If there’s anything I feel like I’ve learned in the past eight years, it’s that old adage about actions speaking louder than words. It’s the old faith vs. works thing – doing good doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian, but if you claim to be a Christian and aren’t doing good, one has to wonder whether your faith is genuine or not.

I’m not about to make a judgment call on whether our leader’s faith is authentic or not – for one thing I’d be an enormous hypocrite, as I do things contrary to what I claim to believe with regularity (albeit on a slightly smaller stage.) But I do think it’s important to remember that just because someone (even myself) claims to be a Christian, it doesn’t mean that they are. Just like I can claim to be a ham sandwich, but that doesn’t make it so. Hitler claimed to be a Christian as well.

There will be a lot of politicians out there who claim to have a very personal relationship with God. They may even go the next step and claim that their policies are informed by their faith. After the last election, I pray that we learn a little discernment.

I hope that we can recognize that, more often than we’d like to think, politicians (and people in general) will use their faith as a tool to advance their agenda, and that agenda will often contradict the values they claim to hold dear. My faith, for one, is supposed to be about turning the other cheek, about forgiving easily, about loving my enemy, abhorring death, and working for peace. My faith tells me that the Gospel can be summed up in the commands to love my neighbor as myself and to give to the poor.

I hope that evangelicals and the church as a whole can have the wisdom to vote for someone whose actions and policies aren’t contrary to their beliefs. I hope that they have the wisdom to vote for a leader and not a ham sandwich.

It worries me that our nation is unraveling…and these channels are some of the primary culprits. In the name of good entertainment, our country has become completely entrenched in this notion of point-counterpoint. Two people intentionally polarized shouting at each other, calling each other idiots, verbally assaulting their colleagues and our eardrums for hours on end.

These people probably don’t hate each other – they probably go grab beers right after and watch baseball. But they have implanted the idea in our soft little brains the following ideas:

1. there are two and only two sides to a story or issue.
2. whichever issue I agree with is obviously the right one.
3. anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot at best, and is the reincarnation of Satan at worst.

The past few elections have been increasingly hostile. We’ve completely thrown out the idea that maybe both parties are simultaneously right and wrong. We’ve decided to ignore the fact that, like everything else in life, issues are complicated. We’ve decided to forget about reason, instead making a choice for one set of ideas or another so we can turn our brains and hearts off and be spoon-fed propoganda.

I live in a world now where people are either republicans or democrats – that’s what defines us, what we are in a nutshell. And it makes me sad.

I’m sad because we miss out on so many opportunities to become friends with other people, opportunities to fall in love, opportunities to be good role models to our children or parents or siblings or coworkers.

Don’t get me wrong – I believe strongly in my ideas, and I do think there are a great many things in this world worth fighting for.

But I also believe that I can discuss my ideas with love in my heart. In fact, I believe it’s my imperative to do so.

We have so little love for people who have different ideas. We have so little patience, so little respect or consideration or kindness or humanity. We villianize them, make ourselves believe they are idiots.

They’re not idiots. None of them. They’re fallen people, people whose lives are riddled with problems and broken hearts and hurt feelings and rejection. People who, just like us, are operating the best way they know how with the information they have at hand. Information that is incomplete, biased (and getting increasingly more so), and probably faulty – just like the information at our disposal.

I feel strongly about the environment, about abortion, about capital punishment, about the war. We all do. But we need to feel a lot more strongly about the guy next door who’s wife just left him after hiding an affair for five years. We need to feel a lot more strongly about the girl whose father beat her mercilessly for years and hates men as a result. We need to feel a lot more strongly about the guy standing outside in the unbelievably cold Chicago weather hoping he can scrape together enough money to buy a McDonald’s sandwich.

Even if they are card-carrying members of the party that your favorite talking head has taught you to despise.

I’m tired of living in a culture that tells me it’s okay, I can do what I want. I’m tired of being told that everything is subjective, tired of being told that I can rationalize away my worst thoughts and deeds. I’m tired of being able to chalk my lowest moments up as ‘learning experiences.’

I’m tired of seeing people make commitments to each other with no intention of honoring them. I’m tired of hearing about couples getting married only to divorce within a few months. I’m tired of flippant, off-hand comments about someone cheating on someone else, as if such behavior is natural, expected, normal.

I’m tired of being let off the hook.

I want to meet people who don’t insist I put on a mask to hide my faults. I want to meet people who are willing to call me on my bullshit.

I write one day about the perils of greed, and the very next I pass right next to a guy asking me for help. Call me on it.

I say something in jest that makes someone feel a little less respected, a little less honorable, a little less beautiful, a little less amazing than they are. Call me on it.

I cut corners on a project because, hey, it’s not like anyone else is giving 150% anyway. Call me on it.

I write something clever. People tell me it’s clever. I puff myself up like I was the source of my ideas, my intellect. Call me on it.

Don’t tell me that I’m being too hard on myself when I point out my faults. Help me work on them, help me become a better person, help me keep the curtain pulled back. Don’t make it easy for me to slip back into normal habits. Expect better from me.

And then take the next step. Expect better from yourself as well. Don’t put on the mask. Someone asks you how you’re doing – tell them. Show your warts. Talk about your demons. Ask to be held accountable.

It’s so much easier for us to slip into a mode that says everything is okay, as long as we’re happy. It’s easy because no one expects anything more from us. Because if they expect more from us, they have to take the next step and expect more from themselves. And that’s a difficult thing to do.

I don’t know how to change the world for the better. I don’t know how to convince our leaders to make intelligent, moral decisions.

But I do know that if I want to hold them accountable, I have to start with myself first. I can’t rail againt my leaders or my friends or my family for lying or cheating or stealing or boasting or hurting others unless I’m willing to first confront myself.

