Former Tennessee lawmaker: Is rivalry the only governing model available to us? | Opinion

I recently had the pleasure to meet David Plazas, The Tennessean’s opinion and engagement director. Those who see me as a right-wing, Bible-thumping, fascist, homophobe might find that description surprising. Those who see me as a Christian defender of the faith might find it equally surprising.

Our almost two-hour visit covered a range of topics. One topic on which I believe there was agreement is a distaste for what I will call rivalry in politics.

Rivalry, despite the jocularity associated with it in sports, is usually destructive in most everything else, especially personal relationships and politics.

That’s why I took particular interest in David’s recent editorial asking if “LGBTQ residents [should] fight or flee Tennessee” after new restrictive laws were enacted in regard to them.

David noted that there is “fear and uncertainty” among people who “feel targeted.”

That is an understandable consequence of rivalry. But while he focuses on those who are the object of these laws, many of its supporters may “feel targeted” by the encroaching worldview of who are its object. In my view this describes rivalry.

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A culture ‘without any transcendent grounding’

The targeted eventually become those who target. It is the perpetual tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits described by Nietzsche, and resolution of the chaos when they collide is what moves history forward.

Mr. Plazas concluded by noting that “civil rights advocacy is a long game,” that “gains can be wiped out,” and “the political pendulum swings back and forth in the United States.”

To me this civic model describes a culture without any transcendent grounding by which a rivalry can be judged, and the outcome determined good or bad, progress or decline.

The armature on which such a culture rests can only be power and that breeds rivalry.

If that is truly the way the world works, then existence has no intelligible purpose, and it seems the only ruling model is Cain and Abel. All we do is change the names of the actors.

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My plea is to Christian evangelicals

My concern, though, is not with the LGBTQ community as much as with a Christian evangelicalism that has minimized the mysterious but beautiful harmony of the one and the many, the unity and diversity resident in its forgotten doctrine of the Trinity. Those who know God as Triune see in that God a beautiful model for interpreting an intentionally created reality that can overcome rivalry.

Sadly, by inattention to this defining characteristic of Christianity, the content of evangelicalism has largely been reduced to rules or laws, i.e., to behavior, not knowing God, and rivalry has become its ruling model, too—the “good guys” against the “bad guys.”

This legal spirit reduces God to a cop-in-the-sky law enforcer who only “lets us off” because Jesus appeased Him. One might appreciate being let off, but love such a God? Not so much.

A legal spirit divorces law of every kind from a God who, as Father, sends His eternally begotten Son to restore and reconcile all things back to Himself through the work of His Holy Spirit.

Without the Trinity, there is no loving Father behind the law whose Spirit leads us into loving the law of God even as Jesus did. However, with God as our Father, law becomes a gracious guide to living in a joy-filled relationship with a God who is personal because He is personal—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Only the grace of that kind of God can overcome the legalistic spirit resident in all of us that produces rivalry of every kind. That grace provides a peace between us and God that no rival can subdue. It’s the only thing that can.

David Fowler is an attorney who served in the Tennessee Senate 12 years and currently directs the Family Action Council of Tennessee.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Former lawmaker: Is rivalry the only governing model available to us?