The Christian Man Vs. The Political World
By Mason Laney
Last year, I spent several months campaigning for an “important” position in Harvard Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society (FedSoc). It was not the most edifying experience. The election cycle devolved into “he said, she said” at its worst. Various factions battled back and forth, and the more drama there was, the more invested everyone became — not in the position or the club, but in the controversy itself. Even professors and podcasters, yes, podcasters, got involved.
It all seemed so important.
So important that, one night just two weeks before the election, I could easily have rushed past an acquaintance of mine in the HLS Pub. He wasn’t in FedSoc, so he wasn’t a potential voter. But I felt a nudge from God, a rare occurrence in my political heart, to sit down and chat with him. So I did.
I began the conversation as anyone might, asking about how he was doing, what he’d been up to lately, and other, similar pleasantries. But he had little interest in small talk, and our conversation quickly turned to Christianity and personal identity. I learned that my friend was not just an agnostic; he was a self-described “man without a chest,” a moniker from C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man.1 In other words, he felt little sentiment towards the world. He recounted to me how reflecting upon his own memories felt like reading a newspaper from the 1920s, merely world events that had happened in one place or another. No feelings, just words on a page.
For me, a self-described hopeless romantic, his outlook was shocking, to say the least. I had always evangelized by appealing to the very emotions he now said were entirely alien to him. This man seemed to pose an impossible challenge: he claimed he just could not feel what I did. My heart broke for him.
I asked several follow-up questions and discussed my relationship with Christ. He pondered my words with consideration but seemed mostly unmoved by them. We chatted for a bit longer and then parted ways. I prayed for him, and that was that.
The election season came and went. Life went on.
Then, a year later, we met again. I had just arrived at a Christian Fellowship gathering when I turned to see him walk in through the door. I was puzzled, but approached him and picked up where we had previously left off, with the same pleasantries we had shared a year before.
I asked him why he was there, expecting it was out of some academic interest. But he paused, reflecting for a moment, clearly not knowing how to say it:
“I actually got baptized last spring.”
In light of what I knew about him, those words shook me to the core. He — of all the people I had ever met, the man I thought most difficult to convert — had converted.
He went on to recount how he had begun to think more deeply about faith. Through a series of strange events and sound reasoning, he said, he had come to the inevitable conclusion that he must become a Christian.
I’ll admit, as I listened, I nearly broke down in tears. How I had forgotten what mattered! I would have easily rushed past him that night at the pub, off to the next meeting with the next voter, or to strategize over whatever speech I wanted to give on election night. I would have and could have.
And still worse, how many more have I rushed by? How many times have I felt that impulse to pause and talk, to show the love of Christ, yet had something ‘more important’ to get to? How many?
It was in the course of this terrible revelation that I came to another.
That conversation, even if it didn’t mean all that much to him, meant more to me now than any one of the conversations I had over the course of that entire election cycle. Any of them.
In the drama of that season, in the ‘high stakes’ of partisan politics, I had so easily forgotten who I truly was.
But it’s not just me who has forgotten. So have many conservative Christians.
It is easy to convince ourselves that our political mission requires our primary focus. But we must not forget what this is all really about. We are not on a mission so important as to be excused from being the hands and feet of Christ, to be excused from caring for the lost, the poor, or the brokenhearted, nor from turning the other cheek.
Our political movement, which will surely fade from this Earth as quickly as it appeared, is not so important. We are not so great.
None of us is.
Now, this is not a popular lesson among Harvard’s right-wing. “We need anger,” one of my HLS peers once told me. “There are traitors in our midst,” another said. “We have a country to save.” All of these words may convey some element of the truth: Winning now matters as much as ever, and we should strive to be firm, direct, and effective in our politics.
But the need to ‘win’ is never an excuse to be anything less than Christian. There are worse things than losing. I would rather die a righteous man than live with the blood of the innocent on my hands or bend the knee to a tyrant.
And yet, in our day and age, I easily forget that. I forget the man in the pub. I convince myself that my mission is more important than stopping for him. I convince myself that I am excused from charity, from humility, from striving towards Christ — because that’s just how important my politics is.
But if we are “to save” this country, if we are to root out those “traitors in our midst,” and if we are to use a dangerous tool as “anger” to do so, then we must be men of honor and God. It is not enough for men such as us in a time such as ours to excuse ourselves from the standard of the Christ-follower, from the weight of glory.
Of course, then, this means that we must follow a different playbook from the other side. We are different from them. And of course, to do so makes it harder to win. To be a man of God, in politics as in life, is to do the harder thing.
But that sounds much like weakness to many on the Right. It sounds like I’m espousing your local RINO politics. “Don’t vote for Trump because he’s mean.”
The truth is much harder: Many of the same people who say we shouldn’t vote for mean politicians are just as morally blind as those who say we should always support the President. The Good is not bound to a sense of self-righteousness nor to the support of one mortal man. The Good is God’s. Our mission is His, our party His, and our lives His.
So yes, we live in troubled times. But all of these troubles will be and have been resolved. We know who wins in the end. So we must stop acting as if it would only be through niceness or cut-throatedness or whatever other political tactic we may contrive that we’ll summon Christ and triumph in the end.
God may not want us to win an election or get that one piece of legislation across the line. But he certainly wants us to stop for the man in the pub.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. Touchstone, 1996, pp. 35–37.