I’m not sure of the best way to articulate this, but there’s something big happening in the way our government functions. I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic, and hopefully I’m wrong, but I’m not convinced it’s a good thing, and I don’t yet know what it will mean for those that openly follow Christ in our country.
A little in the way of background: for a long time in our nation, the person occupying the title of President of the United States has come from the political class. That is, they’ve served as a governor or senator before moving into the White House. The Washington insiders have their connections to one another, and have a “I’ll scratch your back if you make it worth my while” mentality. Neither side really places their constituents above the needs of the party, but when the party’s needs align with something their constituents are after, television cameras and reporters are invited to come in and cover it. Elected officials and career hobnobbers working in DC aren’t primarily there for “the good of the people,” they’re there for the perks.
Then in walks a president who’s not from the political class. He’s accustomed to the way things operate in the private sector: if you’re not doing it better than the next person, you’re losing. It’s one thing to think about applying that mentality to the government, but it’s another thing entirely to actually start moving in that direction. Have you ever been at a job when you get a new boss? He or she wants to take a tour…get the lay of the land…see what they’re working with. Well, the outgoing president more or less took that tour, and said “what’s behind this door?” The tour guide said something like “no, no, no, you don’t want to see what’s back there, Mr. President. Besides, we have a luncheon to get to.” But the President walked over and opened the door anyway. When he saw 300 copy machines in a room, and only seven pieces of paper, he said “what in the world is this?” It turns out that the brother-in-law of the college roommate of someone’s representative’s lobbyist owns a copy machine business, and somebody owed them a favor. The next day the news coverage wasn’t on the tremendous government waste, but on the fact that the president went against the wishes of a long-time, highly decorated tour guide who is from a different racial background than he is.
This story is made up, of course, but sort of shows where we’ve been for the past few years. This guy upends the apple cart. He says things that make sense to the average Jane/Joe, but it threatens the good thing that people in DC have going. That brings us to the past few days.
It’s becoming more and more evident that we don’t really have two political parties in DC; we mainly have one class of politicians that enjoy the power and perks that come with DC life. When this guy began threatening their gravy train, they sat up and took notice.
Now he’s the only president to be impeached twice. The first time was for a phone call where he was supposedly abusing his power by trying to take out a political opponent. The second time was for inciting a riot. Call me suspicious on this one, but the event where the president spoke was filmed; why aren’t his “beyond the shadow of a doubt” riot-inducing remarks being played non-stop on major news programs? Isn’t impeachment the top news story of the day? Also, why is it that rioters in Seattle can set fire to police stations (with cops inside), and rioters in Portland, Oregon can destroy, raze, and loot for months straight, but when the other side storms the Capitol for a few hours (which they should not have done, by the way), this is portrayed as the deadliest threat our nation has ever known?
All that is prologue. Here’s where the trouble comes.
Our nation’s leaders are not known for their calm, deliberate, and rational thinking. They whip up support for the things on their agenda, and the loudest voices (not the majority of constituents) more often than not get their way. Right now, what are the loudest voices calling for?
They want the president’s head on a platter, and they want anyone that supported him dismissed as a lunatic, danger to society, and stripped of their voice. There are many ways they’ll try to do this, and they’ll probably be successful at some of them (anyone here have a Parler account?). One of the first things they’re doing is a lightning-fast impeachment of the president. Keep in mind that Congress took eight months or so to agree on sending out $600 checks during the worst pandemic anyone can remember. Now they decided that, with less than two weeks left in his term, the president needed to be impeached again and removed from office. Why not just let him finish out his term, which now has less than a week to go? It seems to me that they’re doing it so he cannot run again for the office in the future. It would be one thing if it was his own party pushing nearly unanimously for impeachment, but it’s something else when the opposite party leads the charge. Using your power to take out your political enemy is, after all, what the president was impeached for (the first time around).
Here’s my concern. During times where emotions are running high, people follow leaders that have zeal. Well, someone is probably going to come up with the zealous idea that “since the president is a horrible person and a danger to society, the people that like him must therefore be horrible and a danger to our society, too. Many of the people that are his supporters also support religious values. Ergo, people that support religious values are dangerous.”
Of course it sounds far-fetched, especially since the freedom of religion is such a highly valued part of our country’s history. You can’t just stomp out churches! So what will happen is that churches will have to say the right things or avoid saying the wrong things in order to be granted certain privileges (like being tax-exempt organizations). If a sermon contains things that the state disapproves of, that becomes a problem for that particular church.
Change is coming. I ask today that you pray for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the individual state governments. Pray that God would be near them all, and that He’d help the new administration govern in a way that honors Him, that they legislate in good faith, and that this nation is calmed while respecting the constitutional rights of all citizens.