Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia did the one thing that each and every one of us must do: He died.
It’s not a huge surprise when a 79-year-old passes. But this particular passing upended the delicate balance on the imperial United States Supreme Court, along with its penchant for shoot-from-the-hip, re-write the Constitution, judicial lawmaking. That set everyone, from the conspiracy theorists, to the Senatorial bully boys, in a boil.
It also underscored two things I’ve been saying for quite a while now. The first of these is that if we are serious about reclaiming this culture, we must convert both political parties. The second is that our pro-life political strategy of court-packing needs to be re-thought.
I’m going to write today about the first of these two convictions of mine. We must, if we are survive as a nation and a people, re-take control of these run-away political parties. We must also, if we ever hope to build a culture of life, convert both of them.
That means, my dear pro-life brothers and sisters, that we must stop thinking of the other political party as the devil incarnate and begin to look on it as a mission field, ripe for the harvest. In short, we need to stop following political hucksters who want to use our votes to gain power for themselves to be used for themselves, and follow Christ the Lord.
It was Jesus who told us to go out and convert the world. It is Satan who tells us to look at those folks over there and condemn them and damn them to hell with all the smug self-righteousness we can muster. Even if the thought that converting people is what Christ specifically told us to do doesn’t move you, then consider once again the sheer political cliff that we are standing on due to Justice Scalia’s death.
We’ve been trying to pack this court for almost 50 years now, and what we’ve gotten for our efforts is corporatism that is breaking the backs of the people of this nation and gay marriage.
We need to convert the Democratic Party to a party of life. We need to convert the Republican party to a party of conservatism rather than abject corporatism. We need to convert both of them into entities that are focused on how to help America and Americans rather than just raid the national treasury for those who pay for their political campaigns.
Every time I bring up the idea that we must, if we want to reclaim this nation, convert the Democratic party, I get a smattering of comments explaining how terrible the Ds are, along with one or two questioning my personal commitment to Christ because I am a registered Democrat. The unspoken sentiment in those comments is a refusal to even contemplate converting either party, since one is perfect as it is, and the other is beyond hope.
I think that people who do this like things the way they are. They like the self-righteous frisson they get from condemning the Ds, and by comparison deifying themselves.
But these are not eternal verities. They are political parties. They exist for one purpose, and that is to gain power and keep power within the political process. What’s gone wrong is that their total obeisance is now given to the corporate beasts who have taken over our government. Neither party cares about this country or its people, and that is the sad, bad, bitter truth of it.
There is one God, one righteousness, one way to eternal life, and He is Jesus Christ. Everything else we touch and know is fallible human dross. We have a great nation, founded on principles of human value and worth. But our great nation is being drug down to the pits by two warring political parties who are not worthy of the heritage of freedom under which they operate.
Justice Scalia’s death underscores a simple truth: We cannot continue the way we’ve been going. We will never save our great democracy or build a culture of life with these hate-on-hate tactics.
We cannot move forward by simply consigning half the people to hell and stepping over them. We must re-convert this nation, and we must do it completely. If politics is your metier, that means you must be dedicated to converting the political parties. If you are an R, you must work to end the corporatist corruption that rules the party. If you are a D, you must be the pro life, pro family beacon shining in its cultural nihilism.
In short, we must be what Jesus commanded. We must convert our world.