Thank you for your patronage.  I’ll see you on the new site.

An Interview with Os Guinness about the Evangelical Manifesto

The following is an interview with Os Guinness about the publication of the document, An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment (which I have summarized in a separate post).

While Ellul’s political writings are myriad and many are still in print (or in any used bookstore worth its salt), probably his most eye-opening essay on politics appeared as a chapter to his 1973 book Living Faith, and is entitled “Politics:  The Realm of the Demonic.”  Whether one agrees with Ellul or not, or even understands what he’s saying, his perspective is important when considering the life lived in following Christ, and the current political culture of our society.  The following are excerpts from this chapter of Living Faith.

If evil [in society] has piled upon evil, if the tide of danger is rising, the reason lies in politics and nowhere else.  Politics is the contemporary image of absolute evil.  It is satanic, diabolical, the home base of the demonic.  And when I say “politics,” I am not pointing at the state…The point I want to make concerns those who would conquer and use the state for their own purposes…

Politics is the acquisition of power; the means necessary for getting it, and once you have it, the means for defending yourself against the enemy and so holding on to it.  But what does one use it for — for goodness and virtue?  No, one uses it for power; it’s an end in itself.  And that’s all there is to politics.  All the fine talk about politics as a means of establishing justice, so forth and so forth, is nothing but a smokescreen that on the one hand conceals harsh, vulgar reality and on the other justifies the universal passion for politics, the universal conviction that everything is political, that politics is the most noble human activity, whereas it really is the most ignoble.  It is, strickly speaking, the source of all the evils that plague our time…

Politics is diabolical.  The devil can be the one who divides, separates, disjoins, disrupts communions, brings about divorce, breaks up dialog.  In the Bible the devil is the one who instigates the break between God and humankind…God creates humans free, bidding them govern creation and subdue it.  The devil induces them to declare themselves independent of God’s will, to seek autonomy.  And in the same way he transforms the power given by God into a will to dominate.

This kind of distortion is typical of the way the devil acts, pretending to accomplish God’s work, while transforming it into its opposite…

[S]peaking concretely of society today, what is the father of lies?  It is politics, and I would go so far as to say politics alone…

[P]olitics is the divisive force par excellence.  It is politics, and not economics that causes class divisions and shapes class struggle…

Politics creates nothing…nor does it unify society, make it humanly responsible, or lead it forward.  Politics produces nothing but division and inner conflict…

That’s how politics is; it induces, lures, and provokes people into frenzied conflicts.  It makes us deadly serious about the cause or the doctrine or the opinions that must be defended against those of others…

We hear solemn, grandiloquent political proclamations, but their only real, long-term effect is discord…But for the moment people believe them, with their eyes closed.  Politics makes us totally blind…

It stirs up irreversible conflicts…

When people have dealings with individuals of different color or race, when they meet with strange customs, with curious ways of dressing and acting, it doesn’t necessarily prevent mutual understanding.  People are quite capable of respecting one another.  But as soon as politics seizes on physical or cultural differences, then these become grounds for exclusion, and racism is born.  Racism is always stirred up by politics, making use of natural feelings of antagonism — which were never an absolute bar to coexistence, despite occasional clashes.  Thus politics makes differences murderous, conflicts irreversible, disagreements irreparable.  This is true diabolical discord…

The diabolical has taken on different forms down through history, and currently, the devil, the sower of discord, is politics, and politics alone.  We see it diabolically corrupting the law, lying about justice, arousing false hopes (ever brighter tomorrows), driving people into a labyrinth of hostility.

That is just how the diabolical element operates:  it dramatizes everything; it leads to breaches that can’t be healed; to one hopeless impasses after another.  And it does this by seduction, by promises, by illusions.  We shouldn’t forget that the principal weapon of every political system is propaganda and that propaganda is essentially a lie.  In our time the father of lies speaks through propaganda, which engenders passion and false clarity, burning commitment and inner alienation…

Where in our time do we hear the great accusations that condemn certain persons or groups as absolutely evil?  What plays the role of world prosecutor, bringing charges against a whole class or nation or race?  The answer can only be politics…The satanic is the pure distilled essence of the political.  Gone is any reason or balance, any human consideration at all which might serve as a mitigating force…

How many times have I read the words (which seem to have been written in a trance), “Capitalism is absolute evil”?  The writer is a Christian, as it happens.  But the phrase might just as well have been, “Communism is absolute evil.”  This accusation leaves no room for pardon, for leniency, for conversion.  Once you have been a communist, you can’t change; you remain crushed beneath the weight of the satanic accusation.  The enemy, by definition, has nothing good or admirable about them; the only remedy is to wipe them out completely.  This is the only solution, and it was invented by politics.

