Not politics in drag
If you had told me in January that the best article about Christianity I’d read all year would be in the New York Review of Books ….
Many have explained their vote for Trump to me as an agonizing decision between backing a man who regularly attacks the downtrodden and supporting a rival candidate who, as they see it, advocates for killing unborn children.
But the members of The Refuge, black and white, have an unspoken pact to leave politics outside the doors of their houses of worship. By their lights, it’s simply too mundane and ungodly a topic to be allowed to interfere in the more urgent and sacred task at hand.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, A Tale of Two Churches, New York Review of Books.
On one thing, I totally agree with the Pastors of the two churches in the story: leave politics at the door. Anyone who wants to know my politics can figure it out by reading my blogs or my Facebook feed. They won’t figure it out from talking to me at coffee hour. It really is “too mundane … a topic to be allowed to interfere in the more urgent and sacred task at hand,” and it carries a high potential these days to turn ungodly as well.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, a journalist from a liberal New York millieu, might not have thought such an attitude toward politics possible before her journalistic foray to North Carolina, since journalists mostly approach every religion story as a politics story in drag.