“I feel like this election has broken something in me.” – A Christian reader
I’ve heard these sentiments countless times over the past month from people of faith who are finding themselves on this side of Election Day, struggling to believe what they once believed.
They’re looking back at all they’ve seen and experienced during the campaign from family members, pastors, and strangers all in the name of God, and they’re trying to reconcile these things with a God who is love.
They’ve watched the Church they called home being the absolute worst of itself, and they now feel decidedly estranged from it, no longer certain whether or not they fit anymore.
They are limping through this year, depleted, bruised, and quietly terrified they may have lost their faith for good.
If you’re in that place right now, friend—welcome. You’re among many friends struggling in solidarity along with you.
And we have reason to be burdened. There are certain religious illusions that feel shattered for many of us this year:
The one where love does indeed trump hate.
The one where bad people don’t prosper.
The one where our faithfulness doesn’t fail us
The one where diversity is treasured.
The one where truth actually means something fixed and sure.
The one where the bullies are brought down.
The one where the Church stands for what is right at any cost.
The one where the Devil doesn’t win.
These were truths that ran securely in the background operating system of our faith and no longer do.
Maybe they have never been fully true at all, but they seemed much more reliable a year ago. Or maybe they are eventual truths that are simply delayed right now, though that’s hard to see from where we’re standing. Either way there is a new reality to be reckoned with and it doesn’t feel comforting.
Right now it only feels like a massive cosmic failure; a clear defeat for goodness and mercy and the things we believed God was supposed to help us cultivate in this world. That God feels distant or absent altogether in these days. The whole system seems corrupted right now and this makes staying faithful very difficult.
And I suppose that days like this shouldn’t come as a surprise to us and they shouldn’t be as disorienting as they are, when we consider our Christian faith story:
An enslaved, maligned, perpetually oppressed ethnic minority community fighting to reflect God’s character in a world hostile to it.
A homeless, sinless, humble teacher of love and Grace; unjustly arrested, beaten, and murdered.
A politically connected, hypocritical religious elite who had lost the plot and couldn’t recognize love anymore.
A Church of nobodies besieged by opposition and forged in the fires of persecution and suffering.
As inheritors of this story we should feel right at home in this time and place, when so much seems to be coming against what we believe the essence of faith to be. This kind of beautiful oddness has always been our holiest ground.
Christianity was never meant to hold power, it was always supposed to be the active resistance to it. The people of Jesus were the greatest of underdogs; always surrounded by the bullies of Rome, always pushing back against Caesar, always fighting for the maligned and disregarded, always championing the value of all people to the ceremonially religious who would protect only a few.
And so we should be really at home here in America today.
I’m not saying it will be easy, in fact it will be downright Hell at times. Yes, there is real adversity facing us right now as people of compassionate faith, but this really is nothing new under the sun and it is not reason to discard the hope that has always run like a golden thread throughout the bigger story we are a part of.
Your spiritual road forward may not look like it did before, but it can be even more life-giving because you’re no longer a prisoner to those old expectations anymore. You are free to define what it means to be Christian. You get to do the redemptive work that needs doing.
Friend, as difficult as it is and as much as you are able, don’t let this election and all that has happened and will happen in our country shake your faith. Let it confirm your faith. Let it make you more committed than ever to pushing back hard against all that threatens the work of love in the world.
Let the unrest in your spirit and all that burdens you right now be the evidence of the faith you fear you’ve lost. Let them be a reminder that you are meant to be in this place; that the presence of pain is not the absence of God and that you are right where you are supposed to be.
Be encouraged.