No doubt some readers are already objecting, “But aren’t you really talking about religion?”…My answer on this point is direct:  yes indeed, religion has become satanic, every time it has fallen into the grip of politics.  The dreadful part of the Inquisition was not the church’s doing, but the crimes perpetrated on behalf of and often by the state…The Inquisition did not resort to extreme measures until it came under the control of the king of Portugal, the king of Spain, and the republic of Venice.  Excommunication was nothing more than a remedium animi (healing of the soul) until it became a political tool.  And who was responsible for the forced conversions?  Who used violence to convert the Saxons?  Charlemagne.  Who used violence to convert the New World Indians?  The conquistadors…

[J]ust as politics tries to pass itself off as the whole of reality, dethroning God in the process, conversely politics raises accusation to the status of an absolute, thereby counterfeiting — that is, utterly falsifying — divine justice.  So it is no facile literary image but a far-reaching insight into the nature of politics to call it satanic, to view it as Satan’s handiwork…

People always need to feel just, and up till now it has been the task of religion to provide people with the means of self-purification…The great classical religions have disappeared, however, or have lost their power through lack of faith.  But people’s religious needs are as intense as ever…And the only way now available to them to achieve this goal is through accusation, through the political discovery and designation of a scapegoat…

Politics today is indeed the realm of the demonic.  It is the realm of total illusion in our society.  Politics is the art of multiplying false problems, of setting up false goals, and of starting false debates, false with reference to the concrete life of concrete people, false with reference to the actual socioeconomic trends that politics never touches.

Having created this false orientation, politics mobilizes everyone’s energies…

Politics becomes the necessary universal mediator between the individual and society.  Politics offers the only possible way to act upon society as a whole…

In the end, as everyone knows, the modern state claims to be our savior.  We have already made the transition to the state-as-Providence, but now we’ve gone beyond that to the state as dispenser of salvation.  What is actually a lie proclaims its salvific mission — such is the power of evil to disintegrate reality…

A final note:  Of all the writing Jacques Ellul produced on the topic of politics, this chapter in Living Faith is probably the most provocative (and some might say “inflammatory”).  Regardless of whether one accepts Ellul’s conclusion that politics is “diabolical” and “demonic,” his observations about the characteristics of politics have the ring of truth:  that politics heightens divisions, heightens passions, inhibits cooperation and discussion, divides rather than unites, and mutates political opinions and ideologies to a level of quasi-religious dogma. 

Ellul wrote Living Faith some 35 years ago when our political culture still retained a certain amount of civility and bipartisan cooperation.  Since the publication of his book and this chapter, politics has become baser, more rigid, more dogmatic, more divisive, more of a blood sport, and more futile.  Ellul tapped into something and foresaw the condition of politics as it is today.  In other writings (e.g., The Political Illusion, and Hope In Time of Abandonment), Ellul observes that politics has become less about bringing people together, or influencing voters to a particular way of thinking on a variety of issues, but has become the art of dividing the electorate such that your candidate or party gets 50%+1 of the votes in any election. 

If nothing else, voters need to knock politics down a few notches in their own consideration and recognize that “everything is NOT political,” and dethrone politics as something akin to a contemporary religion accompanied by the fervor of self-righteousness. 

The secular world, in its desperate need to find something to believe in, may unconsciously adopt politics as its dominant religion, with some political ideology as its foundational theology, but the church shouldn’t.  The insight that politics has become something of a divisive false religion may not impress the world, but for the disciple seeking to follow Christ, such should be seriously considered, and a new attitude about politics needs to be taken.

Maybe it’s just my impression alone (and possibly an inaccurate one), but I took away from the USA Today article that what really worries Christian right leaders about Obama is that he may get significant support from evangelical voters this election, and what this would mean not to the nation, but to conservative Christian politics.  At worst, this means not simply Obama’s election, but that the power block that some self-appointed Christian right leaders have sought to control and speak for over the past two decades is slipping away from them.  The horror!

