Partisan politics versus grass-roots leadership

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ibertarian Party. Taxpayer’s Party. Green Party. Reform Party. Southern Party. Third party politics looks ever more increasingly like a good option. I have been bothered by the politics of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party for quite some time. I even voted third party (U.S. Taxpayer’s Party) against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton when the senior Bush ran for a second term. The election of Bill Clinton persuaded me to to reenter the major party political scene again. But when the Republicans took over the whole shebang and squandered their opportunity by acting just like the Democrats, to whom everything was returned by the electorate, I was reminded again of why I once voted third party.

Journalist Paul Jacobs addressed this issue in the recent article, Not another party. In the article he rightly observes:

The naked truth of modern politics is that our elections are meaningless affairs in which two blow-dried phonies with the same agenda lie to us shamelessly ... when not charging each other with greater degrees of hypocrisy, deception, and kleptomania.

I don’t know the answer to the current problems the United States is having with its leaders, but I do support the grass-roots efforts of the TEA parties, the Town Hall protestors, and others. Well, perhaps I do know the answer to the problems. We Christians need to stop being hopelessly (and helplessly) tied to one political party or the other and need to get back to the work at hand—spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and his redeeming death on the cross. The heart of man is wicked, whether Republican or Democrat, and he can be expected to pull the same sort of shenanigans as any other man until his heart and mind are controlled by the Holy Spirit.

May the Church in America get back to business—not by dropping out of the political process, but by looking not to the political parties as our savior but to the one Savior, Jesus Christ.