I have been pretty busy since the tea parties of last week, and haven’t had a chance to comment on them. And as my comments have been slow-cooking in this crock pot brain of mine, a few extra carrots have gotten thrown in. First some observations and then some editorializing.
So I went to see our local tea party, see? From what I observed there, and considering what appears to have happened at all the other tea parties around the country, our local protest seems to have been fairly representative. A number of things about it were striking.
First, it was a large protest for these parts, one of the largest I can recall seeing. My office is a block away from Friendship Square, where the rally started, and is right across the street from the Federal Building, where the protest ended. Because of my location, I have seen a number of protests come and go, not to mention various marches on the Federal Building. This was larger than any of our more typical “university town” protests, by a factor of ten. The only march that I can recall being even close to this size was a pro-life march a number of years ago. And . . . oh, yeah . . . the march protesting us a few years ago on campus — that was pretty big. So the first thing to note is that this event was not an insignificant one.
Second, the grass roots nature of the whole thing was glaringly obvious. No pre-printed signs, no “trick my truck” campaign bus, no three-piece-suit wonders from anywhere. Just a lot of ordinary people, many of whom I knew from the larger Christian community. The gentleman who organized it was a local fellow that I did not know — even though I have been following local politics for thirty years or more. He had just had it up to “here,” as they say, and pointed that what the feds are doing to our national debt is not something you would do to your own credit card debt because “that would be stupid.” He commented that he had never done anything like this before, and thanked his heavenly Father for it.
Third, these were not people steeped in Alinsky’s rules for radicals. It was a very well-behaved protest, and quite endearing. Nobody there has ever had any notion of anything like agitprop ever enter their heads. Before taking off for the Federal Building, one gentleman in the crowd asked if we could say the Pledge of Allegiance, which was agreed upon, and everybody lowered their signs so that they were all below the American flags (which were also numerous). I think that if someone had asked if we could say the Lord’s Prayer, they would have done that too.
Fourth, I don’t know how these events went on the east coast, but this is Idaho and a number of people were packing heat, in the old Dodge City fashion. I love open carry laws. They were not doing this because they were expecting any trouble but rather because the Constitution says they get to do that, at least in Idaho.
I would describe the whole thing as an amalgam of the older American civic religion with a strong dose of Christian default assumptions thrown in. Parts of it were bad, but much of it was encouraging. Most of the protest revealed that basic math skills have not eroded nearly as much as people might think. Everybody appeared to know what a trillion was, which is more than you can say for the really smart people running the country.
And so all this got me to thinking about politics, which I do a lot anyway. Oh, goody, you must be thinking.
First, I take it as a given that in order for any lasting good to come out of this kind of thing it has to be, or become, explicitly Christian. This event was implicitly and informally Christian, but in times like these, that is not good enough. I was going to say that for two cents more this kind of event would become explicitly Christian, but it might be more accurate to say that they would do so for two trillion more. We cannot say this often enough. In order to be saved, we have to return to Christ our only possible Savior. It will not be enough to return to an Ozzie and Harriet America. First, that America is not here any more, and second, it couldn’t save us if it were.
Second, this kind of event presents a really interesting test case scenario for Christians who understand the need for an explicitly Christian approach to the polis. If the neighborhood has a barn-raising, explicit Christians can come together with non-believers to accomplish a particular project, the raising of the barn. But what if the “project” is not a barn-raising project, but rather a deficit-lowering project? In the former, we can come together with anyone who has a good will and can swing a hammer. In the latter, why can we not come together with anyone who has a good will and knows what a budget is supposed to be? The answer is that with the latter kind of project, the gods of the city will be invoked, explicitly or implicitly. The good life is being pursued, and ultimate questions are on the surface or just below the surface. In this instance, the answers were Christian, but it was still a jumble. With the barn-raising, the ultimate questions are there (obviously), but nobody is asked to sign on to any particular answer to them in order to swing a hammer.
But things are getting increasingly interesting. This is the third point. These are the days when the center does not hold, as the poet said. This same week saw the governor of Texas saying that Texas could leave the Union if they wanted to. A subsequent poll revealed that 75% of Texans would vote to remain in the Union, but I wonder if anybody else sees how weird this is. A governor of a state like Texas talks about secession publicly, and he doesn’t get ridden out of the country on a rail. Seventy five percent say nah (for the present), which leaves 25% of another opinion. This sort of thing is not driven by abstractions and ideology, it is driven by which side of the bread the butter is on. Follow the money.
And this leads to the final observation. The world is a messy place. Christians who want the lordship of Christ to be openly acknowledged have two options — they can detach or engage. If they detach, they are following the anabaptist option — in order to build the pure city out in the open spaces somewhere. But if they engage, then they are signing up to try to steer something, as opposed to building it from scratch. This means that those who want to engage have two choices again — do you want to latch on to the liberals and try to steer them, or latch on to the conservatives and try to steer them? Given those options, you could look at both helplessly, and decide to go back to the Hutterites. If you try to steer the liberals, or the conservatives, the chances are better than even that you will be the one steered (and used). That has certainly the pattern over the last century or two. But a large part of this is explained by the practice of the Christians (who showed up to steer) agreeing to leave all their divinely inspired maps at home. That might account for the problems. But what if we brought our maps this time?