A Cultural Thermostat

By the end of this week, we should know the identity of the 47^th President of the United States. Surely, many Americans will be celebrating.

• But what will be the response of those whose candidate loses the election?

• How can we anticipate anything short of anarchy when each campaign has sought to so completely vilify the other candidate?

They have spent months seeking to convince as many Americans as possible that there will be hell to pay if the other candidate wins.

• Now, do we just expect all those voters to simply forget those messages and walk away?

• Do we expect the fear that’s been building across a broad swath of America to simply dissipate when the election is over?

• Or are we prepared for the desperate expressions of those who think their worst fears are becoming reality?

I believe in American democracy. I certainly don’t think it’s time to replace it with another form of government. Though, there’s work to be done. Our election process is broken.

We’re quick to point to accusations of voter fraud and what I’ll call backend issues. But I think the problems are on the front end. Something has gone awry with our process for selecting candidates even before, or in this case without, the primaries. The two major parties no longer concern themselves with identifying the statesmen most prepared to serve as President, but rather they seek the politician most well-funded and capable of winning, regardless of whether he or she is prepared to lead our nation.

In an ideal democracy, the candidates would be proven statesmen/women of high character and ideals who simply disagree on how to best lead our nation. We would have a choice between multiple competent candidates representing opposing views. Today, just a day before the election, with many votes already cast, we’ve been given countless reasons to distrust each candidate and very little about how either will lead. So, by design, fear rules the day.    

As a believer, it’s easy to feel helpless, to blame the culture. By focusing on macro or large-scale issues without actively initiating individual relationships and personal conversations, the church has invited accusations of bigotry and hypocrisy. We’ve replaced personal expressions of grace, love, and outreach with broad, sweeping comments and even implicit threats on social media. Most Christians are exponentially more likely to share a social media post presenting a Christian perspective on an issue than we are to invite an unbeliever to a church service or even into a personal conversation about God. Yet, we call these public stances, “following Jesus.”

In response, the world has learned to flip the script and go after individuals rather than institutions using shame, slander, and intimidation. It seems that while the church focuses on the broad issues, our worldly counterparts, perhaps unknowingly, heed Jesus’ warnings that good and evil arise from within individual hearts rather than simply from the masses.

Our culture is being changed by personal intimidation and coercion, and rather than trusting God to work through the spiritual fruit of the One indwelling within each believer we’ve backed ourselves into the proverbial corner thinking we have but two options -

1. to follow the lead of the opposition and let them dictate the means of engagement

2. or to choose the safer and more respectable approach of boldly proclaiming our stances on issues through social media, “unfriending” those who disagree.

With either approach, we abandon the greatest spiritual weapons we possess to fight with the native weapons of our enemy. Then when we can’t seem to beat them while letting them set the rules of engagement, we simply double-down on our efforts. Wisdom and faithfulness have become endangered species in American politics.

Somehow, we’ve bought into the lie that the church is simply a thermometer reflecting the moral temperature of society. That’s a convenient cop-out. Since the forming of our nation, the church has served as a cultural thermostat rather than a thermometer. Every significant cultural moral breakdown in our fledgling history has been preceded by a similar breakdown within the church.

We are not fighting the current of the culture. We are forming it. Selfishness, deceitfulness, malice, envy, greed, and lust are reflections of who we are long before they become societal ills; and they do the most damage when birthed in the hearts of believers.

Why?

Because believers know that only God can change our human nature. If believers seek scapegoats to justify our own sins rather than accepting personal responsibility with God’s grace, we are setting a standard that unsaved people cannot hope to correct or overcome. Again, only God can change our human nature. When the church strays from God, the world follows suit and perfects our sin.

So, if we, as believers, point to the foul play of our political opponents as justification for our own nastiness, we put in motion a cycle that only Jesus can change while compromising the very means – the church (us!) – he put here for intervening.

It’s akin to blindly thumping the thermostat in one direction or the other and then getting angry about the temperature. If our cultural direction is going to change, it will have to start with the church following Jesus into the fray and doing and speaking as he did in the Gospels. I pray we’ll each keep this in mind, as one’s candidate wins or loses this week.