Avoiding "Friendly Fire"

Today I want to post about something very important that I've been learning in the last year (through the election and with the confederate statues issue, etc)...


"I can't go to bed yet, someone is wrong on the internet"

It's common to decry the anger and lack of civility in arguments online, for politics or theology or anything else. This is partly because the semi-anonymity of online comments tends to bring out the worst in people; also when you aren't face to face with someone, there is a tendency to respond to "wrong ideas" and forget that you are really responding to a person. (I think one could make the argument that someone who has decided to become an avatar or promoting conduit for those ideas deserves to be treated as such, but otherwise not.) Also, people are sinful and many simply have zero interest in treating other people well and enjoy trolling, insulting, and/or disputing, and the internet is a convenient tool doing so.

But one more specific danger of arguing on social media, for those who do it for reasons more or less involving what is true and what is not, and not because they simply enjoy it, is that you don't know the context of error that people live in and are responding against. So they may be coming at the issue from a different angle from you, and may indeed be wrong on some particular aspects which you may be pointing out accurately. But if you were to enter into their context, and see the errors they are confronted with and responding against, you would find you were fighting on the same side as them.

As the graduate of a well-known seminary, I and many of my former classmates have trouble not responding to error when we see it, especially theological error. (Yes, sometimes things are not a matter of perspective, but violate basic truths. If you believe the Bible is true, then you believe it's worth arguing about; for humans, one necessitates the other) We certainly have many issues where we disagree; part of going to seminary is being exposed to the scriptural fountain of theological truth whose water is poured (along with many sweeteners and artificial flavors and dyes) into the giant soda fountain of theological opinion, and we all have our favorite flavors of soda even when we did not come to seminary already possessing deep worldview differences that influence how we approach even that pure fountain.

But on the occasions when I have taken issue online with a fellow seminarian or anyone else either expressing a truth unclearly or expressing what was not true, I have often found that their intent was to combat an error they had seen in some other place. Perhaps they had been reading Genesis 1 and 2 and thinking about God's command to humans to be stewards of the earth, and then, stung by a video they saw of environmental devastation somewhere, posted an article which strayed over into dangerous "climate care is the gospel" territory. It is not wrong to stand against that error, indeed it is necessary to do so, but one needs to understand their motivation for posting to address the errors in a constructive way.

Understand 1, before deciding whether engaging 1 or 2 is better worth spending the time for 3

Attacking the wrong they saw, not the one you see

A vivid ongoing example would be the endless array of opinions possessed by American Christians regarding President Trump: If you live in a context (online and/or offline) where most people react to Trump with visceral hatred as a mascot of everything they despise, moving in the direction of truth requires setting aside those emotions and considering the actual ramifications of his actions as president, at least some of which have been positive and helpful, as was also true for Obama. So this is something it was fair to challenge people to do when Obama was the president they loved to hate, and it's fair now that we have a traditionalist authoritarian narcissist in the White House instead of a progressive ideological narcissist.

On the other hand, if you live in a context where there are a lot of people who consider Trump as God's gift to the Church, and to America, which are considered more or less the same thing, then moving in the direction of truth does require challenging some very erroneous assumptions there. (My own stance is that we must be more pragmatic and recognize that, like Treebeard in LotR, the Church should not be on any politician's "side," because none of them are on our "side," and certainly the political machine and swamp of corruption are hostile and corrosive to even those comparatively good men who find their way into positions of power. It is good to be concerned for the state of one's nation and culture; we do not give up our passports or our hard-won freedoms or stop paying taxes or stop driving across local bridges when we enter God's kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. But we also don't need the influence of Washington to get things done, and we greatly weaken ourselves to lean on that splintered staff; for we are the adopted sons and daughters of God Almighty)

With our current social media environment (exacerbated by the desire of companies like Facebook to become a walled garden that you never need to leave, by bringing news and everything else into the FB bubble) these arguments all fall into the same space. So I can see posts praising good actions by the president met with offensive hostility by Trump haters, and posts attacking the conflation of what is Caesar's and what is God's met with defensive hostility by Trump supporters, all on my FB wall on the same day.

