Enough Already

Recently I received an e-mail forward written from the prospective of a political and religious conservative in 2012 after four years of an Obama presidency. I found the e-mail to be very troubling, but probably not in the way the author intended. (Apparently this e-mail has been circulated a lot as it received coverage in an AP article.)

What troubles me is when people mingle hatred and fear with religion and politics. That is at least an unhelpful and more likely a very harmful cocktail. I also wonder if the person who penned this fictional, futuristic letter quite realizes that a movement towards the left or at least towards the democratic party is in large part a response to the repeated failures of the current administration?

This letter raises a spectre of lost freedoms that Christians would be enduring. I doubt this. I am more apprehensive of losing my freedoms due to what could become a fearful and tyrannical department of homeland security (which of course was created under the current administration) than I am in losing them under an administration led by a former professor of constitutional law.

But it was not really the particular arguments of this letter that were so upsetting. It was the tone of fear and fatalism. I would also offer an idea to the conversation that God's redemptive movement in the world is not primarily channeled through a particular nation-state (America), political ideology (conservative) or party (Republican) but through the Church.

I simply do not believe the argument that they sky will fall and world will end if a particular politician or party is elected. Somehow we have survived eight years of the Bush administration. I'm pretty sure we would get through at least four years of an Obama administration. The more outlandish attacks I see on Obama coming from the religious right, the more inclined I am to actually vote for him.

But while we are talking about a Christian perspective on politics, I would like to share some more words of wisdom from Dallas Willard.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart and spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul. External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means. - Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart