You’ve gotta love being human, right? All that intelligence, all those skills, all the creativity that we ‘Big Brains’ enjoy but other species don’t. Then there’s the whole ‘Made in God’s Image’ thing. Yup, no question. It’s good to be a human.
But it can be a pain at times - like our need for community. God made us to be part of a pack. We need to stick together for our survival. We need community if we’re going to thrive. Isolation kills. But what God intended for good, humans have turned into a curse. Our need for community means we divide ourselves into teams, tribes, parties, factions. Soon, what was intended to help us thrive becomes a source of suffering and death.
In theory, churches are the best place to find the sort of community God intended for us. Here we can be (or at least, we should be) able to find the encouragement, support, help, and love that we need and crave. But, as organized religion has seriously declined, people have turned to another place where they find their tribal identity, safety, and pride. It’s politics, and especially the online variety.
This is why our language about politics, and our emotional attachment to parties and personalities, has become so deep and so troubling. Our online community teaches us, trains us, forms us. There we find people who think what we think, love what we love, and hate what we hate. In the echo chamber of Facebook and X, cable news channels, and talk radio, we find belonging, power, acceptance, and safety from ideas that we might find challenging.
Sometimes our tribal political identity can become so strong that it becomes our primary way of understanding the world and our place in it. Party becomes more important than church, and Caesar becomes more worthy of loyalty and worship than Christ.
So, how do you know if your devotion to the tribe has become greater than your loyalty to Jesus? Well, at last Wednesday’s Lost for Words presentation I suggested asking ourselves five questions, the answers to which will tell us if we truly believe that Jesus is Lord or not. Someone asked me to send them out in written form, so here they are:
Signs your tribal identity may be more important than your allegiance to Christ
- Character flaws and behavior you believe would be disqualifying if they were owned by the other party’s candidate are excused when they are owned by your candidate.
- You enthusiastically support a policy of your party, even though you strongly disagreed with it when it was promoted by the other party.
- You are unwilling to be vocal about a policy or practice of your party that you find morally unacceptable.
- You don’t research the truth of a matter because you’re afraid the truth will make your party will look bad.
- You have already decided to vote for your party’s candidate no matter what; the ‘reasons’ you give are not reasons at all - merely justifications.
Oof! How did you do? As followers of Christ we love truth, honesty, and integrity. When we sacrifice those things out of loyalty to our political tribe then we commit idolatry. Lord have mercy!