I have written elsewhere of how the two camps and other zero-sum ideological groups could attempt to live together in relative peace by regarding each other as different nations in the same country. But what I'm talking about today is another way, especially for those being pulled to one side or the other but not yet "in the camp." Sometimes protesting the particular errors around them can drive people too far in a particular direction; many historical evils would be less inexplicable (though not less wrong) if we could feel what it was like to be in a particular context, the unfairness, the personal pain, etc. I see a dangerous tendency to use that kind of language now. In the past, violence usually follows, and that's been true for a couple of years now in America.

So while it's as important as ever to engage and combat falsehood, and keep ideological thinking from undermining the truth that changes not, it's also important to recognize that lots of people's worldviews are being pushed to extremes in our crazy fragmenting society, and attacking their ideas without understanding where they come from is not defeating that extreme thinking but is strengthening it and pushing those attacked to double down on those ideas. This is true of theology as well as politics, since we don't necessarily treat those convictions differently.

So, is it necessary to stop arguing about important issues in "the commons" for which social media has become a very poor replacement? It's useless to even try to say that people shouldn't argue online, but actually I don't think it's necessary to say that. We should argue sometimes, it's an important part of discovering and defending truth. But if truth is indeed our motivation, we should try as much as possible to argue constructively.

Avoiding Friendly Fire

So how do we engage error online when we consider it an appropriate situation to do so, yet focus on attacking the untruth while still loving the person? And more specifically for this post, how do we figure out if there is really a point of disagreement worth engaging, or whether the person is responding to their own context and not yours (or since you are part of their context if you can see what they are posting, we could say, responding to a different part of their context) I think we can do so by making use of two questions:


Important Question #1: What do you think the greatest danger/problem here is?

By asking this question, you do two things. You let the other person feel listened to (because you are in fact offering to listen), which tends to diffuse a lot of potential badfeel if constructive disagreement is going to follow. You also identify what really motivates them in the argument. If you were arguing with a robot, you wouldn't need that, but since even INTPs are people too, it's always more helpful to respond to that motivation too and not merely its symptoms.

In asking, you may find that you don't disagree in any fundamental way, you just don't consider the thing they've honed in on to be the primary issue at stake. In that case you can either end the discussion on friendly terms, agreeing that they are right to be concerned about that thing, or you can shift the argument to whether that thing is really the primary issue. In that case you may need to ask some more questions to find out why they are so worried about that particular issue.

One example of this would be the churches that consider drinking any alcohol to be sinful. That is scripturally indefensible, and the attempt to do so leads to convoluted absurdities of interpretation. However, one often finds that when normally sound, bible-loving pastors also preach this extra-scriptural rule, there are usually strong personal reasons for doing so. (A loved one was lost to a drunk driver, or ruined their own life through alcoholism, etc.)
It is right to stand against misuse of scripture even (especially?) when it has good motives, for that is how heresies tend to begin, with the best of motives. But at the same time, when attacking someone's error, it's important to know what the real motivation behind it is. All the arguing about alcohol in scripture may have been useless, where the person in question may have really needed someone to walk through the grief of their loss with them, so that they did not need to deal with it by bringing the authority of scripture to attack the source of their pain.

Important Question #2: If you were in charge, how would you solve this?

This is an invitation to constructive and not destructive thinking. Sometimes people have never thought this far, and it stops them short. Sometimes they have thought about it a great deal, and will be relieved that someone wants to hear them out.

It seems (at least to me) that a reply to this question of "I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that this isn't right" is basically a cop out. They just want to express disapproval, there is no substance to their opinion to argue over. On the other hand, as Sun Tzu teaches us in the Art of War, it's often wise to leave your opponent one line of retreat. Often lines such as the one above are a way of retreating from the artillery of reason offered in good faith with dignity and order intact.

