The Politically Poor in Spirit
Summer, 1992
In the church, a ceiling-sized flag was unfurled. It was God and Country Sunday, and the stars and stripes hung over every congregant. The choir led God and Country songs. The preacher preached a God and Sunday sermon. And to say I remember the content of those songs and sermons would be an imaginative fiction. Still, I was left with the distinct impression: Morality, Christianity, and the success of the American experiment were inextricably linked.
History of wars, slavery, poverty, inequity, classism be damned.
In my context, Christianity and the Republican Party were synonymous, and if it wasn’t directly spouted from the pulpit, it was implied. I was only fourteen. It’d be another four years before I could vote, but if I followed the suit of my spiritual teachers, I’d never vote for William Jefferson Clinton. The abortion advocate. The candidate who wanted God out of school. The alleged woman-monger. The supposed cocaine runner. The men on the other side, though, were paragons of morality.
Summer, 2020
As a child, I was given an easy rhetorical rubric that was to govern my voting choices: Republicans were Christians, and ergo, more moral leaders. But 28 summers later, that rhetorical rubric is a boat with holes. I’ve witnessed Republicans act with great virtue, and I’ve seen them fail morally. The same goes for members of the Democratic party. So, easy rubrics having failed, I’m left with a new question: How should I participate in political discourse (and voting) now that the easy rubrics of my youth are no longer helpful?
Jesus—a man some saw as a grassroots politician—came with a message for a very political people. Ready for revolution, for salvation from an oppressive regime, they were primed to fight. He came with a different message, though, and he shared that message in his great mountain sermon. If the people were to chase the One Thing, they’d need to embody his teachings. And yes, it’s my estimation that this applied to everything, politics included?
In his opening salvo on the mountain, Jesus preached, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Poor in Spirit—these are the people who lay hold of a heavenly political reality, he said. But who are the poor in spirit? Writing in the fourth century, St. Jerome put it this way: “[Jesus] added ‘in spirit’ so you would understand blessedness to be humility and not poverty.”
Those who embody true virtue, who chase after the One Thing, embody poverty of spirit. They are humble, repentant, know they don’t have all the answers. They put away easy rubrics and easy answers in order to search out the true Good. They do not rally behind the bombastic hubris of men.
If I were poor in spirit, if I were truly humble, how would this change the ways I approach politics? Would I shout down those who disagree on Twitter, would I cancel them? Would I make space for those with diverging views? And if I measured my political choices based on their poverty of Spirit (or the poverty spirit of their party), how would that influence my vote?
There are no easy answers to this question, perhaps. But as you consider poverty of spirit (i.e., humility) and its application to politics, what do you need to change to embody the principle? Better yet, what has to change in the American political discourse to advance a politics that is poor in spirit? As always, the inbox is open. Let me know your thoughts.