The Feeder Project

It’s time for a return to the archives and repost an entry first posted in May 2007. It seems more approriate today than it did then. If I ask myself whether I still feel this way, I might answer: Yes, even more so.

C. S. Lewis is said to have hated conversations about politics. There was no subject that bored him more.

I have great respect for C. S. Lewis; but this was one area where I disagreed with him. I thought that he was dead wrong about this.

At least that is what I once believed. My mind is changing and I’m beginning to understand what I think Lewis hated about political conversations.

I’m guessing, but what I think he hated, and what I am only beginning to hate, is simply this: People derive meaning from politics. But it’s a meaning that is, in the end, meaningless. Politics is a system of identification in America. This is especially true if you are way out on either end of the political spectrum. (There’s identification in the middle of the spectrum, as well–but it’s a different kind of thing and more dangerous.)

Meaning should not come from politics. Meaning cannot come from politics. If meaning does come from politics, it’s false. If your sense of purpose is culled from your voting record, you’re deceiving both yourself and others. Politics as currently practiced is, at its root, deception, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve tried making the argument that politics is neither good nor evil, but I’m afraid that only works in arguments. In practice, politics is most usually evil.

I don’t have time to nuance this further. I’ll let my comments stand as they are, even though what I just said took years to formulate. I realize that I might be—and forgive the metaphor—skewering a sacred cow. If that is the case—if that’s how you feel—and I felt the same way when I first thought about it—then maybe, just maybe, I’m getting close to something that should be discarded.

And my hope and my prayer is that the Evangelical church in America would dispense with all the political wrangling, on both sides, Republican, Democrat and (ha!) Independent.

Someone might object by saying, “Jesus was very political!” and then point to places in the gospels (or worse, to contemporary authors who point to places in the gospels) where Jesus’ politics came to the forefront. My answer, weak as it is, is that Jesus’ politics was not politics in the way we think of politics. This is why he frustrated both the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Jesus didn’t derive meaning from his politics; his political thinking was informed and illuminated by his sense meaning, his purpose, his sense of mission, or whatever you wish to call it. Jesus didn’t rail against one group at the expense of another group; he offended both groups.

But why were they offended?