This question is also one in which you're more likely to come away with something useful for yourself. It's highly unlikely that you are going to convince anyone of anything online via an argument, even a polite and constructive one, but this means that at least one side gets to be heard, and invites the other side to respond in kind. If you have an audience, asking them how they'd solve it also invites the audience to think in a critical way about your opponents proposed solution. If it's implausible or problematic in other ways, that's usually going to much more obvious to bystanders than when you're arguing about the problem itself.

Potatoes argue from identity. Don't be like a potato. Also the cake is a lie.

So...

In an age of ideological conflict and identity fragmentation, Jesus said it best: "whoever is not against us is for us." When we attack the arguments of people who are addressing problems from their own contexts, we need to at least understand their motives. We might be accidentally engaging in friendly fire, distracting or defeating their efforts to engage people in a different context from ours.

I have done this. As an INTP, for an argument I don't shoot a tiny missile at the other person as in my diagram above. I cease to restrain the hungry attack raptors and they devour anything in the argument that's not rock solid. I am not saying I win every argument, there is much I don't know and many other skilled debaters around, and if it comes down to good-sounding rhetoric or emotionally resonant language I'm okay at best. But I am good at seeing what is inconsistent or weak in an argument and articulately dismantling it. And, due to that, there have been times when everything I said was correct and every issue I raised was legitimate, but it was a misdirection from another real problem that needed dealing with, which I wasn't aware of. That didn't delegitimize my own statements, but it made them less helpful in the overall struggle against falsehood.
So today's post is written as much to myself as to anyone else reading it.

I do think arguing online can be selectively useful, and I also do it much less than I used to, partly from being busier with worthwhile things. I usually approach it from the stance that I want to learn more about what other people think and also demonstrate when a position is logically indefensible. Those have been tricky goals over the past year on many topics, especially when emotions and identity are so commonly involved. So my advice to everyone (most of all myself) is to only go into an argument 1) as much as possible not because you are "triggered" by something that seems indefensibly wrong and know exactly how to reduce it to a pile of shattered inconsistencies (or raptor poop), 2) having pictured what realistically winning the argument or having a profitable discussion as a result would look like and making that your goal, and 3) use the questions above and similar ones as needed to keep ideas and people separate, and show that you are willing to listen and learn, and yet that listening and learning doesn't mean conceding the point.

That's all for this post. Have a Resplendent Reformation Day and Happy Halloween!

"That's not how I see it" - The Grace of Differing Perspective

On Sept 1, 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt for the national anthem instead of standing in respect. He had previously sat out the anthem in pre-season games, but at this game began kneeling in protest, a practice which he continued and which spread to other players.

What emotions do you feel, seeing this?

This touched off an ongoing firestorm of controversy, with people viewing the action in very divergent ways. Some saw the gesture as a brave act of protest, an unwillingness to stay silent in the face of injustice, especially regarding police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some players agreed with his motives and began to protest in a similar fashion, though not always for the same reasons.

Others, however, saw a highly-paid athlete disrespecting national symbols--and by extension the nation which had given him so much. They argued his refusal to respect the flag and anthem (and to some extent the NFL and the NFL audience) was disrespect of the country, its principles, the soldiers who died to protect it, etc. They considered it fundamentally wrong, regardless of his intent.

My Facebook feed is currently crowded with memes both supporting and decrying the NFL anthem protest. Social media is not a good place to look for balanced perspectives and careful thought on the best of days, and there isn't much of it out there right now. I don't think there's any point in even calling for it, to be honest, human nature being what it is. But there is something we do need to remind ourselves, which I believe could at least keep us from unfriending each other (another rising trend) and exacerbating the thought war online which has increasingly been taken to the streets.

"Thought Nations" - Diversity is more than skin deep.

