Dear Friends,
Indulge me a little political punditry.
Sometimes politicians and political parties are their own worst enemies. It might be more accurate to say they are always their own worst enemies. After the 2020 election I thought that if President Biden and Co. would just govern as a moderate “return to normalcy” administration they’d have a good chance of solidifying their electoral gains for years to come—not at all my hoped-for turn of events, but one I certainly worried about. My fears were unwarranted.
Somehow winners of elections can delude themselves into thinking they have some kind of transformational mandate even where no evidence of it exists. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump because enough people wanted Donald Trump gone, period. There was no great groundswell of love and support for the Democrat Party and its policies. Don’t forget so quickly that while Biden fairly narrowly defeated Trump, the Democrats were basically wiped out everywhere else down the ballot. And the Georgia Senate run-off victories weren’t anything to brag about, either; MAGA world decided to hand the Senate to the Democrats because enough of them decided to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
So, naturally, Joe Biden pretends he’s the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and promptly starts spending money faster than we can print it. Well, that by itself won’t hurt him because Republicans haven’t cared about fiscal responsibility for a very long time. But stuffing another $2 Trillion “infrastructure” bill with mountains of Democrat wishlist “goody bags,” most of it having nothing to do with infrastructure, might prove problematic.
Then he intimates that Georgia’s new voting law is some kind of return to Jim Crow and encourages MLB to move their All-Star Game out of Atlanta, which they dutifully do, angering Georgians and probably handing one of those Senate seats right back to the Republicans next year.
Next, he does the worst thing a politician can do, particularly a politician with razor-thin majorities: start floating ideas and plans that have zero chance of success, but that nevertheless energize and motivate your opposition.
Abolish the filibuster! Senators Manchin and Sinema have resolutely refused to support this, making it a dead issue. But it does enrage the opposition and motivate them to retake the Senate.
Pack the Supreme Court! Joe Biden knows this has little chance of happening, which is why he’s established a “bipartisan commission” to “study” the issue, which is what you do when you want to throw a bone to the rabid fringes of your base without actually attempting anything. But the real effect of floating this idea is to… enrage the opposition. It’s also designed to threaten and bully the Court (“Nice little club of nine, you have there; it’d be shame if anything happened to it”), which is a weird thing to do when you’re going to need some rulings to go your way.
Executive action on guns! Oh, my. First of all, it would take some monumental legislation to get anywhere near where Democrats want to go: the banning of all scary-looking guns and standard-capacity magazines. There’s very little chance of that happening. So instead he does the next worst thing: start floating ideas that will do almost nothing about gun violence (propose some new rules on pistol braces, and even then not ban them but slap a $200 tax on them!?), but will certainly motivate and energize the opposition—gun enthusiasts being some of the most motivated and energetic voters alive. They don’t take too kindly to being made felons by fiat.
And I cannot help but continually marvel at this irony. Nobody—and I mean nobody—sells firearms like Democrat politicians. I don’t know if you’ve been in the market for a firearm recently, but in the midst of all the rhetoric about “defunding the police” and outright firearm bans Americans have been on a gun-buying binge the likes of which we’ve never seen. Store shelves are empty. The demand is unprecedented. And not just in Hickville, either. Manufacturers cannot make them fast enough—most, if not all, high-end boutique suppliers have year-long waiting lists. Ammunition is almost impossible to find, and if you can it costs over twice what it did last year and you’d better not blink or it will disappear before your eyes. A gun shop employee putting a case of ammo on the sales floor resembles a U.N. supply truck dropping a sack of rice in a starving village. Whatever you think about gun policy, it does not seem like good politics to me to engage in rhetoric that exacerbates the very thing you’re ostensibly against (gun proliferation) or to float marginal and probably useless policies that only energize your opposition. Turn down the temperature, perhaps?
But, no. Everything is designed to turn the temperature up to the maximum degree. No interest in anything that even looks bipartisan, no interest in moderation at all. It’s a longstanding tradition in American politics to predict “generational” majorities—that’s always what parties are after, after all. But this is why they never happen. Parties just cannot help themselves.
I expect our polarization to produce a continued and very heated electoral tug-of-war for the foreseeable future.
Persevering Faith
“Deconstruction” used to be a reference to postmodernist linguistic philosophy, but its got a new meaning. It now refers to the process of Christians, some of them somewhat high profile, “deconstructing” (i.e., shipwrecking) their faith. It is becoming something of a trend or fad, and one of the features is to lose your faith publicly, in real time, on social media. You become very popular with a certain segment of society if, having defected from the faith of your youth, you embrace a new career of trashing it after you’re outside the doors.