We’ve seen signs of weakening within the conservative Christian voting block.  First, despite all the rhetoric about how evangelical Christians make up “the base” of the Republican Party, the candidate who emerged from the crowded field earlier this year is no one’s idea of a champion of religious conservative causes.  In fact, the one candidate who made the most direct appeal to conservative Christians — Mike Huckabee — fell far short the nomination, and except for the early win in Iowa’s caucus, was never seriously considered the frontrunner at any point in the primary season. 

Second, the political/social issues that have been identified with conservative Christians have proven to be both too narrow and too intractable to maintain solidarity.  Take the abortion issue.  Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion-on-demand/abortion-for-convenience, abortion policy in this nation has remained largely unassailed over the past 35 years.  During those 35 years there has been 20 years to pro-life presidencies (Reagan’s, Geo. H.W. Bush’s, and Geo. W. Bush’s), 12 years of GOP control of the House of Representatives, and 16 years of Republican control of the U.S. Senate.  Without a doubt, the passage of a federal ban on partial birth abortion was a significant pro-life victory in Congress, but it’s the only substantial political pro-life victory over the past 35 years.  When one looks at this situation honestly, one must (I would argue) conclude that the solutions to ever-present social problems in America are not political solutions. 

As recently as this spring, I was still maintaining that the election of a conservative president was important for no other reason than to continue to shape the philosophy of the federal judiciary.  But then came the California Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision to give legal sanction to homosexual marriage.  Three of the justices who voted for the decision were appointed by Republican governors, so the idea that Republican-appointed justices can hold back social changes reflective of an ever-increasing post-Christian consensus in society is a vain hope.

Thirdly, an increasing number of evangelical Christians have voiced dissatisfaction equating abortion, gays, and guns as the sum total of Christian social concern.  Many are expressing the need to address issues of poverty, health care needs, stewardship of the environment, humanitarian efforts in Africa and Asia, opposition to war, to name a few, as consistent with their concern as Christians.  Not abandoning convictions over abortion and other social issues that have characterized conservative Christian priorities over the past two-plus decades, many evangelicals are nevertheless concluding that faith can inform a broad scope of issues, and that the old formula that worked in the 1980s through the early years of the 21st Century is insufficient.

Taken together — the failure of social conservatism to overturn the abortion decision, even when that viewpoint (supposedly) held sway in Congress and in the Oval Office; evidence that Republican-appointed justices are no guarantee of maintaining traditional values; the sense that Christian convictions are broader than the issues that have dominated over the past generation; add to this the sense that Christian convictions have been taken captive by self-appointed Christian right “leaders” who have a partisan agenda, and who seem to enjoy the trappings and reputation of power that they have built for themselves, and that a new generation of evangelicals has come of age and are to some degree in revolt over those who would dictate what they are suppose to think– taking all of this into consideration, it isn’t surprising that Sen. Obama is at least being looked at seriously by evangelical voters.  All of this, plus the sense that Sen. Obama is the first Democrat candidate for President in a generation who doesn’t view Christians as “the enemy,” and who respects a faith-informed perspective on politics and the problems that face the nation, means that he’s not viewed as “the enemy” either by a significant number of evangelical Christians.

Regardless of all of this, the truly revolutionary thing in 2008 isn’t for evangelicals to jump the fence and consider voting for a reasonable liberal, but to look at the futility of politics in general, and to apply the walk of faith to addressing human needs outside the realm of politics.  Politics, like the poor and rumors of war, will always be with us, but the growing challenge is to consider that politics is not the end-all/be-all, and wasn’t even within Jesus’ consideration when addressing the needs and pain of a failing world. 

The challenges we face are not political challenges requiring political solutions.  The partisan gridlock in Washington should convince us that no political solutions are possible.  Most of the issues we face in our society are spiritual in nature.  Conservative Christians have failed over the past generation to reverse the trends in an increasingly secular society precisely because they have tried to respond to these trends through politics.  It’s well past time for Bible-believing, Christ-devoted believers to consider what spiritual resources they have in Christ, and begin applying those resources to the challenges in our society.

What I’m referring to is a news item today entitled “Southern Baptists remain wary of McCain,” reporting:

Four years ago, the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign hosted a reception for Southern Baptist pastors at a hotel across the street from their annual meeting.

The country is electing a president again, the Baptists are meeting again and John McCain’s campaign is nowhere to be seen at a gathering of 7,200 people, most of them staunch Republicans.

The absence has some Southern Baptists wondering whether the Arizona senator wants their vote.

