The Perils and Paralysis of Political Paradigms

A good friend and I were eating lunch last week and, as we often do, got to talking about various political, social, and spiritual issues. Building off of pervious conversations, it has been determined that I am something of a Tree-Hugger, and he falls more in the vein of what I shall call a Neocon. Like him, I oppose abortion and share his conviction on many other “conservative” issues, but when it comes to being intentional about being green, our paths divide. To me, my environmental convictions are perfectly congruent with my theology, believing that part of following Christ is the realignment of one’s materialistic ambitions to seek the greater good, and being a good steward of one of God’s greatest blessings to us, planet earth. My friend notes that many environmentalist types, if not most, are also pro-choice. He challenges me by asking how I can support abortion. I told him I don’t, but he said that environmentalists are for abortion because they want to keep the population down. He said he felt like we really don’t need to worry too much about the earth, that it is quite capable of repairing itself (we can cut down the trees for clogged housing developments, but eventually the trees will grow back). Although I disagreed with his last point, I tried to explain to him that A≠B in every case, and that just because I support one of “their” ideas, this doesn’t mean that I share all their other conclusions. This made perfect sense to me, but such a “misalignment” didn’t fit within my friend’s rather dichotomistic political paradigm.

Michael Budde in The (Magic) Kingdom of God (Westview, 1997) criticizes the Church’s frequent accommodation to the ideas and paradigms of mass culture, one that stands in opposition to so many of the Church’s values and its vision for life. Liberal and Conservative alike frequently criticize “the media” for its undesired influence on our lives and values; I believe a large part of that critique should be focused on the political arena—and not just the realm of law and policy, but the political pop culture and media exploitation of politics and party. Popular media seems to reinforce if not create these types of “obvious” political alliances and paradigms, where an “if A=B, then B=C” logic rules. Such a logic may make sense mathematically, but doesn’t work out as well in the realm of politics, where political alliances vary across nation, era, even election season, and where people thankfully don’t have to think like everyone else they might be grouped with, as politically disadvantageous or perplexing as that may sometimes be.