The drama of the federal fiscal standoff – recently postponed, if only till January – bears all the earmarks of the Kingdom of the World at its worst. The looming idols of power, money and lust well overshadowed any of the founding principles of our nation, even the more secular values of economic freedom, ownership rights and the common good. Few of the principle players would be scathed in the scuffle, only the pawns on the board whose health, livelihood and liberty, it seems, are in jeopardy every time official Washington is in session. The damage done in a fortnight of closures of federal agencies pales compared to the continual dysfunction of a ship of State veering adrift from the route charted by our Founders.
The historical evidence is that such standoffs – the tensions and partisan polarities in play – were actually welcome to our Founders, built-in to the bi-cameral legislature and the separation of powers so essential to check them. Representative government should do just that: reflect the consent of the governed who, at this time in history, are torn among views of the role of government, some of which are not easily reconciled with our first constitutional principles, which serve as a rudder.
But is this a crisis of government, really, or a crisis of conscience? The evangelist Franklin Graham has little doubt and minces no words. “Our politicians don’t know right from wrong,” he says. “And our politicians come to this city and they fight one another and it’s the greed in their hearts, the lust that’s in their hearts and they make all these rules and laws that affect the rest of us.” He continues, “[t]he government spends and spends and spends, and they don’t have the money to pay for it. But the politicians are trying to use that money to buy votes in favor for themselves. It is so greedy and so wicked and so wrong,” he charges.
In less censorious terms, Billy Graham, his father, has called for a fresh spiritual awakening in America. Rather than look to an institution, such as government, or for messianic personalities to save us from ourselves, he prays for a wider participation of everyone in spreading the transforming power of the Gospel: a conversion of hearts, one-to-one and one-by-one. This very much echoes the pattern of the early Christians who managed to bring about a “fundamental change” beneficial to all humanity in a very pagan Roman empire, which none of the imperious Caesars were able to accomplish through decades of persecutions and reforms. If ever there was a time for a New Evangelization, it is now!
Thomas Jefferson himself recognized that government was only as wise and effective as the voting public. Writing to William C. Jarvis on Sept. 28, 1820, he observed: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
The informed conscience of every citizen – and the freedom to express it – is, ultimately, the only bulwark against tyranny.
The Kingdom of God is not rooted in the powers of this world. The hope it proclaims flows from God-centered lives, prayer-filled, generous and committed to witness the Gospel in a very public and counter-cultural way. The change to hope for – the change we need at this time – is the conversion of human hearts. The way to make it happen is to begin with ourselves: changing people neighbor-to-neighbor, worker-to-worker and friend-to-friend.
