I am not a conservative (or a liberal)

Photo by Monika Simeonova on Unsplash

I think I was in early high school when my dad gave me Rush Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be.

I read the entire book in a weekend. Soon, I was a dittohead.

I embraced the kind of political and social conservatism that I learned from Limbaugh. I embraced the identity of “conservative” to the point that even the Rush Limbaugh neckties I wore announced my conservatism to everyone.

Not only my clothes, but my entertainment, friends and language came from, and fed back into, my identity as a conservative.

Thirty years later, as I look back on that time, I can see that I did and said things because those were the things conservatives were supposed to do and say. In other words, I filtered each choice and each word through the metric of “whether a good conservative would do or say it.”

This made things easy for me for a while. My conservative identity (reinforced by conservative media and conservative social circles) set the agenda for me. I got a lot of self-satisfaction and social mileage out of this.

The trouble began in my early twenties. I started to notice two things.

First, some conservatives did very un-conservative things–things that violated the aims, values and virtues we conservatives claimed to champion–but they got a pass from conservatives because they were on the “conservative team.”

This seemed out of line with Christian integrity and purity. In my Christian upbringing, I learned that how you do something is as important as why you do something. For example, it is not OK to lie in service to the truth. Lies end up burning the truth platform under our feet.

Second, I sometimes discovered the Spirit of the Christ moving in directions that led away from the agenda that conservatives made for themselves. I discovered the Spirit of the Christ working among, and with, people who conservatives despised and preferred to discard.

In those situations, I found myself stuck in a bind: To embrace Christianity meant breaking ranks with conservatives, taking actions unbecoming of a self-identified conservative. But to stick with conservatism because that was my identity and “team” meant departing from the way of the Christ.

I eventually came to see that to be faithful to conservatism would sometimes compromise my faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. That is, embracing conservatism as my community and my identity would end up divorcing me from the Christ and the Christ’s community of believers.

I had to choose. So I chose to leave conservatism, both as my preferred community and my primary identity. I needed to renounce anything that could ever compete with the Christ for a claim on me. I needed to be free to follow and obey the Christ, which may put me at odds with conservatives one day and liberals the next.

The last ten years affirmed my choice. It seems that those who claim “conservative” as their community and identity will do anything, excuse anything, go along with anything as long as it bears the conservative identity. This is also true of liberals and everything in between.

Christianity must be free to be what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called the “conscience of the state.” I take that to mean that Christianity must be free to critique both conservatives and liberals. Christianity must be free to support both conservative and liberal ideas. More important, I take it to mean that Christianity must be free to love both conservatives and liberals.

One of the worst consequences of both the politics of the last ten years and the political infestation of Christianity is the satanic “permission” it gives Christians to fight their enemies rather than forgive them and hate their enemies rather than love them.

Not only must we not agree with someone from “the other team,” we must de-humanize and demonize them just because they are on the other team. We may not even remember the few points on which we used to disagree; now the point is simply that “they” are bad through and through just because “they” are “them.”

In this situation, I keep hearing these words of God to his people: “Come out from among them” (Second Corinthians 6:17; Isaiah 49:9).

Yes, I have come out from conservatism and liberalism as communities and identities for myself. I have come out from every political and social identity that would demand my total allegiance (and require me to go to war against those that the Christ commands me to forgive and love). I am free in a way that conservatives and liberals cannot be and cannot understand.

Which means I am free to follow one way and one way only: The way of the Christ. It is a safer and surer way than any way that politics promises.

What about you?

Grace and peace.