to imply they're exceptions we don't need to emulate and live with the cognitive dissonance of knowing deep down it's not true, like smokers who know they should throw the pack away but instead light up one more with slow deliberation, drawn into introspective silence by the paradox of their own actions.
2. Political Convictions
While convictions about sports vs. church attendance are a sort of gentle object lesson for most people to whom they apply, something we can joke about while pondering seriously, the gloves come off when it comes to politics. No one's taxes are going to change as the result of a football match. Bills on abortion and gay marriage do not become law or not based on who wins the World Series. Some lives may indeed hang in the balance based on the results of a big soccer match, but not nearly so many as in a big change to U.S. foreign policy. In a sense, political convictions are the mortal-world version of spiritual convictions; you can't watch where someone goes after they die, but you can watch what happens to the country after an election. The higher the perceived stakes, the more intense the conviction.
Of course many people, not seeing how such things affect their day to day life, do not hold political convictions strongly, or only with regards to certain issues. The stakes do not seem high to them, either through apathy, distance, or even cynicism. On the other hand, those people who perceive the stakes to be very high are often quite willing to jump into verbal wars or personal action with a ferocity which would do credit to any dual-wielding, woad-painted berserker.
And that's important to recognize. It's the duty of every Christian to consciously promote the convictions of our faith until they occupy the highest place, but how high political convictions fall on the scale will vary. It's easy for someone who is very cynical or very apathetic about politics to criticize those who are tempted to make an idol out of them, just as it's easy for me, able to sometimes enjoy a game night but not a follower of sports in general, to criticize those who are tempted to idolize sports.
But since in political struggles the outcome really does touch on geopolitical realities, affecting the lives of people in every part of our world, convictions can be held very closely. With the ravages of communism, the pre-natal death toll of abortion, the observable suffering of communities affected by unfair laws (or the debate on whether they are or not) all a matter of historical record and/or currently ongoing situations, these convictions very easily take on a religious fervor, and become closely intertwined with one's convictions on spiritual matters in a natural way.
3. Politico-Spiritual Worldview - Who Influences You?
It's important to understand that this is indeed a natural and constant process. One's concern for other people may be grounded in a spiritual conviction that they are created in the image of God and ought to be loved, but all it takes is the observation, correct or not (usually both, on some levels), that politics going one way or another will significantly affect the plight of many of those people one is concerned about loving. Immediately, the spiritual and political conviction began to be bound together. One's spiritual conviction about loving others becomes intrinsically linked to one's political convictions about what policies will affect them, and after that it's not very helpful to warn about idolizing politics, because that's not exactly what has happened. It's not idolatry to worry about the outcome of an election that will harm people you care about, except in a few very subtle senses, and accusations on this front rarely get into those subtleties.
Of course, how you end up linking these spiritual and political convictions will depend on who you are allowing to influence your thinking on the matter, just like with any other convictions. If you are a believer who hangs out on Leftist political blogs, you're probably going to link your political convictions to your spiritual ones in a way that has you endorsing Leftist thought and causes with a spiritual fervor, maybe to the point of becoming a social justice warrior. If on the Far Right, you may start thinking in terms of Christendom and wishing we could go back to the good old days of God, King, and Country, even if that meant first kicking out everyone who didn't fit that paradigm.
And your argument may be "factually correct" as far as it goes. Post-modernism is not wrong about everything, and it's true that, from within your worldview and mental framework, with the facts presented to you from sources you consider trustworthy, you may be acting in good faith based on reality as you perceive it.
I studied some linguistic theory while getting my Masters degree, and one important idea we discussed is that when I say "school" and you say "school," we may be talking about fairly different things. Broadly the same of course, so basic communication doesn't fail, but individually quite distinct, leading to hidden misunderstandings, based on our different educational experiences and varying exposure to academic environments. So two people saying respectively "public schools are failing and must be significantly reformed" and "public schools are basically fine, teachers just need more support" may both be speaking correctly from their own experience. There's nothing to argue profitably about (not that that stops anyone!), except to what extent one's individual experience differs from reality in the general sense.
This is one reason why, although I jumped into the fray a few times, over the months of arguing on social media I mostly managed to stay out of things. I recognized that without addressing deeper worldview issues, the foundations that someone's political views were built on, all you're going to do is argue until someone gets tired or people get too angry to keep going. You are trying to convince someone to shift their tower over to your castle without recognizing the true depth of the moat in between.
4. When Convictions Are Challenged
All this is how, sadly, Christians both cultural and genuine have managed to fight and kill each other throughout much of the Church's history, a fact people surprised that the Church could be divided over political candidates seem to miss. There is no careful line isolating "earthly" convictions from "spiritual" ones, with the greatest fervor given to the latter. They are all intertwined, something which happens very naturally and perhaps even inevitably on the political level, and whether in our own time that has happened Rightly or Leftly can not only put people of the same faith convictions on opposing sides of an argument, it can leave them barely able to effectively communicate as their worldviews are shifted further apart.
Seen in the light of this, some of what many found baffling during this election becomes quite clear. How could men like Franklin Graham or Wayne Grudem come out in support of a man like Trump? Because enough convictions were linked together for them, rightly or wrongly, that there was a domino effect: Voting for Hillary led directly or indirectly to an assault on more and more deeply-held convictions than voting for Trump did, and the bigger, more urgent mass of convictions under assault justified risking an adverse effect on some others.
