Important reminder for us all: Our politicians are politicians, and our media is the media, and we should interpret what they say accordingly
I expect this will be my last overtly political post for a while, because I feel like I’ve been way too politically-minded recently, and it’s taken away from developing a real closer relationship with God.
But I also see the state of the nation we live in, and with it the state of the American church. Just as the country is divided, so is the church. It is not just political pundits and candidates who are attacking each other and tearing each other down; it is also ordinary Christians, in the church, doing the same thing.
Maybe you don’t notice this. Perhaps your church is fairly politically homogeneous (or at least those who disagree don’t feel comfortable expressing it for fear of alienating their friends). Or maybe you just don’t pay attention to politics. But still, it affects you just the same. It affects all of us. We are seeing a sharp divide occurring between denominations, between generations, and between theological viewpoints. Theology and discipleship are getting improperly blended with politics and policy.
And it is harming the reputation of the church, as many Christians who do hold stronger views choose to line up on the side of their political allies and join them in attacking their family in Christ.
So I do feel the need to write this, because it is so crucial to remember in our modern, divided nation. We Christians seem to have forgotten the nature of politics and popular media. We have forgotten that our politicians are politicians, and the media is the media. And instead of seeing them and their public proclamations for what they are, we have become like them.
In the age of social media, we all have an avenue to express ourselves before a public audience, an avenue that previously was limited to people who could pay to organize a rally or get on TV. And now that we have that avenue to express ourselves publicly whenever we want, and also to have constant access to news and social media via our phones — so that it can be constantly on our minds — we need to remember these two very important things.
Our politicians are…politicians
Politics has always been full of slander, character attacks, and smear campaigns. That’s why so many of us hate paying attention to it. Politicians have a job, and that job is to get elected. To do so, it is to their advantage to portray their opponent in as bad a light as possible, in order to sway some of their opponent’s voters over to their side. That is just the nature of politics.
And savvy politicians know that what gets votes in the modern day — especially the votes of young people — is to attack their opponent’s policies not only as impractical, ineffective, or counterproductive, but as immoral. And such attacks are most effective today when directed not only at political opponents, but at their opponents’ voters. The idea is that a person who supports immoral policies is an immoral person, and those who support immoral people are themselves immoral people who deserve to be shouted down and denounced.
This is the winning political strategy du jour. It’s not like it’s never been used before, but in 2019 it is the primary way politicians present their platform. Republican and Democratic politicians do it in different ways, but they both do it. They do their best to frame every part of their platform as moral, versus the immoral policies of their opponent. They do a great job at capturing our attention and getting our enthusiastic support.
In some cases they may even be right — their opponent’s policy may be immoral, and their own policy may be morally right. We who are Christians, and thus believers in objective moral values and duties, need to keep that in mind. But we also need to keep in mind that what politicians say about their opponent, and their opponent’s policies, is always politically motivated.
We should know this. We should be able to see through our politicians’ ulterior motives. It’s not that every politician is insincere and only pandering for votes — many politicians really do want to make the country better and believe they would do a good job at it — but we must recognize that politicians always have ulterior motives. It is always to their advantage to frame their opponent in the worst possible light. It’s always to their advantage to ascribe bad motives and bad character to their opponent. It’s always to their advantage to frame their opponent’s policies as counter to basic morality, no matter how much they have to stretch beyond the bounds of logical or linguistic credulity to do it.
This is easy to see when Donald Trump, for example, goes on Twitter and says, “Democrats want Open Borders and Crime!” or says his political opponents “don’t care about America.” Or when Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes on Twitter and gives a definition of white supremacy so nebulous that it opens the door for anyone who disagrees with any of her policies to be called while supremacist.
But it’s not just politicians. It’s the media, too.
Our media is…the media
We would like to be able to trust the media, at least reputable mainstream media outlets, to give us accurate information on the goings-on in the world. But the media also operates with ulterior motives. Any media outlet needs subscriptions, ratings, and attention to survive. To do that, they need to capture people’s attention, and the best way to do that is by forming an intriguing narrative with the news. They want to grab people’s attention and incite in their audience a hunger to hear more.
So you can guarantee they will sensationalize everything as much as possible. They will turn it into part of the larger narrative they are writing. And because every good narrative has heroes and villains, most outlets will pick a political side and portray that side as generally heroic, and the other as generally villainous. And, of course, many media outlets employ individuals who are very happy to use their platform to promote their own agenda. In 2019, it doesn’t take long at all to figure out which outlets have chosen which side.
So, we must keep in mind that when the media say sensational things that sound hard to believe, everything the media says stems from ulterior motives as well. They may be to get and keep your attention by sensationalizing the truth. They may take a ridiculous or terrible thing a right- or left-wing figure says and present it as representative of the opinion of everyone on that side of the political aisle, such as the Ohio lawmaker who blamed the recent mass shootings on LGBT activism (among other things), or the anti-Semitic remarks of two certain Democratic Congresswomen.
Or some media outlets’ agenda may be to promote a political agenda under the guise of unbiased journalism. They may selectively report certain facts and leave out those that muddle the desired narrative. They may distort the truth to promote a false narrative. Or they may not report anything untrue, but instead explicitly or implicitly ascribe motives and underhanded goals to one side or another that aren’t there.
Whether you’re consuming the right-leaning Fox News, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Daily Wire, or Breitbart, or the left-leaning CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Vox, or Slate, your preferred media outlet is doing some or all of these things to varying degrees, for varying reasons. There is no such thing as purely unbiased news. And we need to recognize this, or we will begin to see people who disagree with us the same way our favorite media outlets portray them — and that is dangerous.
We…are family
Politics is a toxic enterprise. But now the toxicity of politics has bled over onto social media and into pop culture. How many of us parrot our favorite politicians’ talking points on social media or in our friend groups, or take them at face value when we hear them from top candidates? We know that our politicians and media have ulterior motives when they speak. They are a reflection of a worldly system driven by the sinful tendencies we all share.
But we should be able to see through that. We should not be part of those world systems, parroting our favorite politicians’ and media outlets’ talking points just like the rest of the world does. We should not be classifying people into heroes and villains as politicians and the media do. We should recognize that all people are made in God’s image, and are complex creatures. We should look at people as individuals, all different — not through the lens of a political agenda, ours or someone else’s. And we must be careful that we don’t subconsciously take on the perspectives of the narrative-driven media sources we listen to.
We should also be very careful not to slander anyone — Christian or not. Politicians and the media like to apply to people their favorite -ist or -phobe labels to everyone they disagree with. Obviously, some people are indeed racists and xenophobes, and they should be called out for what they are. Actual racists should be called racists, and their ideology has no place in the church.
But labels have meanings, and they must be used accurately. They cannot be redefined to suit our ideology and then applied to people who disagree with us. If you’re going to call someone a racist or anti-American or any other kind of label, you’d better be doing so accurately, because otherwise you’re engaging in deliberate slander, and slander is evil (Eph 4:31; Col 3:8).
Christians have no business choosing political allies over the family of faith. And Christians have no business adopting the media’s or their favorite politician’s perspective on their brother or sister in Christ. When your favorite politician tells you that your neighbor is a secret white supremacist just because he voted for Donald Trump, or that your other neighbor is an anti-American Communist just because he voted for Bernie Sanders, that is slander, and we cannot participate in that.
We must take the words of our politicians for what they are: politically motivated. And we must take the words of our media for what they are: narrative- and ratings-driven, attention-seeking (and often politically motivated). And we must not become like them by slandering our neighbors and promoting our agenda at the expense of relationships in the family of faith.
