Columns

When does Thanksgiving arrive at your house? Does it show up with family on your doorstep on Thursday morning, at an airport in a far-off place, in the atrium of a restaurant or in the car as you drive over the river and through the woods to you-know-who’s house?

Maybe it arrives several times, with a lunch feast at one home and dinner feast at another on Thanksgiving Day, or at a meal with one family on Thursday and another on a different day. Maybe you have three or four feasts.

Today we pause to shake our heads sadly at the woman in Arizona who, saying she was frustrated by the re-election of Barack Obama, tried to drive over her husband because he had neglected to vote. I’m guessing she was expecting him to vote for someone other than Obama.

Think about that for a moment. You live in Arizona, where you knew who had won the election before the last bites of early bird specials had been gobbled at your neighborhood Denny’s, and you are so irate at one vote not cast that you are trying to injure your beloved.

Whenever an election approaches, as the 2012 presidential race now quickly is, some (though not nearly enough) Christians begin to consider prayerfully for whom they should vote.  And many begin by asking questions like, “Whose side is God on?” or “Is God a Republican or a Democrat?”

However, let me suggest that, for the Christian, these are the wrong questions.

In my last two columns, I have waded into the often-perceived-as-controversial territory at the intersection of politics and religion. Though many try to keep them separate, it is my firm belief that because God established the idea of government (Romans 13) and because governing is first and foremost a moral and spiritual enterprise (making laws that determine right and wrong), trying to separate politics and religion is not only undesirable, it is impossible.