Wide Eyed

As I have begun to reflect long and hard on our political culture, it has become increasingly obvious that its central characteristic is the annihilation, metaphorically speaking, of human beings.

We are daily urged to deny that people who disagree with us are still people. Instead we are urged to see them—and I don’t think I am putting this too strongly—as demons. And we do. Look at Mitch McConnell, if you're a Democrat; or Nancy Pelosi if you're a Republican, and tell me I'm wrong.

My faith tells me that we are created in the image of God. That’s a remarkable way to conceptualize our relationship with the Divine. Yet even those of us who should know better and who, if we paused for a moment’s reflection, *would* know better--employ and even delight in a rhetoric that inveigles us to invert that conceptualization, so that far from seeing in a political opponent the image of God, we see instead the image of Beelzebub.

Listen, then, to evangelical Christian artist Nichole Nordeman's song, “Wide Eyed," which eloquently conveys the stakes involved when we selectively forget that others are also created in the image of God.