Don’t blog about the election. Don’t blog about the election. Don’t blog about the election.
I’ve been fighting this prohibition for weeks. This blog is a space for me to think and engage in conversation about leadership and the church, and I fear nothing takes the knees out from under such a project as effectively as posts airing amateur political punditry. Nobody’s interested.
But the election and the media environment that is swirling around it consumes most of my discretionary attention these days. So I’m giving in and blogging about the election. I pledge to pursue the church leadership angle all the while.
So, take number one:
Sometimes somebody is wrong. Leaders stake their credibility on being unbiased and impartial, but sometimes somebody says or does something that has to be called out as simply wrong. The past several months of the Donald Trump presidential phenomenon have convinced me that sometimes objectivity is dangerous. Objectivity can reinforce the status quo and, in a great phrase from the Presbyterian Book of Order, bring “truth and falsehood upon a level.”
I heard a gutsy sermon to this effect yesterday that used the strongest moral language possible to denounce the language about women and girls that Donald Trump has introduced into this campaign and that a shocking number of his supporters refuse to condemn. It was a no-no: a political sermon. Yet the congregation was clearly stirred by it in a way that only a no-no could effect.
It was the right leadership move no in spite of its disregard for objectivity but because of it. I want my work to follow suit.
YoRocko! 