Quite honestly, my first reaction was, “Who cares!?”  And that’s a sincere reaction of one who came to Christ in a Baptist church and even chaired that church’s elder board at one point.  It’s no disrespect to Southern Baptists.  But if John McCain isn’t bending over backwards to meet with Southern Baptists, perhaps this signals the end (or the beginning of the end) of Republican politicans pandering to the egos of conservative Christians, giving lipservice to their socially conservative opinions, but then not following through with concrete actions.  I doubt John McCain is intentionally dissing this group, but it seems good news and a sign that McCain may be weaning conservative Christians away from the attitude that they should be putting great importance in politics. 

What do the kingdom and Caesar and the kingdom of Christ have to do with each other anyway?  It seems to me that politics and Christianity in this country have both been corrupted by conservative Christian obsession with politics, and particularly with the necessary ego-stroking of self-appointed Christian leaders that politicians have to engage in each election.  (Are you listening, Dr. Dobson?)  It’s reached the point that some Christian groups in this country seem to have a greater devotion to a political ideology and certain pet issues than they do to Christ.

If I end up voting for John McCain in this election, that vote will not be because I think it the “Christian thing to do,” or because such a vote is the answer to the question, “What Would Jesus Do?”  If I vote for McCain, it will be because I believe he’s the best candidate to protect this nation, to encourage economic stability and growth, and to protect and advance individual liberties at home. 

Advice to Southern Baptists:  Get back to proclaiming and living the gospel of Jesus, and look to Jesus (and not our politics) to save a disbelieving world and revive a corrupted society.

Barack Obama: the new Great Redeemer

First it was Kennedy… now the US media are prostrating themselves before the saviour

 Gerard Baker

 Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet.

In the late 1960s the media placed the halo on Robert Kennedy, the tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil rights credentials made him in life – as he remains to this day in death – a kind of devotional figure for most political journalists.

Kennedy at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that these were by no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was conferred a few years later on Jimmy Carter, the plodding nonentity elevated by a willingly compliant press into Everyman, brandishing his steely sword of Truth against the Manichean mendacity of Richard Nixon’s Republican legacy.

Partly because of the Carter embarrassment, the 1980s were barren years for the idolators. Try as they might, they couldn’t work themselves into much ecstasy over Walter Mondale in 1984 or Michael Dukakis in 1988, though they had little flings with bit-part players Gary Hart and (I kid you not) Bruce Babbitt, a genial former Governor of Arizona.

But by the 1990s a new Democrat, or rather a New Democrat, was come among us, a man the media told us would lift our eyes from our selfish greed and rid the world of the ineffable misery left by 12 years of reactionary rule. It’s hard to imagine now, after the battering he’s taken from his old friends in the press these past few months, but Bill Clinton was once their idol. His cleverly cynical balancing act – promising a return to high-minded tolerance while executing mentally ill prisoners in Arkansas, for example – was lauded as a brilliant synthesising of traditional liberal ideology with the political realities of the modern age.

The alert among you will have noticed by now that what all these spiritually uplifting leaders have in common. They are all Democrats. Never in any of the chapters of this hagiography does a Republican, a conservative, appear in a remotely similar light. These alien creatures by contrast have always been portrayed as cartoonish representatives of the Dark Side of humanity, or, if they were really lucky, simply idiots, failed B-movie actors and irredeemably ignorant hicks with embarrassingly neanderthal views on women, religion and communism.

It’s been a while coming – neither Al Gore in 2000 (before the luminescence created by his recent joint Nobel/Oscar triumphs) nor John Kerry in 2004 quite fit the bill. But it’s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.

You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week’s Newsweek, which was entitled “The O Team”. This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama’s campaign reads a little like a cross between Father Alban Butler’s Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.

Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is always eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high principles and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral politics. I stopped reading after a while but I’m sure by the end he was healing the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the blind and setting prisoners free.

The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom in the media that Republicans have only ever won elections in the past 40 years through lies and fearmongering – smearing their opponents and spreading false fears that a vote for a Democrat would open the country to foreign invasion.

To be fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most shameless phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV channels prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers worship at the altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for the election between Senator Obama and John McCain in November – the Second Coming versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up against the Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona.

