Dear Friends of Jesus:

We’re about to face a barrage of information and spin reminding us that an upcoming election is an existential choice, perhaps the most important election of our lifetime. Unless you count all the other elections on which hinged the future of Western civilization itself. Safely banking on our faulty short-term memory or our susceptibility to national frenzy, those who profit from fostering voter turnout are stoking the engines of anxiety for us to fall once again for the dominance of politics above all other spheres of human consideration. The key motivator which will have us again at each other’s throats is the demonizing of the other. Campaign propaganda will serve to ratchet the otherwise banal choice between politicians to a fevered religious pitch in which ‘God’s choice alone’ looms clear. Over the past several decades, the amplification of political anxiety has reached such a pitch that perhaps the greatest political sin is indifference fueled by the twin vices of empathy and compromise.

Simultaneous with increased political hostility has been a corresponding deterioration of religious participation. While religious language seems to permeate every electoral conversation, thoughts of religious transcendence seem to have been drug into the gutter of identity politics. Words like love, freedom, liberation, compassion and goodness no longer seem to apply to the aspirations of all humankind and are instead reserved for the in-group of our political identities. Even Jesus has been ripped off the cross and asked to weigh in on the electoral tensions between righteousness and welcome. His identification as a ‘friend of sinners’ seems to exclude any companionship with the obvious sinners across the aisle.

I am inclined to agree with conservative commentator John Hart’s observation in 2017 that both the right and the left have failed to recognize how politics has zipped into the vacuum created by faith’s withdrawal from the public sphere. In a 2017 article for Forbes Magazine, Hart wrote, “Liberals need to ask themselves: Why do so many on their side who believe they’re enlightened and post-religious use progressive fundamentalist religious rhetoric to advance their views? Conservatives, meanwhile, need to ask traditional believers whether they really believe the author of string theory and the designer of DNA needs an extra vote in the Senate to orchestrate change?” My major disagreement with Hart is his reduction of political division into only two camps, right and left. I fear that politics, like Christianity, is fragmentating into a thousand denominations of carefully curated intolerances. And, like Christianity, while ‘true believers’ defend their superiority over the apostate, the real work of God’s grace remains unconsidered 

It was psychologist Carl Jung who posited a religious instinct driven by a collective unconscious, a residue of ancestral experience that drives humans to seek transcendent religious expression (1916). Emile Durkheim disagreed with Jung, suggesting in 1917 that religious instinct was driven by the complexity of human social engagement. Still, regardless of where it comes from, humans are a religious lot. As Talcott Parsons observed in 1971, “There is no known human society without something which modern social scientists would classify as religion.” My thought is that wherever identifiably religious institutions deteriorate, the human drive for religious meaning cannot help but to sprout up somewhere. These days it’s growing like weeds all over the political landscape.

Of course, as a preacher I’m aware of the deep temptation to join the fray and politicize from the pulpit. As I’ve mentioned before whenever someone accuses me of being too political, it tends to be a euphemism for their not liking my politics. So, I am dedicated to the hard work of not degenerating the Gospel into another version of polarizing party rhetoric. I honestly hope to preach that which is transcendently true as expressed in our Christian faith rather than put my theological thumb on the scale of my preferred policies. But as I endeavor to stay in my lane, I respectfully ask politicians to do the same.

Praying that politics ceases to reside where faith should abide, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor