Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
Genesis 1:26-27
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Recently, a conservative friend of mine posted on Facebook a message something like, “I don’t know if the Democrats DID rig the election, but I believe they WOULD!” This, to me, is a concise statement of the biggest challenge facing America today.
My memory of politics only extends to the late Reagan years, so I cannot meaningfully comment on trends before that, and actually I have pretty vague memories of the pre-Clinton years. What I have observed, though, is an ever-accelerating downward spiral. Republicans and Democrats have both been guilty of demonizing their opponents. The Clinton impeachment was the result of several years of trying to find something—ANYTHING—the Republicans could accuse him of. The election of 2000 was a debacle, at least in Florida, and the outgoing Clinton administration didn’t do any favors for George W. Bush. (I recall a story about staffers taking all of the “W” keys off the keyboards.) A spirit of bipartisan cooperation after 9/11 lasted, oh, three months or so. The last five years have been particularly nasty, starting with a brutal campaign between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump and ending with Trump accusing Democrats of widespread fraud.
The core issue, which lies at the heart of all sin, is denying the fundamental humanity of our opponents and denying that they are, like each of us, made in the image of God. Indeed, politics has learned the lesson of war: if you deny your opponents’ legitimacy, then all actions against them are justified.
Yet if we look at the presidential popular vote totals, a “landslide,” such as Lyndon Johnson, means that the winning candidate gets 61%. (The Electoral College vote distorts things in a way that is not meaningful here.) A popular vote margin greater than 10% is unusual. That means a substantial fraction of voters do not support the winner. Supposing everything goes as I expect it will, President Biden will govern a country in which 74 million people do not think he should be president, and invested the time and energy to say so at the ballot box.
Seventy-four million Americans. These are not bad people. They are people who think differently than I do, who have different priorities than I do. People whose worldviews are different than mine, possibly in part because we consume different news media.
As a nation, we need to come together and recognize that on the one hand, there are real differences of opinion on priorities, on policies, on global relations, on any of a thousand different topics. On the other hand, though, we are all Americans. From big cities on the eastern seaboard to rural areas in the Midwest, across the Sun Belt, and points in-between, we are all Americans. We all deserve a voice in determining our nation’s future.
Beyond that, we are all children of God. We need to see God in all things, most especially in each other. If we assume the “other guy,” whoever that might be, will cheat us and we respond in kind, there is no way out of our downward spiral. Let us seek instead an upward spiral, where we start by assuming the best of each other, and then helping each other live up to that best.
My apologies for not writing much lately. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods, instead of in front of a computer. Next Sunday, I will be preaching at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Hopefully I’ll be back to my normal schedule after that. Happy Thanksgiving!