Our Local Political Idols Won’t Save Us

thefinalcall.org/prophecies/daniel.html

The blog title is a paraphrase of the blog post Our Political Idols Won’t Save Us by Elizabeth Scalia, Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos. Here are a few excerpts...

The first time I observed American Christians creating idols of their ideologies was during the presidency of George W. Bush; I saw people put enormous faith in a president and his policies because—through their post-9/11 prisms—they came to regard his election as God-ordained.

Then came the election of 2008, with idols arising amid both the religious right, who swooned for Sarah Palin’s heartfelt nationalism, and the secular left, who called Barack Obama “The One” and “The Lightworker” while Obama propelled the “anointed” analogies forward with his own rhetorical excesses. I started wondering about idolatry, again. What was driving Americans to paint their candidates—these merely human people—with brushes so gobbed-up with malice or over-laden with love?

This time around, President Obama’s halo has gone missing, and if his opponents still think he is the devil, he’s become a minor one they can finally laugh at. Candidates Romney and Ryan seem more like stable pedestals than the bronze thing upon which we gaze and so, no, we are not making idols of our candidates. Instead some of us are simply nourishing our ideologies—holding them close to the heart and feeding them on our stores of distrust and bitterness—and allowing them to steal all of our instincts to charity, to squeeze out mercy. You can see it on social media, most especially on Facebook where respectable, even admirable, people are beginning to lose perspective and attack each other over news stories, and sometimes over simple questions, reasonably asked.

In many ways, the same viewpoints can be seen locally here in Troy. When it comes to our current Mayor Janice Daniels, most citizens expressing an opinion either love her or hate her. The same could be seen when Louise Schilling was Troy's Mayor.

Will we continue to nourish our local ideologies so much that we allow them to steal all of our instincts to charity and squeeze out mercy?