Quote Source – Kady M.
Kady M. wasn’t writing theology when she wrote that line. But she stumbled into something Scripture has been saying for thousands of years: the problem with our politics usually isn’t the other side. It’s us. Or more precisely, it’s the human heart, doing what human hearts do — dividing the world into “us” and “them,” and then quietly deciding that “us” gets a pass on scrutiny.
Christians aren’t exempt from this tendency. If anything, we’re prone to it in a particular way, because we’re used to thinking in terms of good and evil. That’s a Biblical instinct. The trouble comes when we transfer it wholesale onto a political party — as if one platform is righteousness and the other is rebellion against God.
The Idol Wearing a Party Badge
An idol doesn’t have to look like a statue. It can look like a bumper sticker. Anything that captures your ultimate loyalty, shapes your identity, and gets defended past the point of honesty has functionally become a god. Paul warned that people “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Swap “the creature” for “the party,” and you’ll feel how easily that verse still lands.
Once a party becomes the measure of righteousness instead of a tool for governing a fallen world, you’ve stopped doing politics. You’re doing worship.
What Your Outrage Reveals
James doesn’t let us off easy on this one either. He traces conflict back to something internal, not external — not the other side’s stupidity, but our own appetites.
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. [James 4:1-2]
Notice James doesn’t ask “who’s right.” He asks what’s driving the fight. That’s an uncomfortable question to bring into a conversation about politics, because it means the rage you feel scrolling the news might say more about your own unmet cravings — for control, for validation, for a world that finally makes sense — than about the policy itself.
Loving Truth More Than Your Team
Jeremiah 17:9 is blunt: the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, and nobody can fully understand their own. That includes your political heart. It’s entirely possible to be sincerely convinced your side is the side of light while your heart is busy protecting pride, not principle.
A Christian’s first loyalty was never supposed to go to a platform. It goes to a Kingdom that no party owns and no election can shake (Hebrews 12:28). That doesn’t mean withdrawing from public life — it means holding every party loosely enough to call out its sin when it’s wrong, even when it’s “your” side.
The Only Way Out
The line that started this piece isn’t a call to political neutrality. It’s a call to humility. Pride convinces us that our side has cornered the market on virtue. Grace reminds us we’re all capable of the same self-justification we love pointing out in the other guy. Maybe the real fix for our politics starts smaller than any election — it starts with a person willing to say, “I might be the problem here.”
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org