The protracted election circus that’s dominated the news all week has my inbox filled with urgent questions from folks who are heavily invested in the outcome. These queries range from asking if the American Dream is really dead (it died a long time ago) to speculating that all this chaos is really a chess master gambit to trap the bad guys. In the middle are the majority throwing out reams of arcane election law like spaghetti on a wall.
Spitballing about politics is a time-honored pastime. If you get a kick out of it, more power to you. But when it stops being fun and starts resembling astrology for men, you should consider taking a break. Unless you are an elector, a Democrat machine goon, or a federal judge, your participation has a statistically insignificant effect on the process. Wearing yourself out trying to move that mountain verges on superstitious grasping for control over what’s out of our hands.
Since much of this blog’s audience are people of faith, it behooves us to consider what a just result would really look like. The point of politics is to establish temporal conditions wherein a people can most easily actualize their potential, and we are given that potential by God to attain the highest degree of holiness we can.
Low taxes, freedom of association, and even high social trust are means to the end of human sanctification, not ends in themselves. A lot of folks forgot that in all the drama of the past four years.
Our society has been wallowing in sins that cry out to Heaven longer than most of us have been alive. God answers those cries in one of two ways: the Sodom reply or the Nineveh reply.
Sometimes God sends a Hezekiah figure to attempt eleventh-hour reforms. We got that kind of reprieve in 2016. Instead of using the extra time to root out our own sins, we largely succumbed to the worldly distractions of infighting, grifting, and superstition.
God might grant an extension. We don’t know. It’s in His hands. Either way, the Christian response isn’t to fret over every move of secular bureaucrats. More than any other precept in Scripture, we are commanded to be not afraid. Fortitude is not optional. The day’s troubles are sufficient to themselves.
Stop seeking control over what is not proper to your state in life, and get to work on what you are given power over–your interior spiritual state.
God is the center of the universe–not any other individual, not any political ideology, and not you. The worst sin besetting the West isn’t promiscuity. It’s not globalist nation-wrecking, or even industrial infanticide. It’s Christian blindness to rampant, ubiquitous offenses to God.
For context, remember that profaning God’s name is more serious matter than any sin of the flesh. Now reflect on how casually His name is vainly thrown around by practically everyone, including in all media.
The only fear that should motivate you at this moment is filial fear that drives you to make amends for your sins and others’ and so grow in holiness.
Author David V. Stewart and I went on-stream together to talk about the elections, the Christian response, and my new top 40 Christian sci fi novel Combat Frame XSeed: S
Take heart, and watch the stream:
Brian
Good advice. As a foreigner I'm content I have no skin in the game. So I'm enjoying the great weather, cooking new recipes and tutoring kids.
Puts things in perspective.
xavier
Aka stay home and read pulps, go back to Church and join a gym.
And build stuff especiallyv with kids even if it's out of lego 🙂
xavier
A very good stream, thankyou to both you gentlemen.
You are welcome. To God be the glory!
Thanks, Brian. Well said.
Give the glory to God.
"Since much of this blog's audience are people of faith, it behooves us to consider what a just result would really look like. The point of politics is to establish temporal conditions wherein a people can most easily actualize their potential, and we are given that potential by God to attain the highest degree of holiness we can."
If one says the Nicene Creed and means it, then one is a Catholic theocratic imperialist. "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And His kingdom will have no end…" Every other arrangement is just biding time.
It's not the Witch Test, but I would wonder about someone if they weren't at least a little creeped out by this painting: https://jonmcnaughton.com/one-nation-under-god/
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I was about to argue with you, then I realized I missed your double negative. There is something terribly creepy about that painting< iagree. I immediately checked on the author and yep, he's a Mormon. That explains the dodgy theology of it. Denied both the Holy Trinity and his Blessed Mother, this Mormon-Jesus is somehow both less than God and less than man, rather than been entirely and perfectly both.
Frankly, it's like looking at a Mormon Temple. There is one in Lubbock, Texas that I had occasion to set eyes one once. I cannot quite describe the feeling I had looking at it, but I will try. It felt dead. It felt like death, or a mausoleum, except that a mausoleum need not be so disquieting. A mausoleum can be a place of solemn comfot, remembrance, and even joy, if the deceased were dearly loved in life. That temple by contrast was repulsive somehow.
That painting is the twin heresies of Modernism and Americanism embodied in canvas.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm