Kindle Notes & Highlights
“A demagogue can only thrive when a substantial portion of the demos—the people—want him to.”18 I must add, if we are to engage in this way we must do so not only out of a sense of deep understanding of our own American civil religion, but also by engaging as those who claim a dual citizenship in the reign of God—our fellow Christian citizens.
we propose an engagement that assumes God’s grace as the underpinning and support for the whole of God’s garden social imaginary. All forms of common life (public education, social systems that support first responders—police, fire, and healthcare professionals—our public transportation, creation care, defense, and all the rest of the national infrastructure) are to be elevated by grace. Christian citizens must be grace-filled political players.
Politics is not a sacramental vessel that reveals God, nor is the god of America’s civil religion the God of the Bible. The various systems of modern political philosophy have saved no one, but made a lot of people’s lives worse, including women and people who are part of various minority populations. Modern politics is fundamentally intolerant, and reliably produces all kinds of indefensible discriminations and biases. Modern politics demands total acquiescence to the empire’s grand narrative, lived out as ideological lockstep with the micro narrative of one political party or the other.2
