by Chris Alexion, Copyright February 09, 2006, all rights reserved. 272 views
Remember the game in which somebody says a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind? If we were to play that game with the word "right," I wonder what most people would answer. Would it be "wrong"–as in right vs. wrong–or would it be "left"–as in left vs. right?
As a society and as evangelicals, it's likely that "left" would be the first thing out of our mouths. We've bought the lie that the battle between both sides of the aisle is what really counts, that politics is really what makes things happen and what we really should look to for answers.
It's one thing when we see this mystical trust within the broader culture, with lawmakers crying for more laws and disgruntled seniors demanding that Congress do something about prescription drugs. But when the church, thumb extended, hitches a ride on the same bandwagon, we know there's a problem. As Jon Foreman and Switchfoot point out, "We are broken; we are bitter / We're the problem; we're the politicians."
We, contemporary evangelicals, are the problem. We can't save the world because we don't have the solution ourselves. Instead of preparing the next generation to think in a consistently biblical manner, jettisoning the truncated vision of twentieth-century Christianity, and repairing ruined institutions like the family and the church, we're brown-nosing the political machine, as though it could actually do anything. But the psalmist warned us long ago not to put our trust in princes, or in the son of man, in whom there is no help. The antithesis is not between Republicans and Democrats, nor even between socialists and libertarians. The antithesis is between God-centered thought and man-centered thought; between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
Now all this isn't to embrace an Anabaptistic version of total separation from civil goverment. Civil government is God's "minister," a useful servant that punishes evil and protects the good. To borrow Doug Wilson's words, we trust God that one day politics will be saved.
But politics can never be the savior.
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