I’m feeling quite under the weather today, but I found myself a bit amazed that I completely agreed with Dan Phillips at TeamPyro – in two articles, nonetheless! – on the subject of religion in politics.
Religion is stacking up to be quite the topic during this election cycle. When questioners bring up the matter of religion, or try to pursue it very far, one of the common preferred responses is, “My religion is very private. I keep it separate from my politics. My religion will not influence me one way or the other in office.”
What’s surprising about this paint-thin response is how often it works. I suppose we can thank the mainstream media’s abysmal ignorance of and incuriosity towards religion or philosophy for that.
This response — if it means anything at all — can only mean one of three things:
- The speaker is a liar
- The speaker is a hypocrite
- The speaker can’t rub two live neurons together
Here is my premise: all men are religious, and all worldviews are religious worldviews.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that Dan stole Rob Bell’s notes from last year’s Everything is Spiritual tour. Regardless, he has some good observations on the topic of candidates who try to distance themselves from their religion…
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They state the obvious. And yet they will still vote somehow surmising their candidate is slightly better or they are not electing a pastor just a president. The nickel/spittoon metaphor is most applicable here as well both in the political arena and the mother blog that spawned the post.
Is it wrong that I laugh everytime someone brings up the nickel/spittoon thing? Because I do. Also, how did that become one of our memes?
The mental imagery of seeing a wet, sticky nickel inside a spittoon is striking and unfolds the quite nicely the meaning and application of that metaphor. I heard it many years ago from a preacher in the pulpit. I stole it from him but since he is with Christ I don’t think he minds!
Wow.
Carl Jung can propound this “religious” view, Radical Orthodoxy asserts “everything is theology”…but for some it’s just not OK until the “right person” says it.
I do think he had some good thoughts…
But it makes me think of something else:
I think that a big problem with many christians is that if they don’t like the packaging of any given thing then they reject the content.
Here’s a little story to illustrate: I used this in a sermon.
It’s like I walk up to you with a plastic grocery bag.
I say: There is a gold bar in this bag. I want to give it to you.
You say: No way. There is no possible way someone would put a gold bar in a plastic bag.
Pyro, Ken, Ingrid, or whoever walks up.
They open a wood box with a velvet interior made in 1845:
In the middle is a gold bar.
They say: I have a gold bar for you.
You say: Wow! A Gold bar FOR ME?!?!? Thank you!!!
This guy here says he has a gold bar too! What a fool!
The PyroKengridic machine says: What?!!? In a plastic bag?
There is NO gold bar in there! Gold bars NEVER come in plastic bags!
I show them my gold bar and explain that my box from 1973 was smashed earlier, but I know I still have to give the gold away.
They all say: That is fake. No self-respecting tender of gold bars would ever carry it in anything but a wood box from the 1800’s! YOu are not of the golden guild. You are not one of us.
You are perverting the traditions of 19th c. gold stewardship. The fact that you had a ’70’s box in the first place is suspect anyway. It’s about the box!!!!! The Great GoldSmith gave us these boxes!
And then they proceed to bash you in the face with their gold bars.
When you cry out that your nose is broken and bleeding. They all accuse you of being angry, divisive and trying to make them look bad, because everybody knows that the Goldsmith only intended gold bars to be in 19th c. boxes. (never mind that the gold bars were first given almost 2000 years prior.)
The end.