Tag Archives: election 2016

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My Top Ten Faith and Culture Blogs of 2016

Happy New Year!

Part of the fun of ringing in 2017 is that I can look back at my stats and discover what you were most interested in last year. Here are your favorite blog posts from 2016:

#10 When You’re Feeling Stressed about This Election How to describe the presidential election of 2016? Bizarre? Shock and awe? The caucuses and primaries began on February 1st and by March 1st (Super Tuesday, when this blog was published), unless you were an early fan of Donald Trump, you were starting to feel the stress.

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Waiting for the Cliffhanger Ending: Justice or Mercy?

002-1032x1280It was very quiet at our suburban precinct here in Columbia, South Carolina. Thousands had voted on the way to work, but at mid-morning there were eighteen people in line—a peaceful interlude in this shock-and-awe campaign story. The quiet before tonight’s high-drama conclusion to Election 2016.

(If you are still struggling over your decision today you may want to read these two previous posts.)

As we’ve heard one stunning development after another, I’ve heard journalists and pundits exclaim, “Nobody could write this story.” But clearly, Someone is writing it.

Only God could write such incredible plot twists, expose such secrets, and reveal hearts at such a deep level. He famously writes stories with a “fearful symmetry,” a term coined by William Blake to describe a tiger–beauty and balance and artfulness that also exposes a moral dimension that terrifies us. Who could create such a beautiful killing machine?

God. Especially when he brings judgment to call us to repentance.

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Notes on Hillary’s Basket

basket-of-deplorablesAs anyone who has read this blog knows, I’ve not been a big fan of Donald Trump. So I guess I don’t officially qualify for his “basket of deplorables.” Then why did I feel personally scorned by Hillary’s remark at an LBGT fundraiser last Friday?

To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.

Because, as a conservative Christian with a high view of God’s Word, I have seen all of those labels but one (racist) aimed at people who believe exactly as I do.

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Hitting Back. Lying. How this election makes Jesus look good.

Donald Trump lives by the advice he dispensed in his best-selling business book The Art of the Deal: “Fight Back–always hit back against critics and adversaries, even if it looks bad.”                           It’s looking bad.

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A gold-star Muslim father, Khizr Kahn, whose son was killed in Iraq, challenged Mr. Trump from the podium of the Democratic Convention. “Have you even read the Constitution?…You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

True to his own advice, Trump hit back and keeps hitting back. He even attacked Kahn’s wife. (No surprise to Heidi Cruz.)

The Star Trek movie Into Darkness ends with a moving eulogy from a young Captain Kirk, “There will always be those who mean to do us harm…Our first instinct is to seek revenge…. But that’s not who we are.”  Who would have thought that a Star Trek movie would express a nobility that seems beyond the reach of Election 2016?

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Mad as hell…or mad as heaven?

Getting mad like Jesus did.

It feels like we are living in the 1976 award-winning film Network. I feel surrounded by people throwing open their windows, leaning out and yelling, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”  (Caution for a bit of R-rated language in the clip)

Although the movie came out forty years ago in the midst of gas lines, recession and spiraling inflation, it feels even more relevant today, when we are living more from emotions than ever before.

People want good jobs–meaningful work that leaves them time for life with their families, churches and communities. We want health care premiums that don’t break the bank. Safety from terrorists. We want institutions–government, schools and businesses–that hear our voices and respond to our needs. In this political season the candidates cast a vision of the way the future could be, stirring and heating up our desires to a fever pitch. That is their job. It’s our job to keep our eyes on Jesus. Get mad like he gets mad.

We want, we want, we want…we have so many desires–the soil out of which our expectations grow. Unfulfilled, they can set us up for disappointment and anger. How should we deal with them?