Politics is trivial. Life is what’s important. There aren’t many teachers of this lesson any better than Tony Snow, and because I’m a fan, I’m going to post some of what he said to Catholic University in his commencement address to the graduates. (h/t – k/lo)

This is a way of talking about faith. American culture likes to celebrate the petulant outcast, the smart-aleck with the contempt for everything and faith in nothing. Snarky mavericks. The problem is these guys are losers. They have signed up for an impossible mission. Because they’ve decided they’re going to create all the meaning in their lives. They’ve either decided that no moral law exists or they will be the creator, the author of those laws. Now one road leads to complete and total anarchy. Life is solitary, nasty, brutish and short. The other is to insanity, since it requires playing God. We know in our hearts, intuitively, from our first years as children, that the universe unfolds with a discernable order and that moral laws, far from being convenient social conventions, are firm and unalterable. They predate us, they will survive us. Rather than admitting our weakness a lot of times, we just decide we’ll try to get by. And maybe rather than giving God credit, we’ll try to look for a cheap substitute.

Walk into a bookstore, you’ll know what I mean. The shelves are groaning underneath the trendy tomes promising salvation — medicine balls, herbs, purges, all sorts of weird stuff. In politics, there’s a variant that elevates government to the status of God. It says that it is the source of love. It ought to be the recipient of your tithes, but government, while it does pursue compassionate ends, cannot be loving and personal. It treats all of us as completely equal rather than uniquely divine. The point is you can’t escape the question of God and you can’t escape the question of commitments.

When it comes to faith, I’ve taken my own journey. You will have to take your own. But here’s what I know. Faith is as natural as the air we breathe. Religion is not an opiate, just the opposite. It is the introduction to the ultimate extreme sport. There is nothing that you can imagine that God cannot trump. As Paul said “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And once you realize that there is something greater than you out there, then you have to decide, “Do I acknowledge it and do I act upon it?” You have to at some point surrender yourself. And there is nothing worthwhile in your life that will not at some point require an act of submission. It’s true of faith and friendship. It is a practical passage [of the Bible], especially to marriage.

It all comes back to purpose. Why are we here? What do we hope to accomplish in our lives, and what’s stopping us from getting there? Are we just too comfortable where we are to take a risk and to try something new? All of us have to answer that question for ourselves. As long as we keep searching, we can be sure that we will find what we need, but it may not be what we expect to find at the end of the journey.

Tags: Tony Snow

Cal Thomas:

Nearly 30 years after religious conservatives decided to re-enter the political arena — after abandoning it as “dirty” and leading to compromise — what do they have to show for it? The country remains sharply divided and the reconciling message they used to preach has been obscured by the crass pursuit of the golden ring of political power. In the end, they got neither the power, nor the Kingdom; only the glory and even that is now fading, as these older leaders pass from the scene.

This is not to say there is no role for conservative Christians in the civic life of their nation. There is. But Christians must first understand that the issues they most care about — abortion, same-sex marriage and cultural rot — are not caused by bad politics, but are matters of the heart and soul. Some evangelicals wish to broaden the political agenda beyond these issues to poverty, social justice and the environment. Politics can never completely cure the ills of any of these, but the message Christians bring about salvation and redemption can. Besides, they can never “convert” people to their point of view.

Too many conservative Christians have focused on the “seen” rather than the “unseen,” thinking appearances at the White House, or on “Meet the Press,” is evidence that they are making a difference. And too much attention has been paid to individual personalities, rather than to the One these preachers had originally been called to exalt.

He is saying that many leaders of the “religious right” have lost their focus. Christians should always influence their culture positively and fight for what we believe is right. But like Thomas says in a previous paragraph, “Politics is about compromise. The message of the church is about Truth.” The Truth has been lost or conveniently forgotten. You will never be popular by telling the whole Truth about Christianity and its requirements on believers in Christ. The answer to societal ills and moral decline isn’t a political one. It’s a spiritual one. Once we recognize that, maybe those who wish to speak for evangelical Christians will start concentrating more on changing hearts and minds on these social issues, than on gaining political power for themselves.

Tags: religious right, Cal Thomas