By Graham Glover –
God doesn’t care. Not one bit.
Democrat? Yawn. Republican? Yawn. Socialist? Libertarian? Liberal? Conservative? One big giant yawn from the Lord.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being extremely interested, my guess is God is about a -47 (and that’s probably being too generous).
Seriously folks, God doesn’t care about our politics. At all.
So please, for the sake of our public discourse, as well as our waning attempt at maintaining our democratic republic (to say nothing of our right understanding of God), stop trying to make our political issues sound like they are formed by church doctrine. They aren’t. While some believe otherwise, there is simply no such thing as a Christian position on public policy – and that goes for those on the right, the left, and everywhere in-between.
Yet many of us are tempted to make our politics out to be divinely inspired. In our efforts to make our nation and our society more “Christian” (whatever that means), we try so hard to be “righteous” when taking political stands.
But why do we do these things? Why do we naively think that God cares about our politics?
The easy answer is that Christians regularly confuse the proper role and purpose of the church and the state. We comingle them when we shouldn’t. We use them to support the other when we know the dangers in doing so. More often than we ought, Christians fail at maintaining a right understanding of the ecclesial and civic realms.
But there’s more to this story. There’s a deeper reason Christians make these absurd political claims.
We’re intellectually lazy – politically and theologically.
Instead of forming political opinions based on sound reason and empirical evidence, we default to what we think sounds (or at least comes off as) “more Christian”. We claim that God is on our side, that it is un-Christian to support our opponents bill or vote for their candidate, and voila, we’re doing God’s work. In our intellectual laziness, we jump to quick conclusions about public policy, failing to fully understand the nuances of how laws really affect people. Second and third order effects seldom cross our mind.
So, we continue join the choirs of the right and the left who sanctimoniously stand atop their political pulpits as though they are 21st century prophets sent by God Himself to remake the state (and the church) into the image of their particular special interest group. And as we make our case, we deceive ourselves and those that listen to our ill-informed banter into thinking that there is a Christian answer to our political ills.
This isn’t mere confusion, it’s outright laziness.
Our intellectual laziness has made us political morons and theological duds, and it’s tearing apart Christians and Americans, ransacking our churches and corrupting our republic. And all the while we think God cares about our politics.
I’m not telling you to stop championing your political causes. Keep marching for liberal issues. Take your stand for conservativism. Vote Republican. Support Democrats. Become a socialist. Embrace libertarianism. Just remember, God doesn’t care. He’s indifferent about our politics.
Your theology however…now that’s different issue altogether.
