Politics, Mid-Terms, and Tea Parties | Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

And not the sort of tea parties I really enjoy.

All the same, co-belligerent Joe Carter and I discuss the current political scene over at Trevin Wax’s place. Trevin is one of the Christian blogging community’s sharpest eyes and best interviewers, and Joe is really, really smart. Which mean’s I’m just struggling to pull my weight.

Here’s a snippet:

Palin is probably the Republicans’s best and most effective political talent, but John McCain ruined her for conservatives. Had she not been turned into an instant celebrity, she would have had a few more years of governance and she would have had to work much harder to build the sort of coalition that she now controls. And that would have meant building an organization rather than a fan base, and potentially working a lot harder to demonstrate that she is a serious policy thinker in addition to a savvy speechmaker.

When it became easy for Palin, she lost the pressure to become a credible Presidential candidate. That sort of short-sightedness has been the Republicans’ loss, as she has the sort of charisma and easygoing image that is required in our media-saturated political environment.

Read the whole thing.

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Christopher Benson

The most interesting part of the interview concerned Christian cooperation with Mormons on the issue of marriage. Matt is right to point out that we should not assume our theologies of marriage are identical merely because we both uphold the union of a man and a woman. Joe rightly says, “All of us—Christians as well as our religious co-belligerents—need to develop a more robust political theology.” I anticipate that David VanDrunen’s forthcoming release, LIVING IN GOD’S TWO KINGDOMS: A BIBLICAL VISION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE (Crossway, October 2010), will help many of negotiate the spiritual and civil spheres: http://www.crossway.org/product/9781433514043