That's how it worked for every #never_____ voter, really, but one special confusion and stressful aspect of this election was that Trump's candidacy did not keep within the familiar boundaries at all. Many Christians on the Right and Left respectively had arrived at similar and comfortable politico-religious convictions, what we'd call "camps" or certain political demographics, and Trump came barging in diagonally and messed it all up. People were forced to rethink and even sever and reattach previously linked religious and political convictions, and the speed and degree to which some did so brought accusations of hypocrisy. ("How come such-and-such an issue was such a big deal for you people in previous elections, but now you don't seem to care at all?")
5. Why the Rise of Ideological Thinking is Dangerous
While it's natural for people to link their convictions in ways where involving one drags in others, ideological thinking greatly exacerbates this tendency. Much more than in someone who merely identifies on the "side" of one major party or the other, an ideology weaves many convictions together in a certain pattern, seemingly more and more of them, so that attacking one more or less means attacking them all. There are no issues to be considered separately, and by the end there are no innocuous comments or actions that are not a statement of some kind. This has been on the rise in America for decades, but especially in recent years. In this situation, a Christian under the influence (knowingly or not) of progressive ideology may respond to a non-religious assertion, for example suggesting a month ago that Trump is the best option in this election, with a degree of moral outrage more like you have attacked the assertion that Jesus is Lord, because in a sense for them you have. The ideology has knotted all those convictions together; the political and spiritual are intertwined, and more and more of the rest has become political as well. Many other people will not respond quite so strongly, but will still feel sad, frustrated, or angry that you've "chosen the wrong side" as a Christian.
So when some Americans blew up in destructive hysteria at a Trump win, as if the world was ending, it is because for them it does seem like that. They have been converged, drawn deeply into a particular ideology, and those convictions they perceived Trump to actively threaten, based on their trusted sources of information, are woven together with all their other most deeply held convictions. For them, a Trump victory comes as an assault not on a few, but on the entire interlinked mass of these convictions. It's an attack on their entire worldview from which little is spared.
Ideology, then, takes all the breathing room out of the culture wars. Whereas before one could agree to disagree on arguments that didn't touch on deeper convictions, now there is less and less that doesn't. C.S.Lewis observed in That Hideous Strength (the final volume in his amazing Space Trilogy) that there is a sense in which heaven and hell are always eating into our world from both sides, leaving less and less room in the middle. People who didn't want to fight on any side, didn't want to fight at all, soon find there is no such thing as not fighting on a side. We are getting to that point in America, which is worrisome: when your opponent is not merely wrong but evil (as anyone who attacks all your deeply held convictions must be), then there is less and less that is not justified in stopping them. Democracy becomes difficult to sustain when what had been a political struggle now increasingly turns into a moral and spiritual one. Whether the conclusion of this election will see things calming down or ramping up remains to be seen. (To be sure, we trust God in the darkest of times, but we also do not hope for them.)
6. What Should Our Response Be?
Jesus brilliantly responded to those who tried to trap Him in a politico-spiritual conundrum, that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's. Among other things (the invalidation of dominion theology, for example), this to me is a reminder to reject ideological thinking, and to be actively and carefully engaged in the process of testing and promoting my spiritual convictions at the expense of the rest. (and those spiritual convictions should be ordered as well--core dogma, necessary doctrine, helpful but flexible tradition, personal opinion, etc. lest churches split over comparatively minor issues that have become unjustifiably crucial convictions to them) In short, with regards to my convictions, He must become greater, they must become less. That does not mean they disappear (one should never ignore one's convictions), but He must reign undisputed. If I see evidence that this is not yet the case, I must continue to lay those other convictions at His feet.
Convictions are tricky things, however. One claim I commonly saw these past few months was that people one disagreed with politically were not putting Christ first over politics (because then of course they'd agree with -your- political views, which were all obviously Christ-sanctioned).
So I think we need to not primarily stress the idea of carefully severing political or other deeply held convictions from spiritual ones, as this is so difficult for we humans and the worldviews we accumulate from our travels and travails in this world. We can't really do it without stepping away from our own worldview, which is not like taking off glasses but trying to remove one's eyes, even when looking for the truth of scripture. If we think we've succeeded, we've probably just blinded ourselves to our deepest convictions, not isolated them.
Rather, we must continually exalt Christ as King, and always recognize that every biblical teacher has their own worldview, their own thicket of convictions grown up together. We can't simply allow our convictions to automatically mirror those of this or that teacher, no matter how sound and godly. When John Piper says God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him, we may profit much from reflection on that idea. When John Piper says, as I once heard him say, that sky diving is sinful because it's a pointless risk with no gospel purpose, then he is speaking from a conviction that is linked to a spiritual one, but not one with which I am obligated to agree (and I disagree with him in that particular case).
Let us strive to be not conformed to the pattern of this world, whatever ideological pattern, social gospel, or secular morality, that entails, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Then by testing (carefully and wisely, not from this or that blog or famous figure) we may discern what is the will of God; good, acceptable, and perfect.
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