Yes, Vote, but Resist the Political Illusion
By John Stonestreet and Glenn Sunshine - Posted at Breakpoint:
Though all elections have consequences—some more than others—they are moments in time. As such, they reflect more than they determine. Their outcomes matter, at times greatly. Still, these outcomes result from larger trajectories. In other words, elections tend to be downstream from the rest of culture.The fact that this election will be so immediately consequential for so much and so many—for preborn humans and the future of pro-life activism, for children and their parents, for public safety, for education, for the integrity of the republic, for the direction of the world’s wars, to name but a few—is a serious thing to consider. And it reveals the kind of nation we are, and the kind of church we’ve become. All elections are instructive, like mirrors, but this one is like a big yellow “you are here” arrow.
As we await who will be the next to move into the White House, we face the real prospects of a disputed election, of rioting, and of international instability. It’s one thing when a nation largely agrees on where it should be headed but disagrees on how best to get there. It’s another for a people to not only lack a shared vision for the future, but also shared definitions of essential concepts such as freedom, virtue, human dignity, family, citizenship, and marriage. In our country, the factions are not merely misaligned; they are antagonistic.
Christians are in a unique place to offer a way forward. This will not happen if we fall captive to what Jacques Ellul called the Political Illusion. This is the idea that all problems are, at root, political and therefore must have political solutions. Politics has, in our day, overtaken too much of our lives. Everything has been made political. Elections ought not be this consequential. When they are, it indicates a deep crisis of identity and meaning.
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