As we enter into the final stretch of yet another tedious election season it is worth considering the effects of the patterns of speech we tend to reliably fall into every four years—and patterns we increasingly struggle to leave behind after every fourth November.
The obvious corollary to the notion that we are facing "the most important election in our lifetime" is that despair is authorized if the result should go against us. Or perhaps the point is that any device we might use can now be licit given the gravity of the threat. Either way, I expect that we allow faulty premises to slip by too easily and then find ourselves attempting to triumph in an ultimately unwinnable argument.
As I continue to go back over the works of Wendell Berry, it may be that his example can offer us something when confronted by such language.
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Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
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