You might have noticed American life feels increasingly politicized. Just think about the conversations you’ve had as a pastor in the last two years compared to the last twenty.
Or consider the broader landscape: debates over national anthems at football games, rainbow flags adorning businesses, neighborhood “co-exist” lawn signs, pronouns in email signatures, a broad array of speech codes, diversity training in corporate America and the military, protests against a fast-food establishment, debates about COVID masks and quarantines as well as divisions over whether medical authorities are trustworthy, and the list goes on and on, pushing into more and more areas of life. We live in the era of The Political.
The cultural moment is captured in William Butler Yeats’ 1938 poem “Politics,” which begins with the epigram, “The destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.” Yeats looked leftward and saw communism, rightward and saw fascism. Both ideologies made totalitarian claims—political claims on the totality of people’s lives, from art to romance to religion. The middle ground in European politics was vanishing, squeezed out by this authoritarianism on the left and right.
A few years later, around 1945, C. S. Lewis remarked, “A sick society must think much
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
