Holy Cats, Batman!

Holy Cats, Batman! It's really a new post, and only three months in the making. Generally speaking, on any given day I ruminate over at least 50 different topics I could blog about. Clearly, most (okay, all) of them never make the page. However, today's topic has stuck with me following the recent presidential election.

A friend of mine recently passed along the link to this article: Looking for Hope in All the Wrong Places by Penny Carothers. It's a tad long, but I encourage you to take a few minutes to read it. I promise I won't quiz you when it's over...

For those of you who have decided not to read it, fine. Here's the Megan's Notes version. Essentially, Carothers writes about the manner in which the American Church has started turning to politics in an attempt to accomplish its goals and priorities. While there are several important moral issues that have infused themselves into various party platforms, we have reached a point where rhetoric is actually used to tell people that the way they vote is tied to their "level" of spirituality or the depth of their faith. And because of this, our political parties have caught on to the game and they are now using it to take advantage of voters and agendas. Carothers believes the Church needs to return to its own agenda and the directives Christ laid out for us. And we must pursue them by investing our own love, energy, and generosity, not by putting our hopes in the political system to fix things for us.

Now of course, by posting this article I'm not espousing that we should give up on praying for Godly men and women to lead our country, or that we should stop advocating for policies that would affect various issues. That's not it at all. It does matter who we vote for, and we should vote our values and consciences. What I'm saying, and intrigued with, much like Carothers, is how some have developed a reliance on the political system as an avenue to further God's agenda. While opportunities do exist in the political arena, the opportunity to spread the good news of the gospel and share the love of God presents itself every day, not just every two or four years...

Carother's closes her article with this quote from Gregory Boyd's book, "Myth of a Christian Nation," and I shall leave it for you as well:

“How we need to be freed from the illusion that we’re doing anything kingdom by voting a certain way every couple years! How we need to wake up to the truth that we vote for or against the Kingdom every day of our life. We vote by how we spend our money and time. We vote by where we live, who we hang out with, the kind of car we drive and the kind of clothes we wear. In the Kingdom, we vote with our lives, not in a booth expressing our opinion about what Caesar should do.”