You can find a plethora of statements as to why Mitt Romney lost the election last week. Most of them tend toward calling Republicans to embrace amnesty for illegal aliens to needing to be more hawkish militarily (I guess we’ve been too timid in our method of forcibly spreading democracy around the world). Others are still longing for the return of a new Ronald Reagan. Therein lies a serious problem.
Peter Leithart diagnoses the problem of wanting to return to the days of Reagan. The problem is that Ronald Reagan is dead. More appropriately, the cut taxes, de-regulate, build up the military and let the deficits be cursed philosophy has died. Let Leithart explain:
”Reagan embodied a creed of three articles—limited government, unapologetic support for the free market, and equally unapologetic faith in the rightness of America. Iraq soured the country on aggressive Reaganite foreign policy, and the recession has done the near-miraculous—it has made Keynes sexy again. Obama didn’t get a mandate on Tuesday, but neither did the nation repudiate his health care plan. The era of big government is back. Obama’s re-election was the funeral for a creed that had been on life support for several years.”
This all goes back to death and resurrection, a process God sends His children through on a regular basis in order to protect them from idolatry. We must die to whatever we’ve trusted in besides God Himself. Politically minded (conservative) Christians have trusted in an ideology called Reaganism for their hopes. They’ve put their hopes on a plan that ran it’s course. People don’t support our 1980′s plan for the twenty-first century. God is calling us to something else but we must first surrender our goals to God and let Him prepare us what He desires to do today.
Older
Top
