“Transcendent politics can sometimes be a very dangerous politics, but is the only kind of politics for human beings” (Glenn Moots, Politics Reformed, p. xii).
One of the reasons I like this quote — besides the fact that it is so gloriously true — is the fact that it collides so spectacularly with the actual candidates we usually wind up with. At our best, we can testify to transcendent realities in our political expressions, but even then we can hear the rollicking sounds of all the horse trading going on in the back rooms. At our worst, we try to turn the horse trading itself into a shining and transcendental vision. We do this by building bridges to the future while believing in America.
But that does not mean that such testimony — when it is directly truly — is worthless or to be despised. This is the central reason why Santorum appeals to me. The central lie of our age is that whatever we do is “up to us,” and that if we want homosexual marriage, we can just do it. If we want personhood to arrive late enough to make birth control easier, then we can just do it. Santorum has consistently said that there is a law above the laws of men, and that in recent years we have taken to messing around with issues where we have no jurisdiction.
Just because we say we did something doesn’t make it so. Just because the laws allow it doesn’t make it so. Caligula made his horse a senator, which didn’t make it so. Everybody knows that you never make a senator out of the entire horse, but rather just the hinder parts.
On the issue of practical charges (e.g. that Santorum is a big spender, etc.), there are replies that can be made — such as here. And when he voted against a national right to work bill (while supporting right to work), he did so because he thought states had the constitutional right to make their own decisions on such things — in short, a Ron Paul federalist argument. But however we go back and forth on such things, the fact remains that we need to be brought up short on certain basic things — like homosexual marriage and the right to life.
We have enshrined the right to kill an innocent as a constitutional right, and yet . . . God is in Heaven, and He is just. We are trying to enshrine the right to marry folks we ought not to marry, and God remains just.