Mercy Not Sacrifice
[Note: A previous version of this post had a featured photo with an image that was triggering. Please accept my apology for my lack of sensitivity.]
What if God is the one who hijacked our presidential election in order to defeat his people so catastrophically that they would start acting like Christians again? What would happen if the Supreme Court were completely out of reach for those who have pinned all their hopes for the last four decades on overturning Roe v. Wade? What if Hillary Clinton got to nominate four new justices during her term and they were all in their early thirties? Imagine how liberating that would be for Christians who could actually get back to sharing the gospel instead of spending all of their emotional energy in partisan culture war.
What do the culture warriors have to show for their four decades of political struggle? Nothing. They’ve lost at everything. And they’ve completely alienated millions of people from ever considering the Christian gospel. That’s what makes me gnash my teeth and lie awake at night. How many people will never know Jesus because of how Jesus’ followers have misrepresented him? Jesus says to those who create stumbling blocks through their ugly witness that it would be better for them to tie a millstone around their necks and throw themselves into the sea. They will stand before God and answer for how they have represented him on Earth.
Satan’s third temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4 was the temptation of control. He told Jesus he would give him control of all the nations in the world if he fell down and worshiped him. When the goal of gaining control over a nation of people justifies any and every means, including the proliferation of a toxic multi-billion dollar industry of hate and false witness, that’s what it means to worship Satan. No matter how noble the goals you have for once you are in power, the methods you use to gain power can make you completely toxic and render your goals meaningless.
I’m opposed to abortion and I’m also opposed to its exploitation as a wedge issue by politicians who have demonstrated that they don’t actually care about the well-being of the women who have abortions. I would love to see a pro-life movement that actually took a holistic approach to reducing unwanted pregnancies in their local communities. I know there are many local organizations who are actually invested in the well-being and dignity of women who have unwanted pregnancies. And I’ll bet they would get a lot more support and better funding if the maddening obsession with the Supreme Court were just over.
Whatever is true about abortion, Satan has used the abortion battle more than any other political conflict to destroy our democracy. When you’re able to convince yourself that the other side of a political conflict is utterly nihilistically diabolical and the only morally responsible thing for you to do is to sabotage and undermine them at every turn, then any semblance of government becomes impossible. It will be interesting to see whether Republicans will even let Hillary Clinton nominate Supreme Court justices after she wins the presidency. If they sabotage her like they have Obama for eight years, then they will prove that everything we teach our kids about the perfect wisdom of our three branch government is utter bullshit.
It would be so amazing to live in an era in which white evangelicals’ obsession with totally annihilating their political opponents wasn’t the predominant image of Christianity in our public sphere. I hate our scandal-loving media just as much as anybody else, but Christians can’t blame the media entirely for how we’ve made Jesus look. The Bible clearly puts the onus on us for how Jesus looks to the people around us; we are supposed to win others to Christ through our grace. So I hope and pray that this election will be such a decisive landslide that white evangelicals will be forced to repent of their futile pursuit of political control and they will instead throw their passion into seeking the welfare of the cities where God has sent them (Jeremiah 29:7).
It will take decades of faithful, agenda-less love to undo the spiritual damage of decades of toxic culture war. But Donald Trump is a big enough wrecking ball to put an end to the political era that has ruined Christian witness in our country. At least I really hope so. Christians are supposed to be a people of repentance. That is more fundamentally our identity than how we stand on social issues. So let’s repent and stop being the monstrous trolls Satan has tricked us into being. That goes for everybody on every side of this impossible debate.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In