Musing 15

I like to think things through, and once upon a time, I thought everyone else gave as much thought to their opinions as I did. A view that has gotten me in trouble . .. more often than I’d like to admit.

Especially when it comes to politics. At least to my observation, it increasingly seems to me that people build their opinions on something through the lens of “how have I been impacted by this issue?” rather than through the filter of “this is my worldview at large, what does that mean for my politics?”

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this to some extent. Outside places where our views may become sinful (unintentionally or intentionally) and need repentance, for the most part it’s normal for people to not think things through systematically because they have a life outside that issue.

Especially in these . . . interesting times we live, things often move too fast or require in depth understanding to come to conclusions that are more than surface level.

While I don’t pretend the filter with which I analyze things is exhaustive, I do think this checklist is helpful when thinking of current events at both the personal level where I can be involved and the macro level where I am limited to being an armchair commentator.

First is “where’s the sin?”. Our sin is sin-drowned. All aspects of life, even the good ones, have been corrupted by sin. And by calling out “ok, here’s where sin has impacted this situation” it immediately takes us out of the worldly way of categorizing things. No longer do we implicitly assume that the members of our preferred group is 100% faultless (though sometimes they are faultless!), but we recognize that despite our biases, “our guy” may actually be the bad guy.

The second step is to ask “what are my biases?”. While you could argue that self-reflection on our biases should come first, and it may be helpful for some people, I’ve found that starting with the identification of sin is actually more helpful. As a tangible example, I tend to lean in favor of lesser gov’t overall because of the threat of statism (in any form). But that gets challenged when I look at situations like “Corporation X got caught, yet again, doing a bad thing” (whether that bad thing is child labor, poisoning the locality, or any number of other wrongs). By starting with the identification of sin, now my bias identification is geared towards answering the question of “how should this sin be dealt with?” and in most cases ends up forcing me out of the comfortable answers that are so tempting on either side of the political aisle.

And the final element of this filter is - “where can righteousness be displayed here?” For example, if the issue is “Corporation X is stealing their employees’ wages”, then the God honoring solution is to encourage the gov’t to punish that sin so that the employees are rightly taken care of. In cases where the issue is more personal in nature (perhaps a friend is now in need), I can be more personally involved with caring for that person to demonstrate Christ’s love for the Church.