Posted February 26, 2026
Commentators are still responding to President Trump’s “State of the Union” address in the predictably partisan ways you would expect. Reactions have been from such polar opposites that an uninformed observer could question whether they are responding to the same speech.
I genuinely grieve to see the depth of rancor and bitterness that exists in our country toward fellow Americans with whom we happen to disagree politically. And I genuinely question whether our democratic experiment can be sustained while we sustain such animosity toward one another.
In 1774, John Wesley advised those who would be voting in an upcoming election:
1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy
2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against, and
3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.
Don’t you wish more Americans would take his advice?
To encourage us toward this end, I’d like to reflect with you on a recent interview that has marked me in profound ways.
As you may know, the former US senator and college president Dr. Ben Sasse recently announced that he is dying of pancreatic cancer. In a podcast he taped with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, it is clear that Dr. Sasse is suffering. Tumors have filled his spine and torso; he is on heavy medications to manage his pain and hopefully extend his life.
Nonetheless, his reflections on life and what matters most are both brilliant and wise. I urge you to watch the entire conversation. For our purposes today, I’ll focus on the interviewer’s question as to whether Ben’s decade devoted to politics was “worthwhile.” Ben’s response:
There is no doubt that a framework for ordered liberty is necessary. Power and coercion and restraint of evil are not the center of anybody’s loves, or they shouldn’t be. The worldview is pretty distorted if politics can become the central thing. And yet, because the world is broken, it’s important work.
His last sentence led me down a path I had not considered before.
Prior to the Fall, humans lived in the Garden of Eden, placed there by God to “work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15, my italics). The two Hebrew verbs mean to develop and to protect, to cultivate and to guard God’s creation.
However, as a consequence of sin, humanity was soon consigned to bring forth food “in pain” (Genesis 3:17). Mothers would “bring forth children” in “pain” as well (v. 16), and all mankind would “return to the ground” in death (v. 19).
I therefore wonder if much of what people do for a living in our fallen world is a consequence of the Fall.
Worship leaders would presumably have a job in Eden, as pre-Fall people would especially want to glorify God. Our mandate to develop creation would imply progress that could include scientific, engineering, and technological advances. Teachers would help us acquire the knowledge cultivated by mankind over the generations.
But to illustrate my question: Medical professionals treat bodies that begin to die the moment they are born. Legal professionals seek to preclude and respond to sin and protect sinners from each other. Vocational ministers work professionally to help people find salvation in Christ. None of this would have been needed before sin corrupted our bodies and our relationships with God and each other (cf. Romans 8:22).
Of all the jobs people do, it seems to me that politics would have been especially unnecessary before the Fall. I quoted James Madison’s observation earlier this week: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” That’s because people who do not sin do not need the laws that governments create and enforce. Everyone would drive at speeds that are safe for themselves and others; no one would lie, steal, or kill; there would be no sexual immorality or substance abuse, and so on.
These observations do not mean that Christians should not be engaged in politics. Just because this activity is the result of the Fall does not make it any less essential as a consequence of it. The same can be said of evangelism, for example.
In fact, I am convinced that God is calling more believers into politics than are answering his call, just as he is calling more believers to share their faith than the small number who are doing so.
However, our conversation does point to Dr. Sasse’s assertion that politics should not be our “central thing.” C. S. Lewis made the same point:
We may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention—so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim—he would be a monomaniac.
The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
Accordingly, to build a healthier politics, we start by reversing the Fall and surrendering ourselves anew to our Creator. Only when he remakes our hearts can we use them to love each other with the selfless and consistent commitment upon which a consensual democracy depends.
Otherwise, we risk making politics our religion, devoting ourselves to political leaders as if they were deities and ordering our lives around our partisan beliefs and those who share them, all the while convinced that our “religion” is the correct path and that all others are false.
To quote Shakespeare, “That way madness lies.”
In Letters to an American Christian, Bruce Ashford writes:
“The more we pledge allegiance to Christ, the better citizens of the United States we’ll become.”
Do you agree?
“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.” —G. K. Chesterton
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