A review of my election-related blog posts

I thought I I would share a share a summary of the blog posts that I’ve written related to the election since it’s the day before. As I’ve often shared, I think Christians can find justification in our faith to vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. What I do hope is that you would not vote based on an ideological false narrative about a group of people that you’ve swallowed without thinking about it. I have been quite distressed, for example, by how easy it is for my friends who don’t know any poor people personally to make all sorts of generalized statements about their “laziness” and “dependency” that don’t have any correspondence to the reality I have witnessed first-hand. If your primary basis for your electoral decision is that you don’t want “those lazy people” to get “my tax dollars,” then I have a problem with you because you’re talking in ignorance about people I know personally and care deeply about. In any case, here are 15 pieces I’ve written about election-related topics over the past three months or so in case you’ve missed any of it.

1) I pondered whether the political divide in our country is a rift within Jesus’ Great Commandment in which love of God and love of neighbor are being pitted against each other and named some of the recognitions that need to be made to undo this rift.

2) I named the ten types of people who I want to “lose” or be humbled somehow through this election since they are the real problem with the political climate in our country even if all of us fall into at least one of these categories.

3) I looked at the question of whether projecting strength or integrity on the global stage is a more Biblical foreign policy.

4) I offeredSister Simone Campbellas an example of how to transcend partisan gridlock in the movement to stop abortion from happening.

5) I looked at the two different kinds of Christianity that were represented by Pulpit Freedom Sunday and World Communion Sunday which happened on the same weekend.

6) I asked whether the braces and knee surgery that two girls in my former youth group got through Medicaid is making them “dependent” on the government or giving them an equal chance at success.

7) I looked at the conflation of two kinds of fear that I think explains the theological foundation of  much of evangelical Christian politics.

8) I wrote about an act of witness and penance that I would like to do in Israel and Palestine.

9) I wrote a rap called “Jesus is My Candidate.”

10) I looked at the question of the 47% of people who don’t pay income taxes through the lens of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius over whether we are self-reliant or dependent on God’s grace for everything.

11) I asked whether God needs to be politically endorsed by any political party when there was controversy after Obama got backlash for clumsily trying to hinge support for an exclusively Jewish capitol city of Jerusalem to the presence of the name of God in the Democratic party platform.

12) I said, “God built it; we didn’t” to talk about how the widespread ethos of self-reliance in the evangelical church is a contradiction of our core theological conviction of justification by faith.

13) I contrasted the gospel of Ayn Rand with the gospel of Jesus.

14) I asked whether Christians are supposed to be a special interest group or a kingdom of disciples and evangelists.

15) I asked whether we want to be advocates like Jesus or accusers like Satan in our response to our society’s never-ending culture war.