Snippet: "Hot and Toxic"

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from an interview with journalist (and practicing Christian) Tim Alberta in Apple News. His latest book is The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

SHUMITA BASU: What does this mean for the political future of the evangelical church? Are we just going to keep marching toward a more politics-based identity for religious groups like evangelicals?

ALBERTA: My fear is that in the short term, yes, we will. The political environment we are in now is so hot and so toxic, and … with social media and with cable news and with the algorithms set up the way they are, even those Christians I’ve met who have been making a really concerted effort to extract themselves from the political hothouse have told me that inevitably they just keep getting sucked back in. It’s really, really hard to stay out of it. So it’s hard to imagine that this moment we’re in is going to fade anytime soon.

I can identify with this.

And I don’t believe the solution is to ignore politics or political conversations. The Bible speaks to all arenas of life, including politics. But it simply doesn’t provide the blueprint for the right political ideology. It provides principles and wisdom that will lead to many common concerns among Christians but an abundance of diversity when crafting political solutions.

I think that part of the problem is that even some of our most theologically and biblically astute public leaders, who take on cultural issues, have so entangled their political ideologies with their theology that they can’t see the entanglement or figure out how to disentangle it. So they keep feeding us the same entangled perspectives with all the power their powerful communication skills and platforms provide.

The results:

• We equate veering from our political ideology in any policy solution to sin.

• We excuse, minimize, and fail to call out bad behavior and ideas proposed by people on “our side.” Yes, you can vote for someone who behaves badly sometimes (i.e., a human being), but let’s not fail to call it out. Let’s not excuse or minimize it.

• We slander those with whom we disagree.

• Malice.

However, it seems that more and more are seeing the entanglement and battling it in themselves.

I’m hopeful.

This is part of what we’re talking about this weekend (as we did last week) in our series on “How to be Christian During the Election.”

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash