Pastors tend to watch these closely because it is a great way to gauge the fears and hopes of the people in their church. Even if the fears and hopes weren't there last election, or even last year, political strategy demands that we adopt the fears and hopes because it allows the candidates and their parties to manipulate us.
And because the election is always in the fall preceding a winter inauguration, lent and easter tend to come during the predictable fight for their respective party's nomination between the different candidates (I am only referring to Democrat and Republican, which sometimes hold primaries and caucuses on different days in the same state, thus this list does not add up to 50+territories).
- 2 events for delegates happen prior to Lent this year.
- 26 events for delegate happen after Lent this year.
- 43 events happen during Lent this year.
So a majority of our Lent is, most likely, distracted by our passions for how we think our nation should be governed, how our national symptoms are treated.
Meanwhile one party is experiencing a "shattering of brand" as I read today in a headline on my Facebook newsfeed. I found that a peculiar phrase because in a lot of ways this election has shown how shattered the brand "evangelical" is. It is a phrase I and others like me have tried to hold onto because it seems important to the way we practice our faith, even if we don't actually practice it that often in a society that is dismissive of anyone who holds that title.
It is a title that I have to decide whether to pass onto my daughter who is being baptized into an evangelical community. Or at least a community that is busy trying to cure those who have been harmed in the name of that title.
Does Christianity have a shattered brand? What does that even mean when applied to something that is so radically opposed to the idea of brand? Is Christianity radically opposed though? Some might say being Christian or Evangelical is the ultimate brand. That being baptized, the "coming out" of Christianity, is like branding one-self.
But Lent challenges anything like branding. Lent says that brand is meaningless. Lent eschews brand. Lent flattens everything before God, betraying shallowness and vapidity of all things. I wouldn't say Lent "shatters" the brand because a biblical scholar would argue that the brand was never really cohesive. The community of God is always constructing and demolishing any possible efforts toward a cohesive christian brand.
As I write this it makes me laugh that election is such a theologically endowed word in the reformed vocabulary and that this post is about the event of the presidential election and the elect of God. I am happy to see that those two things that have been so long conflated, are starting to show how incompatible they can be.
