Politics-as-religion

In just a few days the 2020 election will be history. Robin and I haven’t had TV service, i.e. cable or satellite, for 10 years now. We cancelled our cable when Kat joined our family and we just didn’t seem to have time to watch TV. Outside of the occasional baseball or football game we haven’t really missed it. Right now, in this present election cycle, we are glad not to be bringing all the emotion, conjecture and vitriol of the various campaigns into our home and family life.

Not that we are living in a box and unexposed to the news of the world. You are reading this blog post online and a number of the major sites that I visit seem to be saturated with either campaign ads, campaign commentary, or the election-related personal opinions and posts that are shared by my friends. The plus side of following the run-up to the election online is that I get to decide for myself which stories and links I’ll read and listen to, rather than being bombarded, and I mean that quite nearly literally, every time a TV show takes a commercial break.

One thing I did notice recently, which I believe I have seen in past election cycles, is the tendency for politics to be treated as a religion. This seems to happen two ways. One is by the passion, and virtual devotion, of some people to a particular candidate or proposed political position. For example, “This person will have all the answers to the problems of our day, and only he/she will set us on the right trajectory for the future.”

The other way politics appears as religion is with the language some people associate with it. The clearest example I saw recently was someone encouraging people to vote, because it was their “sacred duty.” Sacred duty to vote? Hmmm…

Something that is sacred is something that is set apart for God and his purposes. The sacred should inspire worship of God. That is my definition off the top of my head. I checked an online dictionary’s definition and found that my definition was pretty close and that non-religious usages of sacred are secondary meanings of the term. I’ll grant that voting is important and is an aspect of civic responsibility but I won’t go so far as to use language that elevates it to the equivalence of worship of God. That may not have been the intent of the comment by the person that I saw encouraging people to vote, but it is an example of bringing religious language into the sphere of politics.

Going back to my first example, of the passion and devotion shown by many people towards the candidate and positions in the pending election, I want to say that, from my perspective as a Christian and a pastor, politics makes a poor god and politics cannot save.

The best candidates, for every position in any election, may have many fine attributes. And these same candidates will also have many flaws. The God of the Bible, revealed to us most clearly in the person of Jesus, is holy. He is perfect in every respect. There are no flaws, no weaknesses, no areas that need even the slightest bit of improvement. His holiness is the very thing for which anything that is sacred should point us to. Anyone, or anything, that we might want to give the devotion to that he deserves will most certainly let us down. The Bible tells of many gods, but only One True God. Each and every one of those lesser gods is revealed for what they truly are, which is no god at all. Such is politics when looked on, when worshipped, as god.

And as a corollary, all that we might look to politics as providing the ultimate solutions for, things to save us from, or to lead us to, will also prove to be false. Politics can lead to good, and it has done so in the past, but politics can also lead in ways that even the most ardent advocates can eventually see are wrong. There never has been, and never will be, a political system that results in a universally acclaimed sense of human flourishing. There is a coming day when all will be made right, but it will be at the timing of God, by his power, and for his purposes. You can read Revelation 19-22 to get a sense of how that plays out.

I’ll close with the words of Psalm 20:7, words that point us beyond politics to the One who will never fail us:

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
    but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.