I live in East Asia. One look is enough to know my ethnicity is not from around here (some kids like to poke my "tall nose" when their parents aren't around to scold them), but the differences don't stop at the physically observable. The Chinese metacultural worldview has some deep fundamental differences from that of the West. Differences that go the core of one's worldview, the kind I enjoy learning about but couldn't entirely adopt even if I wanted to; they're too deep for me to reach. One example would be views on authority and freedom. Many if not most Chinese/Taiwanese/East Asian people believe societal order is considerably more important than freedom. Authorities ought to rescind freedoms if people began to act wantonly, they say, in fact that's an important responsibility of authority. (That in Taiwan democracy coexists with this cultural worldview leads to interesting results)

While people expect some big differences in Chinese and Western values and outlook, they sometimes fall prey to the somewhat-propagandic notion that America has common values and principles. We can say "we are one" all we want, but in truth America has always had different subcultures, and when progressive ideals shifted from melting pot to identity politics, all hope of forging some kind of common identity was lost. (Believers are called to be One in Christ too, but the Church is not exactly a paragon of social unity; why should we expect it from ever-shifting society lacking that underlying spiritual reality?)

What we have now, then, is an array of subcultures. Much has been made of trying to divide America up into its underlying geographical component nations, for example the popular "11 nations of the United States" map. Yet in 2017 these historically-derived distinctions may not be the most practically important; what should we say about various "blocs" of Obama or Trump voters, for example, who can barely maintain speaking terms? They may not fall into any convenient historical or geographical areas, but they do have internally cohesive and mutually incompatible worldviews. Effectively, they are different nations scattered throughout one nation-state. What we saw in the aftermath of President Trump's election was one or more "thought nations" within America refusing to accept the results. "Not my president" meant, "not the president of my nation," the thought-nation that is more real to me than the less personally relevant legal reality of the actual U.S.

It has been reported that former president Obama is currently taking unprecedented (for a former president) steps to oppose President Trump and fund and lead opposition to cause problems for him and his agenda. Obama can do this more or less openly and with great support from many Americans, perhaps including some of you reading this, because he is a leader of their nation, which they consider the True America. Most people from the area where I grew up would see things in the opposite way; Obama's progressive ideals were imperiling True America. Their dislike (to put it mildly) for him was not racism, but due to his position as a leader in the assault on "their America," which like most other groups, they call "America."
Kaepernick kneels for a similar reason; because the America he sees does not resemble the American nation of his own ideals. The America others see may correspond closely with theirs, however, or diverge even more widely than for him. There are diverse nations which share our nation-state in an alliance of necessity which grows less feasible the more they imagine themselves to be the one true nation.

A Ray of Hope - Acknowledging Perspective

While fights over resources between rival groups are unavoidable in the history of humanity, there is a relatively simple and straightforward way to avoid losing friends and making enemies in this brave new ideological world--simply acknowledge that some people live in the same country but a different nation than you do, and they see things very differently. I have friends with worldviews that diverge to the point of complete incompatibility with mine. If you put us on a committee that had to make policy decisions, we'd be constantly sparring opponents at best, if not outright enemies. And it's no good to say "we're all Christians." As I've explained in previous blogs, your convictions, Christian and otherwise, are all twisted together; we can study the same passages of scripture and come away with very different conclusions and priorities, because we never really set those aside without long-term effort and the help of the Spirit, and even then it can creep back in, as it does with famous pastors who after long years of careful exegesis are not immune to blind spots.

But I can recognize that other people's views and values have deep differences from mine, no different in some ways than my Taiwanese friends, and accept them in that sense, if they can accept a similar arrangement on their side. We are really from different cultures, and things are getting to the point where it's more harmful to pretend that's not the case than otherwise.

Is this a complete embracing of postmodernism (even as we leave it behind now for the as-of-yet-unnamed current age), an admittance that there is no truth, only different perspectives, a "diversity of truth"?
"By no means," but we can certainly admit that there is a diversity of priorities. To take our initial example, for some people respecting national symbols is an important priority. For some people that simply isn't much of a priority at all, they never grew up caring about that sort of thing, while for some it's the very importance of those symbols that make them important focal points for protests.

