Climb Above The Line Of Despair
Politics is obviously important, but it will never truly give us the answers we seek.
This past Tuesday was Primary Election Day in Georgia. Several high-profile races will go to a four-week runoff because no candidate gained a majority of the votes, as required by Georgia law. While the various candidates have been attacking each other, in my opinion, it hasn’t been a particularly vicious campaign season. Many of my social media friends disagree with me on that point. They post about being overwhelmed by the volume of attack ads and mail pieces they’ve received - particularly among Republican campaigns.
On Peach Pundit The Podcast this week, I was joined by two longtime friends as we reviewed the Primary Election results. Republican turnout across the state was lower than Democratic turnout by a sizeable amount. Several polls showed higher than usual numbers of respondents saying they were undecided, even the weekend before election day. Perhaps the perception of a more negative campaign season led to higher rates of undecided voters, resulting in lower Republican turnout. Perhaps.
In the days following the Primary Election, I noticed a number of Twitter users professionally connected to political campaigns being snarky in the extreme about the success of their candidate and the lack of success of other candidates. They forgot that supporters of failed candidates will return to the polls on June 16th to vote again, and disrespecting their first choice could impact who their second choice ends up being.
This snarkiness culminated in one of the most spectacular campaign-related social media blunders I’ve ever seen.
I’m not going to mention names or describe the content of what was posted. My Georgia readers likely know what took place. The candidate fired the person responsible and claims to have made other staffing and procedural changes to ensure nothing like this happens again.
As the drama unfolded, my comments drew the ire of a podcaster from Florida who, as it turns out, works for the Georgia candidate in question. Like many political “tough guys,” he has a Christian Cross in his profile image, even as he used profanity to put me in my place in defense of his rather crude sexual remarks. Dozens of his fans took the time to inform me that my comments were a distraction from the real issues at stake and indeed evidence of my physical, mental, and spiritual weakness. According to one Tweeter, Jesus found the whole episode hilarious and was definitely on the podcaster’s side.
Sadly, several of these folks, like their podcaster hero, proclaim faith in Jesus in their Twitter bios.
I’m not here to cast stones at these folks for their specific comments towards me. We all fall short of the principles we aspire to live by, and social media tends to bring out the worst in people. Nor do I bring this up to make you feel sorry for me. I’ve been around politics long enough to have developed thick skin.
I want to put this into context with the things I’ve been writing about lately: love, accountability, meekness, and purpose. Believe me, the words I’ve written were ringing in my ears as this episode unfolded. You can’t be the “LAMP guy” and cast all that aside the moment someone confronts you. I hope and pray I stayed true to my own principles.
I’ve been re-reading some of Francis Schaefer’s works lately. I mentioned Schaeffer in my last post on purpose. Schaefer, through a series of books, developed the thought that as America has shifted away from the belief in absolutes in life, i.e., the absolute truth that Christ is Lord over grace and nature, we fell below what he termed “the line of despair.” In other words, by rejecting Christ’s Lordship over grace and nature, we struggle to find what does not exist outside of Christ: a unified explanation of life. This results in a division between rationality and faith.
Falling below the line of despair, mankind engage in “acts of desperation in order to find meaning, namely, he accepts a mysticism which gives an illusion of unity to the whole.1”
For far too many, politics has become their form of mysticism.
We crave assurance that the world still makes sense. When traditional sources of meaning weaken (i.e. faith communities, civic organizations, neighborhood ties), politics rushes in to fill the void.
Sociologist Robert Bellah saw this coming, warning in 1967 that the United States had formed a “civil religion” that told us who we are and what we should revere. Philosopher Eric Voegelin cautioned that when transcendence is lost, ideology becomes a substitute for salvation. Lesslie Newbigin observed that modern societies expect the state to provide not only security, but purpose.
Today, that trend is accelerating. Elections feel existential. Politicians speak in messianic terms.
Ordinary disagreements take on the heat of heresy.
Nowhere is this more true than in the heat of a runoff election for the United States Senate. But winning the Twitter battle, or even winning the election, will not give us what we are searching for, nor will it “save America.” I return to Schaeffer:
“Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to say clearly that its answer has the very thing modern man has despaired of – the unity of thought. It provides a unified answer for the whole of life. True, man has to renounce his rationalism; but then, on the basis of what can be discussed, he has the possibility of recovering his rationality” (Escape From Reason, 262).
I’m not arguing that the 2026 elections are not important; they are. I’m not arguing that electing a candidate who will fight for what is right isn’t important; it is. But when we lose sight of the absolute truth that Christ is Lord over all, even how we engage on Twitter in support of a political candidate we support, we slip below the line of despair and put our hope in a mysticism that cannot give us what we seek. Let us resist that temptation. Christ Jesus, help me resist that temptation!
https://davidsteele.blog/2020/12/03/why-francis-schaefer-matters-the-line-of-despair-part-3-3/