Category: Politics

Immigration: Stepping Back and Looking Forward

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(c) Can Stock Photo / jgroup
(c) Can Stock Photo / jgroup

Immigration has been front and center in the presidential election. Much of the objection to Donald Trump has focused on his statements about immigration, like the famous wall that he claimed he will make Mexico pay for. Rhetoric makes for a good news buzz and can stir up strong emotions, but now the rhetoric is fading.

A little bit anyway.

Still, the fear of the immigrants and their families and friends in places like Aurora, Illinois,[1] and other places where large immigrant populations exist is palpable. Those fears are fueled by the Trump campaign rhetoric, which the media played up.

Now that the rhetoric of the election is fading (hopefully), the real business of planning the future is begun. Trump’s actual plans are beginning to be learned (or beginning to be determined, if you are of the cynical kind), and it appears to be deviating from the rhetoric. As the dust settles, it makes sense to take a step back to consider the way forward. Continue reading “Immigration: Stepping Back and Looking Forward” →

An Open Letter to My Fellow Christians

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(c) Can Stock Photo / ishook
(c) Can Stock Photo / ishook

Dear Fellow Christians,

We won the election, but, it’s no time to celebrate. We won, but we also lost our credibility in the process. We helped to vote into office a man that people almost universally dislike for his brash, harsh, insensitive comments. It is the first time in history that xenophobe, racist and misogynist are words used to describe the President of the United States.

I understand why it happened. Trump sought us out. He promised protection for our decaying religious freedoms. He listened to us and courted us. Hillary Clinton vowed to continue the course of this country down a road that we have dreaded, and Trump promised us he would stop that momentum.

Hillary vowed to work to change religious beliefs to conform to official government postures. She gave no inch to the unborn. She portrays a private and public persona, two faces that could not be trusted. She represented the entrenched political machine that has shown us no favors for decades.

But now we need to face the stark reality of our success. Continue reading “An Open Letter to My Fellow Christians” →

The Messy Politics of Labelling

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(c) Can Stock Photo / Bialasiewicz
(c) Can Stock Photo / Bialasiewicz

We live in a society and culture of labels. I’m not sure when that happened. Maybe it’s always been that way. The first experience for most of us likely began on the playground.

Labels aren’t inherently negative, but we learn to use them early on positively and negatively to include and exclude people. We use labels to define desirable groups (like “cool kids”), and we label others to attempt to distinguish and distance ourselves from groups we find undesirable (like “losers”). We use labels as leverage and as weapons.

We become much more adept at labeling as we grow up. The most sophisticated use of labeling, perhaps, is in politics and “the cultural wars”. The terms gays and queers, for instance, are like playground labels compared to homophobes, xenophobes and misogynists. The latter labels were coined as a way of fighting back and gaining societal leverage for a new set of ideals. The labels helped define who was to be excluded from the new ideology.

The words, most of which have existed for eons, took on new meaning as labels, and new words, like homophobe, blazed the way for cultural revolutions by defining the who was in and who was out. Labeling used in this way is quite effective.

The recent election, I believe, underscores the downside of labeling and the ultimate ineffectiveness of labeling when taken to extremes. Labels draw lines in the sand. Labels signify us and them. Labels are also caricatures, like their cousins, stereotypes. Continue reading “The Messy Politics of Labelling” →

What Have We Gained?

While we won the battle for the presidency, I am afraid we may have lost the message of the Gospel.

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(c) Can Stock Photo / FotoVika
(c) Can Stock Photo / FotoVika

I have so many mixed emotions and mixed thoughts following the election that appears to have established Donald Trump as the President elect of the United States of America. As an evangelical, I feel that we won; our voice was heard. But did we?

We elected a man that none of us can trust and most of us can’t stand. We hope that he has changed and is changing, but we don’t know that. There was a rumor that he made a profession of faith back in the spring, and that he is a new Christian, born again and now one of us.

Is that really true? We simply don’t know.

To be fair, we can all relate to the fact that new Christians often continue to struggle with open sin and sinful ways of thinking, acting and talking. When God gets a hold of someone, though, He begins to transform the mind and the heart and the fruit begins to show in the outward life.

I hope that is what has happened and is happening with Donald Trump.

But that aside, while we won the battle for the presidency, I am afraid we may have lost the message of the Gospel.   Continue reading “What Have We Gained?” →

Voting As Sojourners and Exhiles

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canstockphoto14916221
(c) Can Stock Photo

How much of our political motivation is rooted in our desire for an easy life, for familiar things, for things that are friendly to our faith? We need to search our hearts on a regular basis to be sure that we are not following after our own, human purposes and not God’s purposes.

What if God doesn’t see things the way we do?

What if God can be most effective and make the most change in the world and in people’s lives when circumstances are not favorable to the motivations and desires of Christians? What if God’s light shines most noticeably where darkness is greatest?

These are rhetorical questions, of course, and the answers are not often what we want them to be. Continue reading “Voting As Sojourners and Exhiles” →