July in an Election Year

Last updated on: July 2, 2012 at 10:25 am by Phyllis Tickle

July in an Election Year 2012-07-02T10:25:37-05:00 Phyllis Tickle

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One of the few things in this life that I really do try to

be careful about is the business of proper citation. When I find an idea worth
taking, I am grateful enough not to morph into a ready thief certainly. And
usually…at least so far as I know…I also am pretty good at saying thank-you
publicly several times over to the giver; but I am about to fail. Thus, a mea
culpa of sorts.

At some point over the last few months, I read and copied
out, but failed to record citation on, what I thought–and still think–is a
very pertinent question. It is especially suited, I think, for pondering in
July when many of us sink into some kind of cultural patriotism that often
seems to be more a bouquet of red-white-and-blue clichés than any kind of
mature consideration of what, as a multiform polity, we are supposed to be
becoming.

My question, whose author I have forever misplaced
apparently, is a deceptively brief one. It functions, rather, in the style of
Rob Bell and those incisive interrogatives of his that cut past the heart of a
thing and straight into its very soul. And so, the question: Is politics about
compromise or is it about matters of good and evil?

I don’t know…I have never known categorically…where the line
between the things of Caesar and the things of God rests; but scripturally-speaking,
I have to assume there is one. Were such not the case, our Lord most surely would
not have spoken of two kingdoms, much less made so telling a distinction
between them.

I know also, and again scripturally-speaking, that we cannot,
in the name of the Prince of Peace, continue to use politics as a means for sorting
out, in front of the whole of Caesar’s court, our various and frequently
conflicting sectarian definitions of good and evil. Most certainly, we cannot—must
not–use any of our particularized definitions of good and evil to circumscribe
a shared polity.

In an increasingly glocalized world…and ugly as that neologism
is, it still names accurately the state of things in which we live…in an
increasingly glocalized world, the most urgent and principal Christian calling
of 21st century politics must be the assurance of an American
governance in which we who are Christians are free to be Christian in all the
varied and various ways there are to be that, in which Jews are free to be
Jewish in all the various and varying ways that that faith may be exercised, in
which Muslims are free to follow their varied practices, and likewise Buddhist
and Hindu etc., etc.
Beyond that obvious point and probably because of it, thinking
scripturally about how to speak and vote and influence as Christians in America
today, it seems to me, is really thinking prayerfully about how to live a less
strident, but more efficacious, life of radical concern for loving mercy,
exercising justice in all our affairs and, most important, walking humbly
before our God.

There is one other thing worth mentioning as well, of
course, and that is that when we walk before our God, whether humbly or
otherwise, we walk as well before those of our fellow citizens who, sharing space
and time with us, cannot help seeing. I would even submit, in this pre-election
July, that many of those fellow-citizens of ours are secular watchers who are,
in fact, watching with a hope and a hunger that, as a Christian, I am loathe to
have them become bereft of just because we who are already Christian forgot how
to render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, and unto God the things
that belong to God.

Phyllis Tickle

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