A Healthy Asceticism
In days gone by, when I would have to drive into work every morning, I made it a practice to regularly flip to National Public Radio, in an effort to gain a holistic understanding of current events. On one occasion, they were running a feature on a young woman who had questioned her left-wing upbringing to become open to voting Republican. It was a forgettable piece, except for one exchange that has stuck with me for the decade since. Getting to know conservatives through her job, the young woman learned to reject their portrayal as evil people by the news (really opinion) media she consumed. Most notably, the interviewer quickly changed the subject to something about current Republican activity the interviewee found cruel, and then led her into affirming a tu quoque on the right’s vilification of the left. I was aghast at how nonchalantly the idea that people who differ on politics are portrayed as evil was discussed. When I think of the current state of our society, this seven-minute NPR piece acts as a sort of mental ebeneezer, a milestone in witnessing what has been a multi-decade national spiritual decline.
It’s a documented fact that, over the last half-century, America has become significantly less religious. To be fair, the depth of mainstream American theology and praxis for the last two centuries, in particular, has been quite questionable, but that’s not as consequential when examining the decline of religion and the rise of politics. We’re dealing with something more dangerous than a loss of theology: we’re in the middle of a crisis of teleology.
Human beings require meaning in their lives, whether they’ll admit it or not; one need only look at how atheistic existentialist philosophers often drove themselves mad and/or abused others, attempting to re-inject meaning into the human experience after having supposedly killed God. Over the last half-century, our nation has, by and large, secularized itself in the same way Europe did in the preceding half-century. That normalization of a wholly earthly, yet conspicuously undefined, telos left a need for some sort of meaning to fill the God-shaped hole left in the collective national conscience. What has filled that gap, more than anything, is a Manichean pseudo-religion of political obsession, which has dangerously normalized viewing half of our image-bearing neighbors as irredeemably evil, something that, within living memory, was only a belief held by the most extreme political actors. This assertion is at direct odds with the true Christian proposition that I myself am fundamentally evil—it’s also where those two centuries of questionable American theology and praxis come into play.
The American Protestant church at large, long lacking not only a robust theology, but a proper sense of piety and asceticism, driven by a centuries-old civil religion of American greatness, and, within the last generation, having political action normalized as the primary response to the secularization of society, rather than fight this Manichean folk religion, has syncretized it. It’s become normal to anathematize other Christians over whom they vote for. It’s become normal to treat non-Christians not as lost brothers, but as existential enemies. It’s become normal to treat political action as the highest form of Christian expression. The average politically-left-leaning American non-Christian, who has no interaction with the faith outside of the media they consume, is not being presented with an eternal, heavenly calling, but merely a competing, extremely vitriolic, political faction.
If that doesn’t make your heart sink into your stomach, then you don’t have a true understanding of the gospel.
I won’t delve into legalism and suggest that genuine Christians must stay out of politics, but I will argue, if you rightly place the gospel above everything and most desire to exhibit the sacrificial love of Christ to your neighbors, you should consider such an action. This new hybrid religion of Cultural Evangelicalism is rapidly becoming an objectively false “Christianity,” with a key value proposition of Solum Politicam. Consider that, under these circumstances, the best thing a Christian can do, in order to present his neighbor with a true expression of the gospel, may be to adopt a healthy asceticism of ignoring politics altogether and filling that time with an attempt to be the hands and feet of Christ, one person at a time.