Government God

[Valin]

Patheos:

Americans, conservatives and liberal, Christian and otherwise, expend great amounts of energy trying to solve our social problems by changing government.
J. E. Dyer
March 14, 2011

Americans have made an idol of government. So, in fact, have all the peoples of the Western world. This may seem strange, coming from someone who writes about politics and government as much as I do. But this point has been growing more persistent in my mind over the last few years, and I think it is extremely important for us to consider the idea.

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This is not a fault particular to one side of the political spectrum. Both the Left and the Right, in their current incarnations, are overly prone to put faith in government and give a sort of spiritual loyalty to particular ideas of it. The political factions manifest this in different ways, but resorting to government is a pronounced reflex for both sides. Even in cases where they do not propose specific government "solutions," they cannot rest until there is at least a government attitude toward the issue.

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Political conservatives might insist at this point that they do not put their faith in government. As a conservative myself, I understand that argument and the distinction between how the Right and Left propose to use government. But conservatives still tend to believe that what will set Americans on a more sustainable national path is a better idea of government. Christians (and Jews and Muslims, for that matter) are as likely to believe this as agnostic or atheist conservatives are. The conservative concept for improving our lives and guaranteeing our future may be smaller government, as opposed to bigger, but it is still a government-centric concept. We look first to fix government in order to solve the crises of our economy and society. This puts government in first place as the nexus of all solutions.

My purpose here is to take a step back from our partisan political beliefs and look at the fact that regardless of the human issue or situation, temporal government is too often the first thing we think of. The winner in all this is the idea of government—not any one ideological concept of it, but the mental impression of "government" hovering over each of our minds. Government has become the object of a mass obsession. It uses up tremendous amounts of our spiritual energy; we might justly be said to have a habit of studying it, praying to it, and waiting for it to give us signs and portents.
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