A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

In his review of a book titled On The Side of The Angels, Paul Starr wrote this opening paragraph:

Partisanship is resurgent in America, and hardly anyone likes it. To say that American politics has become polarized along party lines is tantamount, for most people, to acknowledging that something has gone wrong with the country. And, indeed, the differences between Republicans and Democrats are less easily bridged than in the past: the two parties now stand for different worldviews, not just different policy positions.

Is there really a Republican worldview and a Democratic worldview? If so, I wonder what they look like. The book Professor Starr (Princeton University) was reviewing is about partisan politics, and it is the contention of the book that America has become more partisan in the last few decades, to the detriment of the country.

Whether or not that is true, I find it interesting that we can — or at least someone can — identify a worldview for Republicans and one for Democrats. And the reason it interests me is that it causes me to ask this question: Could they do the same for Christians?

Often times the answer is no, because while differences between the two major political parties may be “less easily bridged than in the past,” many Christians seem to be working hard to see that differences between Christianity and the world are more easily bridged than in the past. It is Christians, I contend, and not those “of the world,” who are trying to blur the differences. And that neither honors the commitment of Christianity nor helps the world.

Partisanship may be a bad thing for the political system in America — in fact if members of any political party care more about their agenda than they do about the country, they will be poor servants of the country. But the error on the side of Christianity, I contend, is that its members have not been partisan enough.