If you'd read my comment from yesterday's post you wouldn't have written the first paragraph as you did. It simply isn't true that there was some halcyon time where Americans practiced a noble political art that took into account their finite ability to rectify the world and treated their opponent with a restraint, dignity, and respect.
Come march with me through the streets of Boston as we go to tar and feather the tax man. Would you like to carry our mob's threatening banner, "Join or DIE!" Or perhaps you'll be persuaded to vote for John Quincy Adams in 1828 by Charles Hammond writing in his Cincinnati Gazette, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" Of course I could go on.
Of course if you look at world politics in general you'll see this attribute of othering is even more pronounced. All of this to say, that it is a disservice to feed the creeping fear Americans feel in the political season that "things are worse than they have ever been." I can promise you that inept political manipulators - short on time and imagination - will lean into that trope. Theologians, who are not facing the ticking tock of the coming election day to finish their work could help their people with a whisper, "this is normal, they always do this, help the cause you believe in but don't respond to their angsty manipulations."
I read it! I'm not positing an idealized past. I'm only recognizing the very noticeable change in politics in my own adulthood, it's becoming a seculosity.
Harumph, I should have used examples from the 1980's. As the nation turns generally away from the Church and family as a source of meaning for their life (with State-sponsored support I might ad) all that is left for them is to find justification, and meaning in their political and social action. I think you'd agree the Main Line Denominations are well down the line to discovering there is little to sustain the Christian or her church when they are only defined by social action. But the other side is doing the same thing.
BUT the politics isn't different. It's always been an evil knife fight of othering. What's changed is that after a week of othering the hell out of each other at the polls we don't meet at the parish alter. Which, again, is exactly how the State likes things.
"Come to me, all ye who are weak and heavy laden," our Government says, "and if you behave correctly I will give you a tax credit."
If you'd read my comment from yesterday's post you wouldn't have written the first paragraph as you did. It simply isn't true that there was some halcyon time where Americans practiced a noble political art that took into account their finite ability to rectify the world and treated their opponent with a restraint, dignity, and respect.
Come march with me through the streets of Boston as we go to tar and feather the tax man. Would you like to carry our mob's threatening banner, "Join or DIE!" Or perhaps you'll be persuaded to vote for John Quincy Adams in 1828 by Charles Hammond writing in his Cincinnati Gazette, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" Of course I could go on.
Of course if you look at world politics in general you'll see this attribute of othering is even more pronounced. All of this to say, that it is a disservice to feed the creeping fear Americans feel in the political season that "things are worse than they have ever been." I can promise you that inept political manipulators - short on time and imagination - will lean into that trope. Theologians, who are not facing the ticking tock of the coming election day to finish their work could help their people with a whisper, "this is normal, they always do this, help the cause you believe in but don't respond to their angsty manipulations."
I read it! I'm not positing an idealized past. I'm only recognizing the very noticeable change in politics in my own adulthood, it's becoming a seculosity.
Harumph, I should have used examples from the 1980's. As the nation turns generally away from the Church and family as a source of meaning for their life (with State-sponsored support I might ad) all that is left for them is to find justification, and meaning in their political and social action. I think you'd agree the Main Line Denominations are well down the line to discovering there is little to sustain the Christian or her church when they are only defined by social action. But the other side is doing the same thing.
BUT the politics isn't different. It's always been an evil knife fight of othering. What's changed is that after a week of othering the hell out of each other at the polls we don't meet at the parish alter. Which, again, is exactly how the State likes things.
"Come to me, all ye who are weak and heavy laden," our Government says, "and if you behave correctly I will give you a tax credit."
I mean we don't meet at the parish alter for communion...