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 shoul…