What's happening on my Facebook wall regarding the NFL protests is neither racism nor treason, it's simply people with different cultures and priorities looking at the same action in very different ways, but not really acknowledging that those different cultures and priorities exist. Yet doing so would allow what feel like betraying comrades to become, in a sense, foreign friends. We live in diverse thought-nations while inhabiting the same physical and online spaces. Acknowledging the difference in perspective that comes from that is in fact an acknowledgment of universal truth.

A Useful Theological Example

(Credit for this pic: brazilcarroll)

Scripture makes a lot of what are sometimes called "gnomic" truth statements: not statements wearing little pointy red hats, but timelessly true or proverbial statements which communicate the nature of reality. ("God is good," "birds fly," etc) And whether birds fly is not a matter of your perspective on birds, it is a general truth about the vast majority of birds; at best you could try to pick apart language as a thought exercise, constructing some scenario where what we call what birds do something else, or else deconstructing the idea of flight, but birds still would be flying around outside untroubled by your sophistry.

This recognition that there are divergent perspectives from which to look at the same issue gets hairy when we attempt the sacred challenge of maintaining sound theology. Scripture itself does not allow for a multiplicity of mutually exclusive interpretations of the same passage, even though that's exactly what we have in the Church now, for basically the reasons described earlier in this post. Scripture is making claims about the world, not presenting them for round table discussion. You can discuss them anyway, of course, you can even judge scripture from the standpoint of values themselves mutually incompatible with scripture ("Paul was a misogynist," and other such incoherencies), but the Bible itself teaches us that to do so is neither to believe it nor even to take it seriously.

No, there is a different kind of perspective consideration I'm more interested in, because it resolves some thorny theological debates by reminding us that a valid alternative perspective does exist in scripture--not that of some people vs. other people, but of men vs. God.

While we cannot hope to see from God's perspective even approximately, it is well to remember that He has one. If we accept that He interacts with created man within created space-time, yet Himself exists in a timeless state apart from His own creation, some endless debates resolve themselves almost automatically.

Prophecy, for example, from a time-bound perspective, is something God "knows will happen." Even in a time-bound sense it is not merely that--a lot of prophecy is actually what we called "gnomic truth" above, pronouncements of what has always been true.

But from a timeless perspective, all prophecy is simply a communication by God of what is, either always, or at a specific point in time we humans have not yet reached. We humans have to travel through history to get there, and for some prophecies it seems we travel through multiple instances of the same prophecy being fulfilled, suspiciously like reality unfolds in a way that will suddenly make sense when our eyes are opened. But God isn't waiting for these things to happen as we are; He is omnipresent in time as well as space, but He created both and exists beyond both. The Lamb was slain before the foundations of the world.

Taking this perspective, then, or at least recognizing it, the "problem" of election goes away. To speak of God "looking down the halls of time" is forcing God into a human perspective to which He is not limited. He does not need to look down halls, His presence is in all time as in all space.


***Well it's late, time for some reading before bed, and this post is long enough. I hope to examine the topic again in more detail, as I believe it is very useful for examining the question of free will vs. sovereignty. But for now, if you can't believe you have friends who could possibly hold the opinions they do, consider whether they might not really be foreign friends--from a different thought nation than you, and approach them as if they are from another part of the world. In at least one very pragmatic sense, they are.

There is no Sacred-Secular Divide in your Convictions (Election Series - Part 2)

Hello everyone. While the 2016 U.S. general election is technically not over yet (the electors have yet to cast their votes), we have all already been through the experience of the past year and especially these past few months together. Amidst the celebrating or mourning that is following the surprise (to many) victory of Donald Trump in the election, I can admit that I've closely followed this election with a certain amount of fascination. Today I'll continue my loose series of entries (here is the first) which reflect the many hours of observation and thought that have come out of the unprecedented spectacle of the 2016 elections.

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.