“Surprised, but not surprised.”
That’s how I feel this morning.
All this election year I’ve thought that, no matter what happened on November 5th, on November 6th it would still be true that the American Church has big problems.
There never should have been such a thing as “the Christian Right,” but there is. It’s here, and it’s not going to go away overnight. Some of us (myself included) were discipled into this way of thinking since infancy. Some of us (myself included!) owe our very existence to this way of thinking (looking at you, my fellow Quiverfull babies). For many people, “right-wing Christianity” is the only Christianity they know, and anything else is apostasy.
My political alliances have changed over the last eight years. But the work is bigger than getting people to vote differently or shift their political alliances (although it’s to be expected that people’s political involvement will be impacted). Politics are - or should be - downstream from spiritual formation. If the “end game” is merely a political shift, then we’ve already lost.
The work is slow. It’s going to be two steps forward, one step back, on a good day. We’ll have to constantly challenge and adjust our ideas of what “success” looks like. It’s going to be hampered by the fact that we ourselves - the ones trying to do the work - are still stumbling, learning, growing.
But the work is good. It’s worth doing, no matter what happens.