God told us to “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” Caesar, on the other hand, is increasingly unsatisfied with having what belongs only to him; he wants it all.
I could go on an economist’s rant about the ballooning public debt, for which we are sacrificing our own and our children’s material well-being. The source of the debt, of course, is not Caesar spending federal dollars like a drunken sailor; we want him to do it. We vote him in, after all, on promises that he will give us free goodies in the form of Social Security and Medicare checks, stimulus spending, crony capitalist bailouts, and the like. Party affiliation on this issue has been irrelevant since the days of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” (It’s easy to be compassionate when you use other people’s money.)
It goes beyond economics, though. The state seeks to have a role or a say in almost everything. Your toilets are not legally allowed to flush more than the environmentally-approved amount of water. Your home cannot legally be lit by incandescent bulbs. You cannot legally buy a soda that exceeds a certain volume. If you own a business, you cannot legally charge below the market price because that is driving out mom-and-pop stores; you cannot legally charge above the market price because that is price gouging; you cannot legally charge the market price because that is collusive behavior. And, as we’ve seen this week, you cannot legally defend the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman oriented toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of children because doing so will get you labeled a bigot.
Since my college days, I’ve had two major shifts in thinking which I presumed were unrelated, but I’m increasingly coming to believe that they inevitably happened simultaneously:
1) I used to love politics. I interned for a state Representative in college, listened to political talk radio, kept up with the news about presidents, policies, and programs. I knew our country had problems that needed fixing, and all of these experiences seemed to suggest that the solutions were just around the corner if only our guy got elected to Washington so he could pass our laws to get our ideas implemented. Political defeats were just setbacks; our ideas would win once and for all in the political arena.
Unfortunately, his account is never overdrawn. Pic by Jeff Sandquist
Vanity of vanities. Aside from the empirical fact that our ideas are not winning in the political arena, I am increasingly convinced that most political debates today should not even be in the political arena. Why in the world did we render to Caesar the volume that our toilets could flush? Why do we think that the sacred institution of marriage, or the lives of the unborn, will be saved by black-robed denizens of D.C.? Instead of rooting for our team to win, we should be questioning why the game is even taking place. Our government has changed, and we have allowed and encouraged it to change, from a minimally-intrusive protector of life, liberty, and property into Santa Claus. Every election is a popularity contest to elect the Santa Claus with the bigger bag of toys for us children, whether the toys are government spending, abortion on demand, building a border fence, or same-sex “marriage.” We render to Caesar without questioning, hoping for the great things he will render to us.
2) To the extent that my love affair with politics is over, my love affair with the spiritual life is taking off. In my college and grad school days, religion did not have a claim on my life. The usefulness and utility of prayer (yes, I judged its merits on its ability to achieve those things; am I alone?) was minimal. After my reversion, the importance of prayer and doing God’s will wasn’t apparent until being introduced to St. Teresa of Avila and (I think) St. Francis de Sales. In crude terms, I originally thought I could be a good Catholic by driving my own car with God as the passenger; I realize now that we have to switch seats. As Fr. Barron says, your life is not about you.
The benefit of religion is not that it makes life better; we shouldn’t view religion as one of the many things that brings happiness, like a cruise or cookies and creme ice cream. Our faith is the center of our lives; its circumstances can help or hinder our religious walk. The saints always speak of glorying not just in the good events of life, but the bad ones too. From God’s perspective, and in view of the heaven that awaits those who persevere, the bad things that happen to us shrink in importance. I’m sure many of you have had experiences where you abandon a current trouble to the mercy and care of God, and felt a weight lifted as a result.
Politics used to be my mammon; it wasn’t an idol but certainly seemed the appropriate avenue to solve the problems I thought were important. Now, I would much rather have God than politics (and politicians). I know we are called to be civically engaged, and that if good people don’t run for office the alternatives will. But spirituality has matured me past politics. Call it sour grapes; there is only so much the mind and heart can take when you are bringing children into the world who will not know life before Obamacare, crushing taxes, infringment on religious liberties, and a million deaths annually by dozens of Gosnells.
But instead of hoping “we” can elect the next great statesman to turn this ship around, I realize the problem is me. Not enough trust, prayer, faith, hope, and love. It’s a lot easier to fix those than to get a majority of sane, logically- and philosophically-consistent people in the White House, Congress, and the courts. My salvation isn’t in the ballot box; it’s in the confessional and tabernacle.