Does God Care About Our Politics?
by Loren Seibold | 12 November 2024 |
It depends, I suppose, on how you define the terms.
If by “care,” you mean, does God feel sympathy with us? Then the Bible is clear that God does care. About everything. About all of us. God’s eye is on the sparrow, so I know he’s watching me.
As for the other main term in the sentence—politics—I’m forced to define it more broadly than the hugger-mugger of arguing candidates we in the United States have just suffered. Let’s ask, rather: is how levers of earthly government work, or who works them, of interest to God? Here, we’ll have to also take into account the inevitable result of politics: power, which always, always ends in violence to someone, somewhere.
Again, I think most of us would say, based on stories in the Old Testament and Jesus’ and Paul’s interaction with the authorities, that God does take an interest in these.
“Taking an interest” is a very low bar, to be sure. But we’ve got to start someplace. And the notion that God is good seemed more important to Jesus than anything else God might be.
How it proceeds from there, though, is much less clear. Because this question remains: does God do anything about it? Here I am forced to say: probably not in any way that we can identify.
The Bible says that God sees the little sparrow fall. It doesn’t say God catches it.
The bottom lines
There are three things that would be necessary to convince me that God is in charge of history.
First, God would have to be in charge of all history, in all times, everywhere. According to the eschatology we inherited from Uriah Smith and Ellen White, God’s purposes twine exclusively around America and the 109 acres of Vatican City, and mostly during a few time periods defined by obscure prophetic arithmetic. (The now-defunct Ottoman Empire and France’s murderous revolution make cameo appearances, but they contribute nothing of importance other than to show up at convenient moments in the prophetic spans.)
What does it say about the Adventist God that the prophecies are silent about the child soldiers in Liberia, the six million Jews in Europe, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” and the 40,000 dead in Gaza, three quarters of them women and children? Of these, the God of our prophetic interpreters appears largely unconcerned.
Second, the outcome would have to be good for everyone, not just the winners. I don’t think you can make that case for most political contests, either elections or wars. There are winners and there are losers.
Often, in America, the winners are the richest and most protected white men. Stephen Stills said in a cynical song written during the Vietnam war, “The rich keep gettin’ richer and the rest of us just keep gettin’ old.” (He got both rich and old, so hooray for Stephen, I guess.) Much war is driven by manufacturers of armaments, purchased with your taxes, which we then send to (mostly) innocent young men to use against other (mostly) innocent young men—whose guns and bombs are sometimes also stamped “Made in America.”
Patriotism convinces, with touching displays of brotherhood and sisterhood and waving flags and rousing songs and rituals done in fancy dress, that you are living and dying for something important—until the politician who wants to be reelected pulls the armed forces out and lets the communists have Indochina. 58,000 Americans dead, 250,000 Vietnamese troops, plus countless women and children—without winning a yard of land or creating a single democratic political institution. Would any decent God think that a moral victory?
Third (and this is most important) you shouldn’t have to tie yourself in knots to explain God’s part in it.
I have friends who say, “If it happens, it’s God’s will.” If so, why do they pray so hard for God to fix things when the bad stuff happens to them? No, if you assert that God is at work on some plan that involves consequences to you and me, I need a more cogent argument than that.
The response is usually that God is trying to teach certain people something.
A football team could get away with saying, “We prayed to win. But in our loss, God taught us we need to work harder on our passing.” That doesn’t work in war or politics, because what’s on the line there is more than a trophy.
So: what lesson did God teach the 30,000 women and children who died in Gaza—or their grieving families, for that matter? If prenatal care in the United States should be defined by fundamentalist Christian men in statehouses (not an impossible scenario anymore) so that physicians would deny treatment to young women with problem pregnancies, then tell me, please: what lesson does God want these young women to learn as their hearts flutter their last?
I once heard Terry Waite speak about his five-year captivity in Lebanon. He said Christians often ask him, “Was this a deep and significant experience for you? Did God come especially close to you and teach you to trust in him?” Terry wouldn’t fall for it. There was no lesson in this, he said. No one gained anything. No one learned anything. It was useless suffering.
If a lesson is so deeply buried that you have to accuse God of causing unnecessary suffering to explain it, it’s not much of a lesson, is it? Like an embedded bit of shrapnel, it turns faith septic before anything is gained.
Does God pick the winners?
The Bible says God does. I don’t believe it.
Two armies are lined up across from one another. Each gathers with its chaplain to pray to its god for victory over the enemy. After a devastating battle, one side surrenders to the other.
There is no assurance that the winning side was composed of people more like Jesus—loving and caring—than the losing side. Neither side in a war is allowed to be especially loving and caring anyway, or they wouldn’t be at war; they’d be turning the other cheek. No, it is likely they won because they were more cruel and ruthless, had built bigger bombs and more guns, and just slaughtered more people more effectively.
(I’d argue that since in any war both sides lose people to horrific violence, neither side can say they’ve “won” in any but a technical sense. There are no winners in war other than the guys around the boardroom table at Lockheed Martin.)
You will undoubtedly try to remind me that in many battles in the Old Testament, God was said to have given Israel the victory. Yet even those accounts are inconsistent. Sometimes God’s people lost.
Other times they were incredibly cruel, and they said God told them to be. Sorry, but a god who tells the Chosen People to kill all the men and women and keep the little girls for their own use isn’t one I would worship.
Or, to put it another way, I don’t believe God was involved in any of that. No, it seems fairly clear to me that rulers and generals generally use God, rather than letting God use them. Everybody wants God on their side, but much less thought is given to being on God’s.
I can’t discern God’s intervention either in politics (in America or elsewhere) or in the violence that is its inevitable sequel. Some winners will undoubtedly be better leaders than others. But I don’t see God in the insult-trading candidates, or the unkept promises of the people who won, or the battles the winners will inevitably use their guns and bombs to fight in.
And given the infelicitous results, I’d be very surprised if God has, at least recently, had any hand in picking the right person. I refuse to believe that we get to screw everything up by our own decisions, and then say that God wanted it that way. That’s the very definition of what the third commandment warns against.
I will try to live by the values I’ve learned from Jesus. But given what power-seeking people claim in the name of God, I don’t want to be any part of inviting God to do one thing or another under the flag of any party or any country.
Arrogant it may be, but I reject the god of the politicians as unworthy of my worship. You’ll have to make up your own mind.
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
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