November 13, 2024
“The nonstop news cycle will be crazy. You don’t have to be.”
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Bravo! to Russell Moore for some well-thought and
convicting advice for all Christians in this country, and those affected by our
country outside our country. We know how this song goes, but we also know how
to better respond and behave in the years ahead. I anticipate a lot of change
is coming, like in the 1960’s. History doesn’t always repeat, but it sure
rhymes and that should bring peace to our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirit as
we prepare to be better salt and light in this world which we are not to be of
any longer.
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“Someone
walked up to me in an airport last week and said, “So, what do you think about
the election?” I was in a less-than-ideal mood at the moment, for reasons that
had nothing to do with the election, but I stopped myself from saying
sarcastically, “What do you think I think about the election?”
The last thing
I wanted to talk about, after ten years of talking about him, was Donald Trump.
Now the news cycle will be the Donald Trump Show all day, every day, for four
more years.
The nonstop news cycle and drama won’t be some unforeseen
circumstance. It’s what the American people voted for. The theory that people
would want to “turn the page” on all that, offered by Vice President Kamala
Harris, proved false. Turns out most people liked the drama just fine. So here
we go.
I have very
little to say that I haven’t already said, very little to write that I haven’t
already written, and there are very few people who think like I do. I can’t
control that. But neither can you. As a matter of fact, there is very little
any of us can do to control the next four years—with a news cycle that will be,
like the last near-decade, all Trump, all the time.
Just like
during the last near-decade, those who support Trump and those who oppose him
will continue to look at one another the way Adams and Jefferson did over the
French Revolution: “How could you support (or not support) that?”
You can control very little of that either.
And that’s
surprisingly good news.
The passivity of Americans in their own civic order is
always a problem. The word woke—before it became associated with
identity politics—spoke to the sense of waking people from their slumber about
injustice. The opposite of passivity, though, is often not responsibility or
engagement. Sometimes it’s a kind of passivity that feels like “doing
something.”
Wherever
someone falls on the political spectrum, that’s where “doomscrolling” comes
into play. We feel we are informed by having a steady stream of drama in front
of us, our emotions driven up or down by the news cycle.
We’ve seen the
end result of that. The constant flow of (real and fake) information spikes our
adrenaline, activating our “lizard brains.” We throw our limbic systems into
the sense of having to support or to oppose something—when, much of the time,
there’s actually nothing we can do about it. And this works because many people
like it.
What we call
“politics” these days offers people a sense of meaning and purpose, an
interruption to the dead everydayness of life. A jolt of adrenaline can feel
almost like life—for a little while.
This kind of political “drama” is related to actual
political life the way that pornography is to intimacy. Porn gives the same
physical sensation as sexual union. The nervous system responds the way it is
meant to respond in the union of a husband and wife; it just does so by getting
rid of the love, the connection, the other person. In other words, it gives the
physical sense without what actually brings about the joy.
Someone might
think that porn use will kick-start their flagging passion, that it’s a
temporary step toward intimacy. That person is left, though, feeling deader and
lonelier than before. A news cycle can be like that too—ultimately leaving
people not more informed and thoughtful but with worn-out attention spans and
burned-out expectations.
One of the
things you owe your country is your attention. By that, I do not mean your
constant focus. I mean, quite literally, your attention: your ability to think
and to reflect apart from the roar of the mob.
During the
tumult of the 1960s—war, civil unrest, assassinations—Thomas Merton argued that
his ability to speak to all of those things was not in spite of but because of
his vocation as a Trappist monk, devoted to silence and solitude.
“Someone has
to try to keep his head clear of static and preserve the interior solitude and
silence that are essential for independent thought,” Merton wrote. He
continues, A monk loses his reason for existing if he simply submits to all the
routines that govern the thinking of everybody else. He loses his reason for
existing if he simply substitutes other routines of his own! He is obliged by
his vocation to have his own mind if not to speak it. He has got to be a free
man. Merton concludes by saying, “What did the radio say this
evening? I don’t know.”
I believe in the priesthood of all believers and, in this
way, I suppose, in the monkhood of all believers too. News and information are
important in helping a free and attentive mind discern what’s happening and how
to make sense of it. News and information as sources of a sense of personal
“drama” or belonging, though, will fray your attention, scatter your thinking,
and affix you to whatever mob it’s easiest to mimic. It’s hard to
maintain sanity with a mind like that. It’s hard to love your country with a
mind like that. It’s hard to love the Lord your God with a mind like that.
The stakes are
too high for us to see our country as a reality television show. You can’t opt
out of the country, but you can opt out of the show. In some ways, you get
there by subtraction. Don’t rely on social media for your news, for instance.
Don’t fall into the trap of every-ten-minute hits of dopamine about how your
side is losing something or winning something.
But maybe an
even more important factor is not subtraction but addition. You are meant to
have a life of drama and adventure and excitement. Politics—of the left, right,
or center—can’t deliver it. News cycles can’t replicate it.
For those of
us who are Christians, we already have it. We need no Jungian hero’s journey.
We are joined to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is our story. Our
lives are hidden in him (Col. 3:3). We are crucified under Pontius Pilate. We
are raised out of the grave. We are seated at the right hand of the Father.
All of that is
true, right now, for those who are joined by the Spirit to the life of Christ.
And we are waiting a trump—not a Trump—to tell us when the action of our lives
will really get interesting, in ways we cannot even imagine
yet.
Realize that
this is true for you. You don’t need to be part of some make-believe drama. You
don’t need to adopt some politician as a father figure. You have an actual
Father who is making plans for you. And when you realize how temporary, how
fleeting, and how pitiful much of what is counted as glory is in this moment,
you can learn how to love it without placing on it the burden of making you
happy or driving you crazy. We always come to hate our idols—whatever they
are—because they never give us what we want.
That means you
will need the Bible—and more than just the devotional cherry-picking or
doctrinal proof texts to which modern American Christianity is accustomed. You
will need to immerse yourself in the stories there until you gradually start to
sense they are your stories. You need to plunge into the poems
and songs there until you find they are telling you the story of your own life
too.
You need to spend enough time with the Jesus found in the
pages of Scripture that he starts to surprise you again. You don’t have to
understand what you’re reading all the time. Read it anyway. Let the Word do
its work. Don’t immediately Google “How to understand Psalm 46” or “What does
Colossians 2 mean?” Wrestle with it. Be baffled by it.
And sooner or
later you will start to hear, as though calling to you personally from those
words: “Who do you say that I am?”
The news cycle will be crazy for the next four years.
You don’t have to be.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/next-four-years-donald-trump-russell-moore-election-2024/