There’s a special irony here. Senator McCain is the Republican who has received probably the single most favourable treatment from the media in the past 40 years. He has been a favourite because he conformed to the first law of contemporary political journalism: the only good conservative is a bad conservative. His willingness to defy his party on everything from taxes to global warming, to take on George Bush, has earned him at least an honourable mention in the martyrology of American politics of the past 40 years.

But now that he’s up against Oh! Bama! he will have to be recast in the more familiar Republican mould of villain and scaremonger-in-chief.

This media narrative is not only an outgrowth of the journalists’ natural enthusiasm for a Democrat such as Mr Obama. It is also a clever ploy to pre-emptively de-legitimise any Republican critique of the Democratic nominee. It is designed to prevent Mr McCain from asking reasonable questions about Mr Obama’s strikingly vacuous political background, or raising doubts about his credentials for the presidency.

The idolatry of Mr Obama is a shame, really. The Illinois senator is indeed, an unusually talented, inspiring and charismatic figure. His very ethnicity offers an exciting departure. But he is not a saint. He is a smart and eloquent man with a personal history that is startlingly shallow set against the scale of the office he seeks to hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary, to scrutinise his past and infer what it might tell us about his beliefs, in the absence of the normal record of achievement expected in a presidential nominee.

If the past 40 years have taught us anything they have surely taught that premature canonisation is an almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment.

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He—or she—is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

Perhaps we should retitle the office “The Supreme Oprah.”

This perspective on the role of our Chief Executive is tantamount to rank idolatry.  It also makes practical governance nearly impossible.  We — the American people in general, both those on the left and on the right — have placed upon the Presidency expectations that cannot realistically be achieved.  It’s more evidence that in our secular society, where politics has become the supreme religion, the President has become the High Priest.

God help the person elected President in 2008.  With the high expectations we place on our Presidents, whomever takes office in January 2009 will have to exercise great skill not to be perceived as a failure.

Young, evangelical … for Obama?
By Haley Edwards
May 11, 2008
Seattle Times staff reporter

Michael Dudley is the son of a preacher man.

He’s a born-again Christian with two family members in the military. He grew up in the Bible Belt, where almost everyone he knew was Republican. But this fall, he’s breaking a handful of stereotypes: He plans to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.

“I think a lot of Christians are having trouble getting behind everything the Republicans stand for,” said Dudley, 20, a sophomore at Seattle Pacific University.

Dudley’s disenchantment with the GOP isn’t unique among young, devoutly Christian voters. According to a September 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 15 percent of white evangelicals between 18 and 29, a group traditionally a shoo-in for the GOP, say they no longer identify with the Republican Party. Older evangelicals are also questioning their traditional allegiance, but not at the same rate.

But, Howard Dean, don’t count your chickens quite yet. College-age and 20-something Christians may be leaving the GOP, but only 5 percent of young evangelicals have joined the Democrats, according to the Pew survey. The other 10 percent are wandering the political wilderness, somewhere between “independent” and “unaffiliated.”

(Read the full article here. )

Well, so much for “the base.”

I could have told the geniuses in the GOP that following the old guard of the religious right was going to be like following a bus off the cliff this year. The old guard evangelicals weren’t going to deliver this election to the GOP. I knew it. A good number of other people knew it, but clearly not enough people in places of influence to get anyone’s attention.  We argued that conservative evangelical voters would do well to put their social issues into perspective with the rest of what makes up the concerns of the real world, and nominate someone like Rudy Giuliani, someone for whom we’d get our conservative courts, but who could appeal to the decisive middle. McCain’s probably the next best in that regard, but a new generation of evangelical voters is coming of age, and the old cranks like Dobson, et al, just can’t deliver any more.

From the article — a quote from a seminary student:  “I just keep thinking, if Jesus were alive now, he wouldn’t necessarily be voting Republican.”

Someone should tell this young man that Jesus IS alive now…isn’t that the cornerstone message of the gospel?  What are they teaching in seminary these days?

Aside from that, I sincerely doubt that Jesus puts much value in American political activism in the early 21st Century. He didn’t during his earthly ministry. WWJD? Probably what he did about 2000 years ago — preach the kingdom of God, address the ache and pain of the human heart, call people to himself, raise the spiritually dead. I’ve long maintained that, hey, give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s — vote your convictions, install a government that is at least benign and does little harm — but don’t look to government or politics to institute the “kingdom of God.” It’s a false hope.

