Everywhere you look, you see politics and politicians. News coverage has seldom been as dominated by politics as it has been for the last year or so.
Election fever gripped first the UK, then the US, and just a few months later the whole political landscape is in a state of dramatic flux. Opinion polls are all over the place; it takes a brave person to predict the next few months, let alone the next few years. If, two generations ago, Harold Wilson said that ‘a week is a long time in politics’, in these days of social media, AI bots and multi-billionaire political donors, a week seems like an eternity.
Losing faith
There has been much talk of people losing faith in politics, indeed losing faith in the whole political process. Perhaps there is a whiff of revolution in the air; maybe it’s time for a complete rethink of the dog-eared political systems we have all grown up with? As Christians we should heartily agree that there is such a thing as inflated and misplaced confidence in human leaders. The central verses in the Bible, according to some reckonings, are Psalm 118:8-9: ‘It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes.’
Are men our biggest pastoral problem today?
If someone were to pin me down and ask me the question: “What is the most common underlying cause of …