beauty. (t)ruth. god.

For a while I have been trying to come with a good post about why the Obama (or fill in the blank of anyone else running for president, he just happens to extremely popular at Mars Hill) fan parade has been bugging me but in the short conversations I tried to engage anyone on the subject it went nowhere. It was like attempting to talk an evangelical about voting for Bush in 2000. So, I decided to just let it go and not blog about. But then David Fitch (whose books I will buy after reading this) really wrote out this critique I wanted to write using Slavoj Zizek’s political theory, and gently critiquing this phenomena (phenomena being here national politics) that the church gets sucked into every four years.  Here is just one line, but please go to his blog and read the whole thing. Later I might engage in his questions at the end, but in the meantime his post is excellent. 

• When it comes to Christians of my evangelical tradition, I would suggest this “ideological cynicism” could work another way. We participate in National politics, its political ideologies of a more just society, even though we deeply suspect the corporate national machine insures nothing will change. We do this because it is much harder to think of the church itself as a legitimate social political force for God’s justice in the world. It is simply a lot less work to support Barak Obama for president than it is to lead our churches into being living communities of righteousness, justice and God’s Mission in the world.