Now, of course, I’ve dropped political blogging in favor of blogging about my experience as a growing Christian.  There is, however, a connection between the two in my mind.

When I went to Charleston Southern University I was a double major.  My majors were religion and political science.  People often looked at me as if I had grown two heads when I told them that.  The question in their minds was, “what in the world do those two things have to do with each other?”

For me the conservative political philosophy was a natural extension of my Christian beliefs. On issue after issue it has always seemed to me that the conservative position (as opposed to the Republican position) was much more in line with Biblical teaching than liberal positions.

I can just hear Christian Democrats screaming at me now so let me clarify.  I am NOT presenting a conservative Christianity apologetic.   I am explaining where I have come from in order to lay the ground work for what I have to say on the general subject of Christianity and politics.

You see, I did not stop political blogging because I changed my political views.  On the contrary, I hold essentially the same views I always have regarding what I believe to be correct or the best political philosophy.  What has changed is where I see that philosophy fitting in to the bigger picture of change in the world.

For many years I believed that if only we could, as a country, adopt the best political philosophy, we could turn America around and once again become a moral, Christian country.  I hope you see the problem with this.  I was placing my trust in a philosophy which is the same mistake Utopian thinkers have made throughout history.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this approach is that it ignores the basic inability of man to make himself better.  Utopian thinkers have always believed that if society only had the right approach, every social problem, every social injustice could be corrected and we could all live happily ever after.  But the fact is, mankind is hopelessly corrupt and morally bankrupt.  It is our nature to grab all we can for ourselves and not worry about everyone else.  If that were not true there would be no need for government in the first place.

That’s why conservatives are always disappointed when they elect Republicans they believe to be conservative.  While they may have been conservative when elected, they are subject to the same failings as all humans and when they face the temptations that come with power, they generally don’t handle it any better than anyone else.  So you end up with Republicans presiding over the largest expansion of government up to that time which is clearly not based on conservatism.

Regardless of which party is in power, it is still human men and women who are in power and they are all, along with the rest of us, fallen human beings in need of a savior.  Left to their own devices and their own personal philosophy, they will all become more and more corrupt because that is our nature.

As Lord Acton so aptly noted, “power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  This is true for the best of us as well as the worst.  It might take longer for the best but it is still the norm because we cannot improve ourselves.

This, of course, flies in the face of postmodern thinking which is generally committed to the idea that we can improve the human condition through our own efforts.  Never mind that thousands of years of history demonstrate the falsity of such a belief.  We still cling to the idea that, in spite of everything that has been tried before, if we just do this or that differently, we can achieve a different result.  Now there is absolute faith that flies in the face of all the evidence!

So if we are helpless to help ourselves, what hope is there?  The answer is that the God of all creation has already done for us what we could never do for ourselves.  He has provided redemption through His Son, Jesus, who died so that we might live.  Only through faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross can we hope to effect any change in humanity as a whole and American society more specifically.

Following the 2006 elections I was so disappointed that I could hardly function.  I thought we were doomed as a nation.  By the time of the 2008 elections, I had gone through a change.  Even though the 2008 election results were far worse from a conservative perspective than the 2006 results, I was not nearly so disappointed.  The reason was that I grasped much more fully that God is in control and He knows what He is doing.  I knew that I could trust Him no matter how it looked to me.

I still believe that a conservative approach to governance is the best way to go but attempting that without a Christian worldview is just wasted effort because people do not feel accountable to anyone but themselves and no one does a worse job of holding you accountable than you do.  “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” Psalms 127:1

So my focus has changed from politics to Christianity because that is the real, the true answer.  Political philosophy can never save us.  Only God can do that through His Son, Jesus.