Confessing My Political Idolatry

No one leader or party can save us. This gives me a strange reason to hope.

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I cried at the foot of my bed. I wrote for The Washington Post that I couldn’t defend white evangelicals anymore. I tweeted through the rage. In winter 2017, I attended the women’s march in Chicago and local World Relief meetings about refugees. There seemed to be more at stake politically than ever before. I was newly awake to the importance of political engagement, the bleakness of our new political era. I was grieved by the white evangelical alignment with Donald Trump, a man who has never not been exactly who he is.

Image: “The Golden Calf,” Damien Hirst (2008). Courtesy of Artsy.net

The morning after the 2020 election, well, we didn’t know much of anything. But around noon that Saturday, I began hearing hollers and whoops outside my apartment in Brooklyn. The neighborhood quickly broke out into jubilation. I watched a man proudly march down the street playing the bagpipes. I watched another man walk around with a parrot on his shoulder. Even this seemed like a form of hope, like the parrot was joining in our revelry. Americans, including its parrots, had chosen rightly this time, and we were never going back.

This morning, there was no waiting to learn the election results, as many had predicted. Trump’s second win was clear, decisive, and humbling.

No one’s minds were measurably changed by the extensive evidence against Trump’s fitness for our country’s highest political office. No one who supported him seems to care, or care enough, that he regularly undermines democratic norms and helped foment an attack on the Capitol, faces 34 felony counts, openly lies, is sexually immoral, and sounds forth a stream of verbal garbage that has coarsened our public discourse and deepened the chasm between his supporters and haters.

There is nothing more to be said that will change anyone’s minds. That’s because Americans are living in two different accounts of reality. No amount of lofty, principled arguments from the Never Trump conservatives or the Evangelical Thought Leaders (TM) appealing to winsomeness seem to hold sway. In my view, Trump’s effectiveness is in appealing to two of our basest human emotions: fear and anger. It worked very well, again. We are in the time of the Id.

But, instead of feeling despair or panic, I feel a bit numb. I’m not sure if this is okay. Have I checked out or “spiritually bypassed”? I wonder if it means I don’t care about the direction of the country or my neighbors near and far who will again be negatively affected by Trumpian rhetoric and policies.

The reality is, I do care. I’m grateful that the Trump era woke many of us up to the ways policies bear immediate, material effects on our lives, especially on the most disadvantaged and powerless. But I can’t spend the next four years sounding the alarm against Trump, hoping fellow Christians and Americans will wake up to what seems to me to be clear as day. Those days were exhausting, and they’re over.

I can’t afford to put my emotional, psychological, and spiritual eggs in the basket of national politics. Politics — at least defined as the thing we do ever four years to select Candidate A or B — was never a basket big enough to hold our hopes and dreams for peace, well-being, and flourishing for future generations.

Right-Sizing Politics

Let’s imagine a different scenario for the 2024 election, the one I had hoped for when I mailed in an absentee ballot three weeks ago before leaving NYC for Ohio, jumping from one political bubble to another.

If Kamala Harris had won, I would have felt relief that Trump wouldn’t dominate our news media for the next four years (although, I gotta give it to the man, he manages to sustain main character energy even when no one wants it). I would have been glad that we would not have a convicted felon president; at least enough of us can agree on that baseline requirement. I would have felt assured that we’d have someone who wasn’t beholden to Putin or Elon Musk making decisions with global consequences. I would have felt excited to see the first woman, and first woman of color, in the White House.

But a Harris presidency wouldn’t have lifted the ever-present responsibility in my own life to love the people the Lord has entrusted to me, far and wide; to pray with the church every week for the sick, poor, and oppressed; to resist cruelty and retaliation; to educate myself on local issues that are affecting my neighbors in immediate ways; to volunteer; to love my enemies; to speak up for the cause of the oppressed; and to practice joy that bears witness to another way of being human.

Image: José Luis Magaña/AP

We’re tempted to think that if we just get our person into office, then things will be okay. But our problems today are so much bigger than any political leader or party can solve. Our Big Tech billionaire overlords have colonized our time and our imaginations, with no financial incentive to stop the rapid spread of falsehood, hate speech, and violent pornography. The youngest generation has retreated into a digital world that further disconnects them from the very embodied relationships they need to navigate their ever-complex future. The planet gets hotter, and poor communities the world over are the first to suffer the effects of climate catastrophe. Many Americans have not one friend, not one other person to help bear their burdens.

The Left and the Right offer themselves as the ticket out of this scary future. In his victory speech, Trump said, “God saved me, to save America,” and many pro-Trump Christians are happy to grant him that messianic power. But many Democratic leaders, as good progressives, tend to overestimate human goodness and capacity for change. And Trump’s enemies give him too much power when they claim that he will singlehandedly end democracy and the American experiment.

This is all political idolatry. As

Michael Wear

has said many times over these strange years, political idolatry is when we make something penultimate ultimate, loading human affairs with a moral and spiritual weight they can’t possibly bear. We confess Jesus is Lord, but our hearts and imaginations are occupied by hopes of a triumph or safety through some other way, some other ruler. (My Old Testament knowledge is paltry, but I seem to remember something about God’s people placing their hopes in earthly kings, and how that didn’t work out for them.)

A deeply disappointing election result reminds me, painfully, of where our ultimate hope lies. But the takeaway here is not that politics don’t matter, or that caring about them means you’re worldly or spiritually immature. It’s perfectly okay to feel grief, sadness, and rage in the coming days, just as it’s okay for the people whom I think are deeply wrong about Trump to feel elation and hope.

When we place politics in their right-sized realm, we are more empowered to make a difference in the places we can have the most immediate effect. Voting is political, but so is breaking bread. So is reading to our children. So is showing up to serve at the food pantry. So is praying for an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. So is lending an ear to our elderly neighbor, for whom this may be his only real human interaction of the week. So is driving less and walking more. So is lavish giving and celebrating.

I worry it will come across as the ultimate spiritual bypassing to quote C. S. Lewis at this hour. But this quote, from his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” written in another, scary time, came across my feed a couple times this morning. It gave me a strange hope, and it may give you hope as well:

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

I want to live the next four years doing sensible and human things. There are no guarantees any of this will change much, but right now, it seems like a better bet than being dominated by fear and fury. —KB