Post election thoughts and a prayer

Before I was called to the pastorate, I taught American government. I rarely read professional political science any more, but I still mix a look at our politics with some degree of objectivity and having policy views at the same time. On that great productivity vacuum, Facebook, I’ve noticed four responses: gushing winners, conciliatory winners, depressed, confused losers, and angry, vicious losers. I don’t know if the edges are even capable of hearing much, so I direct these random thoughts to the middle two groupings. I found this a dispiriting campaign as it was a marketing drive. It often disregarded the truth, time and again. Not only that, data was not used to explain an argument, a narrative, but merely to bolster a position without regard to alternatives. Instead of marketing policies, we marketed candidate image.Marketing campaigns treat voters with contempt. They assume voters are incapable of making rational judgments, so we are fed pablum of images and slogans. The highlight of the campaign for me was President Clinton’s careful marshaling of facts to make a case for the president. I do not mean specific policies, but he respected hsi audience enough to explain things to us. Elections are tricky to campaign as they seem to require that we make retrospective evaluations of results, and also compare competing views of the future. the Romney campaign was strong on evaluation of the economic slump, but very weak on prescriptions for the future, one that was shared by the incumbent.So we were faced with competing aims of blaming but no compelling vision of the way ahead, other than “Forward.” One of the reasons we breathed a collective sigh of relief with the commercials over is that we realized that we were being pandered to, and every voiceover from political action committees reminded us of it.I fear that we are gravitating to media sources that merely confirm our prejudices instead of seeking to get a range of views and opinions. I may be wrong, but I still see American politics as a battle over a vast middle. Maybe I am wrong, and we have grown more polarized into two competing camps, with two competing centers of gravity. I have real concerns about the radicalization of the Republican party in my lifetime. I lived in Indiana for 20 years. Compare Senator Lugar to the candidate Richard Mourdock. Compare John Danforth to Todd Aiken in Missouri.Conservative meant the opposite of flying off the handle, but far too often it can be equated with just that. Maybe this election will make us more humble about claiming God’s will for policy or outcome. How many of us hold to the vulgar Calvinism that God directs minutely actions.Maybe the Catholic bishops will learn that calls for voting a certain way will often fall on deaf ears. Maybe we can come to the point where we do not see God as one of the past and a God is is drawing us all into a new future, a God who responds to human life without controlling God’s free creatures. Religious people throw the word sin out far too liberally for their opponents and far too rarely toward themselves. Perhaps we would do well to accept a chastened sense of our creaturehood, that discerning the hand of God is not automatic but takes real reflection and study over time. I suppose I shall end with a prayer for us to find the spirit of conciliation, to discover the humility of the fallibility of the judgments of self and party and ideology, to truly seek the public interest, to seek common ground as well as dividing lines, that we can still our curses and notice our blessings, individually and together.