Election Aftermath, Assessment, and Our Faith Response

The doctor told me when he replaced my knees this summer that the new joints would hurt for months—perhaps eighteen months. I didn’t doubt him, but as my recovery weeks turn into months, I keep wondering, How long is this going to take?

They said we wouldn’t know who won the election for weeks. I didn’t disagree, but as the days of rancor and wrangling accumulate, I keep wondering, How long is this going to take?

A news conference featuring Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and a Trump lawyer named Jenna Ellis is throughout the media with the routine polarized opinions. Mr. Giuliani: If I could rant like him maybe I could have been a litigator. Ms. Ellis? I wouldn’t want to argue with her.

But Ms. Powell. She’s got ice water in her veins and a mind like a steel trap. As she threatened us with the team’s legal findings, she said she was going to “release the Kraken.”

I didn’t know what a Kraken was. As it turns out, we don’t have them in Oklahoma or Texas. The Kraken is a sea monster that lives in Norway and terrorizes fishermen. I don’t know, but I believe Ms. Powell is its Mistress.

Mr. Biden has set up the Office of the President-Elect. The Left is gaga even though there is no such thing and there is yet no President-Elect. Mr. Trump has apparently misplaced his phone as his Twitter feed is quiet. The Right is on the lookout for the Kraken that will prove Mr. Trump won reelection in a landslide.

I don’t know what to think, let alone believe.

But I’ve been here before: Neither do I know what to think or believe about this stupid virus and its pandemic. It has ruined funerals, weddings, parties, bars, churches, and now Thanksgiving. Christmas is next up. The good news is the virus doesn’t infect politicians or people traveling on sold-out airplanes. However, your dog can get COVID and your prescient cat has been quarantining since you got it.

Conservatives are fed up with media bias and censorship. Earlier in the week, Conservative leaders evoked their ire upon Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Dorsey. Conservatives of all ilk are leaping from Facebook and Twitter like they are burning ships and embracing competitive platforms like MeWe and Parler. The divide grows wider.

At the congressional meeting, the Democrats railed upon Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Dorsey for not censoring the Right more aggressively. Both Zuckerberg and Dorsey had bad days, damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Running a monopoly is a hard job.

The winner is censorship, cancellation, and normative justification for calling each other the most hyperbolic, egregious, and disgusting names one can come up with for a fellow human being. I’m speechless about what we are saying to each other.

I will say this though: If you identify a roach, or a rat, or a spider it’s okay to eliminate it. Declared enough, the vile attributions we are attaching to the other side moves us closer and closer to deciding in our souls that it is okay to eliminate what and who inconveniences our view, opinion, experience, or wish. We have crossed a known red-line in the horrid history of humanity, a red-line that demarcates a basic civility that we grant to another human as a person of value and worth. Not far on the other side of this bleeding line there is holocaust, genocide, elimination, imprisonment, and carnage—until there is silence.

I don’t know what to think, but in this case, I know what to believe: The sane among us, as opposed to the rabid among us, must resist such intolerance for human value until those uttering atrocities are ashamed and recover their civility enough to speak with dignity and respect. If we fail to achieve this, we will remedy our disconsolation with each other by war.

With this sobering thought and the tumult that remains rampant in American life, I turn my mind’s eye to matters of faith—Christian faith. Does faith have any pertinence?   

For decades Christians have falsely believed there is—there must be—a separation between church and state, faith on Sunday and in our private prayers versus how we conduct ourselves within society. We built edifices of brick and mortar on the corners of every town in America, cloistered ourselves within, and devised programs to entice the lost to come into our Christian cloister and find forgiveness and life eternal. Government began smelling worse than ever.

A few years ago, a moral majority among our Christian leadership exercised their platforms of influence to venture out and seek to sway the way government conducted itself. Their goal was to utilize public opinion and their powerful voice to make government (and society) look more Christian. The followers these leaders amassed became a voting block large enough to be courted by politicians seeking election and power—and the endorsement of influential Christian leaders. This group is known to them as the Religious Right, Evangelicals, Christian Right, and part of the Radical Right.

Said another way, Christians are a politically conservative sect, not followers of Jesus Christ known by the way we love. Given that outsiders to the faith have heard Christians consider themselves people who love and care for the least among us, they see our endorsement of political conservatism as especially egregious, what with the walls, opposition to healthcare for all, intransigence regarding women’s health, and separation of children from poor parents fleeing oppression.

And we defend our Christian integrity, “That’s not right—not what we meant.”

However, while we ostensibly know what we mean deep inside our cloistered Bible studies or home groups, outsiders to Christianity only know what they read in a media who despises Christians and showcases Christian leaders linking conservative/deplorable politics to Christian faith.

Who’s to blame for this?

You say, “The media. They are misrepresenting Christianity.” Some would add, “It’s Franklin Graham’s fault. He’s not like his old man was. Jack Graham—no relation—and Wayne Grudem endorsing Trump wasn’t helpful. And Carl Lentz! Jeepers, why didn’t he keep his hands to himself and his pants zipped up. It’s these guys’ fault this has happened to Christianity.”

