We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

The famous line from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo aptly describes the current situation in the United States. I have been a Chuck Colson fan for a long time - not the man who was President Nixon's political hatchetman, but the broken man who went to prison after becoming a Christian and lived out his faith for the rest of his years after his release. 

Colson's last address was to the Wilberforce Weekend. He collapsed at the end of his address and died a few days later. His last public words speak to our situation and should stand as a call to all of us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. His friend and now successor Eric Metaxas reports what he said:

"... as a result of relativism and the denial of truth, “our culture has been decaying from the inside” for the last 40 years. Politics won’t save us, he said, because “politics is nothing but an expression of the culture. So how do you fix the culture?”

Chuck explained it this way: “Culture is actually formed by the belief system of the people, by the cult, which is us, the Church.” So if the culture is sick, don’t think the problem is “going to be solved by an election. When you have a healthy cult you have a healthy culture. When you have a healthy culture you have healthy politics.

“So it comes right back to us. Look in the mirror. That’s where the problem is.”

www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/21637

I have come to believe that you are either building God's Kingdom or you are not. It is not something that you can dabble at or do a hurry-up job when it is convenient and you have a little time. It is a lifelong pursuit of God and God's Kingdom that takes qualities like mercy and justice and righteousness seriously, which man's kingdoms do not. The more a culture reflects this with millions of people taking God's Kingdom seriously, the more stable and functional the political system will be. I am not talking a theocracy. St. Paul reminds us that now we see through a glass darkly and there will always be an imperfect translation of the spiritual into the political. It is a balance that America's Founding Fathers recognized and in fact counted on in forming the American Republic. I pray that each of us will take our part in restoring a healthy culture, rejecting the jaded and cynical relativism that is the current ethic du jour and instead living our lives in a way that consistently reflects the qualities of God's Kingdom. That is the way back to a healthy political system.