And when I do confront myself, openly, honestly….I find a lot of dirt.

There are so many things I do – daily – that I’m not proud of. Things I’d like to do differently. I screw up all the time. I’m not strong enough to live the way I know I should. Not on my own.

I need someone to hold me accountable. But the person holding me accountable can’t do so unless they first examine themselves. And once they do so, they find a lot of dirt. They discover that they too need someone to hold them accountable.

Our lives, the organism of humanity, appears to me to be more and more related to accountability. We are not islands. The decisions we make impact us, often in the long term, almost certainly in the short term. Our decisions impact those around us, those we love, those we don’t even know exist.

Unfortunately, our nature seems to lend itself to screwing up. Nobody’s perfect, and that’s probably on purpose. But the answer to screwing up is not to be let off the hook. The answer isn’t to rationalize it away. The answer isn’t to call it life and forget about it. The answer is to strive to be better – to resolve to lie to each other less, steal from each other less, hurt each other less.

And the best way I’ve found to support our push to be better is to have someone to hold us accountable. Someone who loves us enough to not let us off the hook, to cheer us on when we succeed, to rebuke us and build us up when we fail.

Are you willing to be held accountable? Are you willing to examine yourself? Are you willing to hold someone you love accountable n similar fashion?

If we did so, I bet the world would very quickly become a much different place.

We learn when we’re extremely little that there are people who are ‘in’ and people who are not. We learn that if you’re not in my group you’re probably stupid. In high school we get in fights at the mall or at a party with a group of kids because they go to a different high school than we do – because they committed the travesty of living in different neighborhood we learn to hate them for no apparent reason.

We grow older and hate people because they root for a different basketball team, or because they vote differently than we do, or because their God is different than our God or because their skin tone is lighter or darker or because they speak a different language.

We do it because it feels good to turn people into cartoons. It feels good to feel like you’re better or smarter or prettier or faster than others, and the easiest way to do so is to take these complicated, emotional, talented, fragile people and package them up into a singular idea. Once we turn them into cartoons it’s easy to hate them.

It’s easy to call George Bush an idiot or Bill Clinton evil. It’s easy to call the kid downstairs a punk. It’s easy to call the guy sitting across from us on the subway a drunk. It’s easy to call the beautiful girl on the other side of the bar stupid and easy. It’s easy to wave an American flag and dismiss people’s complaints as ignorant or unpatriotic. It’s easy to shout from a pulpit that the gay guy in the car next to at a traffic light is demon possessed. It’s easy to call your Christian coworker an intolerant sheep with no understanding of the real world.

They’re not part of our club, so there’s something wrong with them.

What’s hard is to rip up the membership card.

What’s hard is to not get into a stupid argument about whether the Raiders or the Broncos are the better team.

What’s hard is to realize that the girl who walked by you on the street with the ‘go to hell’ stare is probably immensely self-conscious because of magazines telling her how she’s supposed to look and talk and interact, that she may have been hurt emotionally or otherwise by a slew of guys who didn’t value her as a person.

What’s hard is to contemplate the unthinkable tragedies that might have happened in the life of a guy that’s reduced him to sitting on a corner without having showered in a week, humiliating himself by having to hold out a three day old paper coffee cup begging you to drop in your spare change.

What’s hard is to have a conversation or read an article about protests in France or wherever and ask yourself whether their protests have some serious merit.

What’s hard is to acknowledge that every serious political candidate you’re seeing on television has lived a pretty extraordinary life, has done a great deal to impact the lives of those around them and holds the ideas they hold (is willing to put themselves on television at our mercy to spread those ideas) because they truly believe that they will help the country in the long run. What’s hard is to be willing to admit that the idea that one party is right about every idea while the other party is hopelessly insipid…is pretty insipid.

What’s hard is to be aware that there are indeed villians in the world, but they are in much shorter supply than we think. The majority of people we treat as villians are fragile, broken, self-conscious people just like us. And the hard thing is to respond to people, with their scars and blemishes and dissenting ideas and misguided actions….and love them.

We should all consider letting more people into our club.

Forget that – we should all consider getting rid of the club.

There are times when we makes decisions based on what we think are good precepts. We believe that something would be the right decision, would prove beneficial for ourselves or our families or our communities. We believe that there isn’t enough objectivity – that the world is black and white, right and wrong, and those truths should guide our decision-making.

And so we make a decision. And we watch the repurcussions of that decision. Unfortunately we’re human, and sometimes those decisions don’t turn out quite like we thought they would.

It’s even worse when our decisions are public ones, when the repurcusssions are in plain sight in front of our friends and loved ones – sometimes even in front of people we barely know, and sometimes in front of people who told us we were idiots for doing what we were about to do.

All to often, instead of apologizing or admitting we may have made a mistake, we dig in, entench ourselves, look for a reason – any reason – to justify our actions. We look for the tiniest silver lining to back up our opinion. We may look progressively more foolish as time goes on, as the situation gets worse, but it doesn’t matter. If we’re going to be wrong, we should do so with bravado.

The problem when making decisions based on faith is that we make two assumptions, one right, one wrong.

We’re right to think that there is objective truth in this world – there is a right and a wrong answer, and we’re right to base our assumptions on those values.

We’re wrong to think that we’re omniscient enough to always know which answer is which.

The answer isn’t to act like a child and demand that we’re right even when the evidence more and more clearly suggests we’re probably not. The answer is to be willing to admit that we made a mistake, apologize if necessary, and then resolve to do what you can to remedy the situation. The disciple Peter, who once thought that the Gospel was something only for Jews, later recognized his staunch beliefs weren’t accurate. He didn’t pout, didn’t hold his ground – he submitted to what he now saw as the truth and changed.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: America, I’m sorry about the whole voting for Bush thing.