It’s a fair point—but it’s a point reliant upon a biased media doing right by us and our faith. It’s a point reliant upon Christian leaders representing us accurately to the world. It’s a point reliant upon a fallible man not failing. Corporately, it’s a point reliant upon church leadership to create a stupendous enough program that outsiders will be compelled to come inside our brick and mortar and participate in our program, understand the faith, and become Believers themselves.

The hard truth is this: We Christians are caught in our own trap. Seeking to enjoy a cohesive identity with other Believers, we embrace our enclaves at the expense of being salt and light in a fallen and dark world. My fear is that the negative aspect of Jesus’ metaphor is coming true: “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by people.”

Observing from the outside, my non-Christian friends find Christianity confusing and contradictory, especially as it regards morality and human ethics. Consequently, they find Christianity irrational, immoral, inconvenient, divisive, and duplicitous. In a word, they find Christians and our faith deplorable.

Given their outside assessment and absent an alternative view, I see where they’re coming from. My non-Christian friends are not compelled by Christianity, they are repulsed.

This is not their fault. After all, they are outsiders. They don’t know what they don’t know. How could they?

Unless.

Unless we who Believe and are called Christians come to our senses and realize that staying locked away in our brick and mortar on the corner of First and Main is the opposite of our calling. Retreating into our cloisters of common belief, outsiders look on and rightly assess and evaluate us: Your indifference to society leaves us writhing in lostness, darkness, and hopelessness. We resent you for this.

The outsiders are correct in their assessment. They need Jesus Christ. Intuitively they sense the God-shaped vacuum in their souls and the failure of the world to deliver satisfaction. There is one group of people who claim to have a solution: Christians. But this group aligns itself politically, apparently believes government is the solution to what ails us, and retreats within their walls to study their faith. Outsiders conclude, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”  

The church has made an egregious error. Instead of going, sending, engaging, and being, we are staying, closing, retreating, and disengaging. While we make yet another study of the faith, the world twists around the dark axis of power seeking to destroy our fellow man.

American society is profoundly disconsolate, divided, and degrading. Hope is at its lowest in decades. Social ills are exploding and the ties that bind us are fraying under the duress of the pandemic and the politicians exploiting our “health.”

Christian: There are two takeaways for you:

1) While there are numerous explanations for how American has gotten into our mess, one reason is evident: Society is not influenced by Christianity because Christians have disengaged from society. Society doesn’t know Christianity and is not influenced by Christianity because Christians keep to themselves.

2) If there was ever a wake-up call for the church to reinvent how ministry is to be performed, the call is NOW.

Governments rise and fall and are put in place by God. We are called to pray for those in positions of leadership, but our hope is not that a Christian government will result. Our hope is in Christ and His eternal Kingdom. This life is not our life. Our life is Christ and our future is in Him. This confidence is why we are called upon and able to pray for flawed governments and leaders while relishing an eternal hope that compels disillusioned mankind to investigate how we live and love and hope as we do.

Donald Trump is not the answer to what’s wrong in America. Joe Biden will not make America a moral nation.

Generally speaking, Republicans believe in causes that advance America’s productivity while Democrats advocate for America’s passion—two ideals in constant tension. In a healthy society these ideals argue, negotiate, and hammer out compromises that render the best for all concerned. This is the definition of societal unity.

Christianity is the conscience of society. Christianity is the savor of society and the light that illuminates the path for even those lost in fallen darkness. When we engage society, this is what our influence looks like, feels like, and it is what compels others to take note: You love. You engage. You participate, but you don’t cling desperately to this world as I do. You know something—have something—that I don’t. Why do you love so freely?

It is pointless to be ready “…to give an account for the hope that is in you…” when you cloister your faith within the brick and mortar of your church.

The realization of every Christian should be:

These are the most confusing, disconsolate days I’ve ever lived through as an American.

Maintaining my faith within the sanctity of those who believe as I do is a bold indifference to my fellow human beings. I must, and I must require of those who lead my body of faith, figure out how Christianity is made relevant to a world spinning toward disaster.

I cannot live my faith within walls. I must live my faith outside the walls of brick and mortar. There cannot be, there must not be, any separation between church and state, separation between my faith and my daily life.

With prayer, meditation, and active engagement with others in my community of faith, I will endeavor to discern what my faith has to say about the issues facing my world: abortion, immigration, financial policy, care for the poor, racial harmony, equality, education, law, and the long view of the history of our nation and people. Christ came to seek and save those who are lost. He came to where I was so I might go to where others are. He lives in me. I will follow His lead. Now.

We cannot wait for the electoral college on December 14th or Congress on January 6th. We cannot wait until the virus is no more. God is marching, calling, and seizing upon the strategic advantage of this moment. We are called to participate. Now.

When it comes to the practice of our faith, we cannot do again today what we did yesterday thinking we will realize a different result within society tomorrow. This is insane. Outsiders know it, society suffers it, and it is past time we recognize that the fields of harvest are outside, not inside.

In the confidence and security that are ours in Christ Jesus, we must engage. After all, how shall they know unless we go?

To consider further how Christians interact with society in thought, life, and belief, I refer you to Swagger: Keeping Your Wits When Others Are Not.