Getting What We Deserve

An impossibility. That’s what America’s founding fathers in the 1700s meant when they used the phrase “a chimerical idea”. They used that phrase to describe their doomsday hypothesis: It is impossible for our form of self-governance to long endure without a virtuous populous. Ruthless empires full of vice may be allowed to endure for dynasties upon dynasties, but not so a representative democracy.

And, despite what conservatives claim, we do not live in a meritocracy. Anyone who’s ever participated in electing a class president or student council knows this. Rarely do we get candidates who actually merit the office. Elections anywhere for anything are never about coronating the best person for the job. We get nominees, as a rule, who are suited not for the responsibilities of the post but for the campaign.

During the campaign, we end up coalescing around certain candidates, nostrils pinched as we attempt to console ourselves with the reminder that we are not beatifying or canonizing them. But we are enabling them. We are empowering them. We are wanting them to reflect us. And they do . . . too often the worst in us.

God has allowed our virtue or lack thereof to be magnified in two particularly dismal nominees. On the one hand, Trump has already proven who he is: a self-consumed consumer of women and sycophants who would rather burn Rome to the ground and lie about it, than lose power. On the other hand, Harris is poised to grease the rails enabling Corinth to slide into the brave new world of liberunstrtinism and its concomitant commitment to unfettered destruction of life in the womb.

Either way, we will get what we deserve. Either way, we have rejected God (cf. 1 Samuel 8:7 & 10.19). Either way, the church continues to have its work cut out for it here in the mission field we call America. Kyrie eleison.