You may be familiar with some examples. One-time bestselling Christian author Josh Harris deconstructed a few years ago. Last week Paul Maxwell, a contributor to The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God Ministries, announced that he is no longer a Christian. And the New York Times reports the newest TikTok sensation: Abraham Piper. You might know that name because his father is rather famous. He’s taken to trashing his father’s faith on social media. I can’t imagine the pain. The 5th Commandment is holy, just, and good, folks. Honor your father and mother.
There is no “autopilot” button in the Christian faith. Christians live in a time of fundamental tension, between two worlds. The Bible calls it “this age” and “the age to come.” Our salvation is something we possess already, right now, by virtue of our union with Christ, but it is also very much “not yet”—it awaits the consummation of the end. And there is, indeed, a path or road from the one to the other. It is the way of faith; not some kind of mental assent to the truths of Christ, but a wholehearted and active devotion to Christ. It is a “standing firm to the end” (Matt. 10:22). It is “holding firmly the beginning of our confidence until the end” (Heb. 3:14). It is a “remaining in the vine” (John 17). We instinctively want a place to rest; to kick back and relax. Instead of daily taking up our cross and following Christ, we’d rather just hit the autopilot button and rest in our presumed security. But you know what? People deconstruct. People stumble before their race is over. Yes, I know that sounds surprising coming from a died-in-the-wool Calvinist like me. But the Bible (and, subordinately, Calvinism!) certainly teaches this. Genuine faith is persevering faith. This is why calling it the doctrine of the “Perseverance of the Saints” is far to be preferred to the watered-down cheap-grace version known as “Eternal Security of the Believer.”
The awful and sobering thing we need to contend with is that unbelievers can experience such graces of the gospel and kingdom of God that they are well-nigh indistinguishable from genuine faith. Listen to John Murray:
The epistle to the Hebrews…speaks of those ‘who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit and tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come’ (Heb. 6:5-6). It staggers us to think of the terms of this description as applicable to those who may fall away. They advise us, however, of forces that are operative in the kingdom of God and of the influence these forces exert upon those who finally demonstrate that they had not been radically and savingly affected by them [….]
The Scripture itself, therefore, leads us to the conclusion that it is possible to have very uplifting, ennobling, reforming, and exhilarating experience of contact with the supernatural forces which are operative in God’s kingdom of grace that these forces produce effects in us which to human observation are hardly distinguishable from those produced by God’s regenerating and sanctifying grace and yet be not partakers of Christ and heirs of eternal life.
If this produces a pang of anxiety for you, good. That is the point of the warnings and exhortations in Scripture—they are means that God uses to motivate and encourage us to persevere. We are to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12), “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith” (Heb. 12:1-2). There is no rest in the Christian life, unless it be complete and utter rest in the work of Christ for us and in us.
We feel great anxiety about this question: will I persevere to the end? Let me encourage you. When we consider that question, most of us tend to think in huge timeframes: decades and decades. We look to the future, the “race marked out for us,” and think it is a marathon. But who said it’s a marathon? Your race could end an hour from now, or tomorrow, or next week. You do not know your time. God is not calling you to gin up a supply of endurance beyond what he wants from you right now. And part of God’s grace and faithfulness is to supply all your needs. You think of future challenges and despair (“What if something happens to my child?” “What if I get cancer?” “What if…”) because you don’t think you’d be up for them, based on how you feel right now. But God will supply what you need when you need it; genuine faith is a faith in that promise, too!
It occurs to me, ironically, that none other than John Piper wrote a book about this very thing.
So when you see a high-profile person “deconstructing” their faith in public, your first response should hardly be haughtiness and pride in your own perceived security. Rather, each of us should first look to our own affairs and examine our own life with fear and trembling, and repentance and hope.
“And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day” (John 6:39)
Miscellany
Christianity Today CEO Timothy Dalrymple has written a very thought-provoking essay on “The Splintering of the Evangelical Soul.” Why are we so divided? I found it extremely helpful and illuminating.
Ivan Mesa has edited a new book entitled, Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church. The contributors look excellent, so if you want to read more on this topic, check it out.
Major League Baseball did, in fact, take a hit in their popularity numbers after the All-Star Game fiasco.
Media malpractice is contributing so terribly to the overall loss of confidence in our institutions. Click this Tweet and read the whole thread on just one tiny, but eye-opening example of how media misleads.
Years ago on a digital TV show I co-hosted we did a video on some people whose race ended far sooner than they thought. They were probably thinking of faith in Christ being a marathon; yet they were suddenly captured by a bloodthirsty band of barbarians calling themselves “ISIS.” And they faced a terrible choice; lose your life for Christ, or save it by swiftly “deconstructing.” They ended their race by confessing the name of Christ. ISIS made a propaganda video about it, but we turned it to nobler ends. Don’t fear: we left out the really graphic stuff.
Just heard an encouraging sermon from Tim Keller re: assurance. He noted that an aching feeling of God's absence is a sign that you know him. That was super good news.
Great article. You are a real breath of fresh air politically as well as theologically.