While waiting for my computer to boot this morning, I picked up a copy I’ve been hoarding of the most recent Atlantic. The Advocacy Office has a subscription, and I’d wanted to read about “how A.Q. Khan made Pakistan a nuclear power.” The magazine has also featured a series by philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy about his Tocquevillian travels through America. I think I’ve even mentioned the series in the blog before—back in April or so, he wrote an enchanting feature on the Pacific Northwest (although he spelled Wenatchee, WA “Wanatchee”—ughh).

Levy started off his fifth installment in Washington, DC, where he visited with leaders of the Democrats. In a section entitled “The Democratic Party as a Black Hole,” he says this:

“The fact is that these brilliant pioneers who were supposed to set down the cornerstones for the people’s house of tomorrow had only one idea, one obsession, and fundamentally, one watchword: how, in four years, to fight the Republicans on the battlefield of fundraising…” (106).

I was a student of history and literature in college. And though the study of American history is often ugly, there were always a couple of elements that inspired me—the lofty philosophical ideals of the nation’s founders, the eternally optimistic outlook of American Romantic writers like Emerson and Whitman, the courage and bravery of ordinary people as they made their faith real in the face of attack dogs and water hoses in the civil rights movement. Maybe I took in too much of Winthrop’s “city on a hill” rhetoric as a third grader or something. But I’ve always subconsciously paralleled our toddler nation with the human condition itself—always falling short, but constantly striving toward something great. “…Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,” in the words of Paul from Philippians 3:13, to make this a place where life and liberty can truly abound for all.

But these days, I’m beginning to feel that the few idealistic illusions I had left are gone. It seems that our leaders, of whatever political persuasion, no longer strive toward the greatness of a better life for all the world’s people. They focus on the fundraising and the strategy that will supposedly buy them our hearts and minds, without giving us something to believe in. They sell us empty husks for food and expect us to return on the next market day. And they wonder why young adults in general fail to turn out in November. Simply put, what do we have to vote for?

Don’t get me wrong—fundraising in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. I’ve been in the real world long enough to know that organizations can’t get by without a little dough. But what happens when money replaces substance as the avenue to power, and power is the end goal? When staying in office becomes more important than what you do with your time there? I feel like the battles have become so acrimonious, the financial stakes so high, the actual message so hollow, that you and me and almost everyone else has lost much to invest in.

The question is whether the church will follow the same path, as it tries to up its revenue, to get more members, and to increasingly seek power to frame the moral debates in our society. Whether or not the American government is still “of the people, by the people, for the people,” Christianity must cling to the substance that has kept it alive for the past two millennia—the abundant love of God for every human being, expressed in the person of Christ. The death of that hope means the death of this institution.

And perhaps the survival of that basic message, enduring beyond the rise and fall of powers and principalities and political trends, testifies better than any individual witness to its veracity.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” --Romans 8:38-39

Kelsey