Greg Alterton

From the jacket of the 2003 book Political Visions & Illusions by David T. Koyzis: 

The end of the Cold War has brought about more than the triumph of some political ideologies and the disappearance of others. In fact, the collapse of communism has created a vacuum quickly being filled by various alternative visions, ranging from ethnic nationalism to individualistic liberalism.  But political ideologies are not merely a matter of governmental efficacy.  Rather, political ideologies are intrinsically and inescapably religious — each carries certain assumptions about the nature of reality, individuals and society, as well as a particular vision for the common good.  These fundamental beliefs transcend the political sphere, and the astute Christian observer should thus discern the subtle ways in which ideologies are rooted in idolatrous worldviews.In this comprehensive study, political scientist David Koyzis surveys the key political ideologies of our era, including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democracy and socialism.  Each philosophy is given careful analysis and fair critique, unpacking the worldview issues inherent to each and pointing out essential strengths and weaknesses.  Koyzis concludes by proposing alternative models that flow out of Christianity’s historic engagement with the public square, retrieving approaches that hold promise for the complex political realities of the twenty-first century.  Writing with broad, international perspective and keen analytical insight, Koyzis offers a sound guide for Christians working in the public square, culture watchers, political pundits and all students of modern political thought.

From the Introduction:  “Ideology, Religion, and Idolatry.”

So what is an ideology?  At this point I shall tip my hand and indicate that I view ideologies as modern types of that ancient phenomenon idolatry, complete with their own accounts of sin and redemption…Ideologies attempt to offer a total explanation for the world and its history and thus all ideologies contain totalitarian elements.  They read the whole of reality through a single idea and deny the possibility that any genuine knowledge can be attained through experience apart from that idea.  In contemporary parlance, they exempt themselves from a “reality check.”  It is a short step from ideology to totalitarianism…

[Ideology] attempts to eliminate different interests and to mold the people in accordance with a single idea.  It tries to simplify the complexity of society into a monolithic vision…Politics is content to make do with the existing state of society and to conciliate whatever interests are currently there.  Ideology attempts to remake, not only government, but education, industry, art, even domesticity and private affections… 

For [Czech Republic President Vaclav] Havel, ideology threatens not only politics but also the ordinary aims of life itself…In what he labels the “post-totalitarian” societies of the former Soviet bloc, ideology claims to offer the people a sense of identity and dignity while in reality stripping them of this.  “It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality,” [Havel writes].  It contructs a world which assimilates all people into a self-contained alternative pseudo-reality in which slavery passes for liberty, censorship for free expression, bureaucracy for democracy, and arbitrary power for legal authority…[P]eople are compelled to “live within a lie”… 

Christians are, of course, concerned with truth, both in absolute and relative senses.  Truth is an attribute of God, and Jesus calls himself the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6)…If…ideologies represent fundamentally flawed conceptions of the world, then we Christians are obligated to take them seriously and to try to discern in exactly which ways they go wrong…I shall concur with the tradition that sees ideology as a type of false consciousness, and will argue further that it is rooted in the biblical category of ideology…

I believe a case can be made that those phenomena normally classified as ideologies do indeed originate in idolatrous religion.  These include liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, ideological democracy and socialism, among others… 

[A] precondition contributing to the rise of ideologies is the secularization of the Christian faith and of the cultures…  Used here…secularization means nothing less than the increasing rejection of the Christian faith by a society as a whole…

[I]deologies are inescapably religious…  It…might be more accurate to say that an ideology flows out of the (idolatrous) religious commitment of a person or community…

Idolatry takes something within God’s creation, attempts to elevate it above the boundary separating Creator from creature, and makes of it a kind of god….[I]dolatry further tries to bring the rest of creation into the service of the invented god….

[E]veryone serves a god of some sort…[E]veryone is transformed into the image of the god she serves…[P]eople structure their society in their own image…

[E]ach of the ideologies is based on a specific soteriology, that is, on a worked-out theory promising deliverance to human beings from some fundamental evil that is viewed as the source of a broad range of human ills…”The mature ideology is a false revelation of creation, fall and redemption.”  Christianity sees Jesus Christ as the source of salvation; the ideologies see salvation coming to us through, for example, the maximization of individual freedom, the communal ownership of all wealth, the liberation of the nation from foreign rule, the submission of individuals to the general will and so forth…

[T]he ideologies tend to locate the source of this fundamental evil somewhere within the creation…Thus the ideology can be seen to partake of that ancient heresy of Gnosticism, for which the physical world is deemed intrinsically sinful, and salvation is viewed as deliverance from its supposed confines…

