Is God a Democrat? A Republican? Was Jesus a conservative, liberal, socialist, or libertarian? Those are jarring questions. Yet, because faith informs one’s values and values inform one’s political leanings, it is understandable why religion and politics often intersect and overlap. And because there are myriad different concepts of Deity (hence, the thousands of sects plus varying degrees of nonbelief in the world) and many divergent political beliefs (so that even within each Christian denomination there are adherents spread across the political spectrum) the inevitable result is friction, contention, and disagreement.
Can we agree on this at least? Let’s agree that those who worship the Creator and accept the Savior should let His redeeming grace lift us higher instead of trying to squeeze him into limited and limiting human beliefs. Neither God nor Jesus can be reduced to any human philosophy, political or otherwise. Politics is human; God is divine. The human is the realm of mortal, material, flawed, and imperfect beings where many wills collide, compete, and clash; the divine is the realm of the immortal, spiritual, perfect Holy One where there is but one will. For those who find this phraseology problematical, I apologize; it’s often difficult to express spiritual concepts with mere human language, and even with the clearest communication there are often different slants on these transcendent concepts. Let’s just say that none of us should be overly confident that we have the infinite God and His Son figured out, when even Jesus’ own disciples, who abode with him for three years, repeatedly didn’t “get it.”
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