This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Whatever our political views, those of us who care about America are apprehensive about Election Day. We face the specter of an ever-widening divide, with even the possibility of violence on the horizon.
A friend of mine, a public policy expert, recently talked about the anxiety that comes with constantly hearing the predictions, constantly watching often-contradictory polling numbers. “I guess I should just look for the ‘hopium’ that people are talking about,” she said. I could relate to that.
By “hopium,” she means the tongue-in-cheek label for curating news that offers reassurance of how everything is going to turn out all right. The metaphor works—especially in the context of a country plagued with opiate addiction—because there’s a kind of “hope” that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.
And Election Day is, in some ways, just a stand-in for even deeper fears and misgivings about what might be lurking around the corner—pandemics, world wars, ecological disaster, artificial intelligence catastrophes, who knows?
With the election and other things, I tend to default to convincing myself of the worst possible outcome—say, a 269–269 electoral tie that takes an already angry and exhausted public to the brink. But that’s kind of a counter-label hopium too, trying to forestall bad things by imagining them so that anything better is a welcome surprise.
Many Christians, when asking me about the aftermath of the election (however it turns out), say, “Can you give us some hope?” Often, what these Christians actually want is hopium—a way of saying, after all the division and scandal of the past decade, that something will happen that will put everything back together again. In their churches or families or in the country, they want things to return to the way it was in 2010 or 2015.
Time Is Not a Political Promise
Myles Werntz
In one sense, then, perhaps the most hopeful thing I could say in the lead-up to Election Day is to encourage you to lose hope.
Many are familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “cheap grace.” The first thing we must recognize if we understand what he meant is that cheap grace is not “too much grace.” Grace is inexhaustible and unquantifiable. Cheap grace is no grace at all.
The kind of grace that calls for no repentance or transformation doesn’t ultimately work, even for the purposes of reassurance. Our consciences know—however deeply we bury that awareness—that we need something more than the superficial. We need the kind of grace that really knows us, in all our transgression, and says anyway, “You are forgiven.”
“Cheap hope” works the same way. It’s actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.
Søren Kierkegaard warned that introducing Christianity to a culture where everyone is a “Christian” will feel, at first, like taking Christianity away. Similarly, introducing hope as just a sunnier form of despair will feel, at first, like losing hope.
Hope is, of course, a Christian virtue (1 Cor. 13:13). But, as with grace, the Bible defines hope by contrasting it with what it is not. The apostle Paul wrote, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24–25, ESV throughout). In calling us to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God,” Paul wrote that hope comes about in ways few of us define as “hopeful”—through suffering that produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope (5:2–4).
There’s a certain kind of Christian who drinks coffee from a mug with Jeremiah 29:11 on it: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope”—and that’s good. There’s another kind of Christian who often quotes a few verses before that: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (v. 7)—and that’s good too.
And yet neither of those verses—one giving hope to our faith, the other to our work—can be understood without the chapter before it. There, we see two prophets dueling it out. Hananiah is the messenger of “hope.” Within two years, he said, God will break the rule of the Babylonian invaders and will restore all the stolen vessels back to the temple. Jeremiah seems to be the “hopeless” one. He says:
Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord make the words that you have prophesied come true, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. Yet hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet. (28:6–9)
Hananiah offered hopium. Jeremiah offered the only kind of hope God gives—the kind that goes the long way around, through the valley of the shadow of death, through the way of the cross. Hananiah’s kind of hope would be, “Hold on; this is almost over, and you can go back to normal.” Jeremiah offers a different kind of “a future and a hope”: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (29:13–14).
That kind of hope is what enables us to exhale and trust and even rejoice—because it tells us the truth. Our situation, in every era from Eden to now, is even worse than it appears. But Jesus. And that’s what’s most important about a Christian view of the future, a Christian kind of hope. “The future” has a name: Jesus of Nazareth. Hope is not an argument but a person.
Real hope often finds us pointing right in front of us, saying, “I don’t exactly know where we’re going, but God does, and I’m with him.” Left to ourselves, the kind of faith we want is just sight. The kind of love we want is just affirmation. And the kind of hope we want is whatever we think best working itself out somehow.
Hopium, however we curate it for ourselves, is really just another kind of despair. Let’s let go of it. We don’t need it.
We can see backward—to the cloud of witnesses and martyrs who told us the truth. We can see way, way forward—to the wiping away of all tears. We just can’t see right ahead of us. But we know that whatever happens, just like in the far past and in the far future, underneath are the everlasting arms. Those who would save their lives must lose it, Jesus told us. And those who would find hope must lose that too. That’s true on Election Day and on Judgment Day, and on every day in between.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
The post Election Day Can Help Break Our Addiction to Hope appeared first on Christianity Today.