[I]deologies have a fundamentally distorted view of the world, and hence of government and politics.  This distorted worldview has tremendous consequences for political practice, because people inevitably live out their religious worldviews.  Because the followers of ideologies see the world as not belonging to God but to themselves, they misunderstand the character of the world…

[Ideologies] are…rooted in the predominant secular belief in human autonomy, according to which human beings determine the course of their own lives without reference to God’s will…   [T]hese goals themselves become gods to which ordinary flesh-and-blood people may have to be sacrificed…

[T]he heart of the argument of the book…is that it is possible to transcend the ideologies and to embrace a spirit more compatible with the Christian understanding of creation, fall and redemption…We…will argue…for a biblical – and hence creational and redemptive – understanding of politics and its place in God’s world.  We shall, in short, offer an alternative vision – one which, it is to be hoped, will take us beyond the reductionisms and idolatries of the ideologies insofar as it offers a truer and fuller account of the world and of politics…

The fact that this rush of evangelical support never materialized leads one to question both the ability of some evanglical “leaders” to accurately discern Thompson’s apparent weaknesses, and to question why Thompson was being pushed on evangelical voters in the first place.

At the time, news of the predicted muscle-flexing by conservative Christian leaders for Thompson was not met with universal excitement from all conservatives. A comment posted on a conservative discussion forum bemoaned the efforts of certain Christian leaders to play the role of kingmakers, stating that American churches haven’t been “doing their job and have, in a way, tried to put the responsibility onto the government to revive morals in the nation, using government for social engineering.”

I’ll go even further, and analyze it from a theological perspective. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Once abolish the God, and government becomes the God.”

Our society has become increasingly secular, and increasingly atheistic (if not in conviction, at least in practice). This secular humanism has its most comfortable home in such leftist ideologies as socialism and Marxism (or socialism-lite…the American Democrat Party).

Many on the left, as they jettisoned the God of the Bible, didn’t jettison God, per se, but adopted a new god — namely, the state — with politics as their religion, and politicians as the priesthood. In this analysis, Ann Coulter was correct in her book Godless. But what Ann failed to recognize is that many on the right have also “deified” the state, and have opted for politics as a more powerful religion. And, both sadly and ironically, most of those on the right who have followed the contemporary culture in its adoption of a political religion belong to the “Christian right.” They look to government to do what only God can do: change hearts and change lives. They’ve given up on the power of prayer and the power of the Spirit (if they ever truly believed in it), and have opted for the power of the state and the influence of politics to accomplish what Christian religion in this country hasn’t accomplished — a reformation and revival of morals.

So, the Richard Lands and Tony Perkinses are guilty of idol worship in a sense — paying homage to the new god of this age, the god of secular humanistic liberalism, namely, the state, and politics through which the power of the state is wielded. And like every worldly Christian down through the 2000 year history of the church, they are blind to their mistake.

These folks have outlasted their positive usefulness. The late Jerry Falwell was on to something when he formed the Moral Majority in the late ’70s. His goal was to get pietistic Christians to start considering that they have a responsibility to apply their faith and convictions to the political realm. And millions of Christians who had avoided politics and political involvement began to do just that. They were instrumental in helping elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.

But those who came after Falwell and tried to build upon what he had started never took this Christian interest and involvement in politics to the next level…helping people to think for themselves, and apply their faith in an intelligent way to their responsibilities as citizens. Instead, organizations such as Land’s, and Perkins’s Family Research Council, created a dependency of sorts, establishing themselves as the “spokesmen” for conservative Christians, and seeking to attract followers of their organizations, not enabling Christians to think critically for themselves as they integrated their faith with their political actions. So, they’ve largely created a constituency of “sheep,” and now they, as self-appointed leaders, “speak” for conservative Christians. Put more bluntly, they’ve adopted the faddish idol worship of politics and the power of the state as means to achieve what they view as a positive Christian agenda.

The Republican Party needs to be freed from a slavish devotion to self-appointed Christian opinion leaders. People of faith should certainly think for themselves and apply their convictions to their political actions, but I do not believe that Christians should delegate their thinking to self-appointed leaders like Richard Land and Tony Perkins. Just as politics should be freed from the influence of statist religionists on the right, American Christianity needs to be freed from a worship of politics and the state.

Greg Alterton