David McElroy

Jesus wasn’t an American. He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s not asking you to vote for a “pro-family agenda.” He’s also not calling you to elect politicians to achieve “social justice.” These things are news to some people.

There’s absolutely no reason to think God even wants you vote. You’re lying to yourself and to others if you superimpose your own political views onto God — no matter what your beliefs are.

It’s been common throughout history for nations to claim that God was on their side, regardless of what they called God and regardless of what the rest of their theological beliefs were. Whatever “our side” did was favored by God — or the gods or Allah 0r whatever they called their deity. If you’re a Christian and you’re doing this today, you’re engaging in blasphemy, because you’re claiming to speak for God — and you’re just making things up and claiming they’re from Him.

I don’t have the exact quote anymore, but I once heard talk radio host Ian Punnett say that for many people, God is simply themselves with a deeper voice. Sadly, that’s true.

For Christians who hold conservative political positions, they somehow manage to come to the conclusion that God believes exactly what they do. What a relief. God wants a strong government to control people’s morality, but He also likes invading foreign countries that have those dirty people who talk funny and aren’t much like us. (He obviously didn’t really mean those things about loving enemies, so it’s safe to ignore those things as we cheer people being blown up and prisoners being tortured by the U.S. government.)

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In order to show how much they care, the folks in the White House have set up a website for people to make petitions about issues they care about. What the politicians didn’t count on was someone using their system to satirize how vapid and condescending the actual responses are.

Any sane and realistic person knows that the administration doesn’t care how many petitions you sign. (It’s not just this one, of course. No administration cares about petitions, contrary to what many people assume.) It’s only interested in how many votes you can deliver and how many dollars you can give.

For the rest of us, they’re just interested in placating us. They’ll pretend to listen. They’ll write boilerplate responses. They might even promise a pony sometimes. But it’s not going to change reality.

The White House petition system is for PR purposes, pure and simple. We all know that. And when politicians go through the motions of pretending to take us seriously, it’s condescending. So here’s a petition that I hope you’ll actually consider signing:

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It’s easy for me to get depressed about the state of things in this fallen world. Everywhere I look, there’s ugliness, ignorance and hatred. Those things are very real. But if all we see is the squalor in the world, we’re missing the love and beauty that were put all around us to experience. They’re very real, too.

I’ve seen evidence of the very bad and the very good this week, and I’m constantly trying to reconcile the two. It seems that the more you feel one of the extremes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the other extreme.

From talking to others, I suspect that I experience both extremes more strongly than most. The things that hurt me don’t just disappoint. They wound something really deeply, even if it’s something that wouldn’t affect others. I’ve never liked that about myself, but I suspect that if I didn’t feel so deeply about the hurtful things, I wouldn’t feel the beautiful things so strongly.

I started thinking about this Friday night as I drove west on I-20 in Birmingham just barely after sunset. I came over the top of a hill and suddenly had a vast open space ahead of me with hills in the distance. The fading sunset was a pinkish orange hanging just above the black of the hill contours.

It was breathtaking to me. It wasn’t just beautiful. It was something that touched me emotionally. For that moment, all the ugliness of the world was gone. All the problems of daily life were gone. I felt content, at peace and as though I was experiencing something God put in front of me — just for me.

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