Tag: Books – Politics

Reflect on your average day and consider the routines, rituals, and practices you follow. These daily habits—what you spend your time on, the media you consume, and the people and places you engage with—compose a personal liturgy of life. This liturgy shapes you both politically and spiritually, often without being critically examined. In The Liturgy of Politics, Kaitlyn Schiess challenges readers to reflect on what influences their political and spiritual lives and to understand what true Christian political responsibility entails.

Despite the decline in American church attendance quoting the Bible in the public square still holds cultural sway. Each year presidential hopefuls reference Matthew 5 and the city on a hill while those whose political party is in power appeal to Romans 13. One of the most recent egregious examples happened in June of 2020 when President Donald Trump posed in front of St. John's Church in Washington D.C. with a Bible in hand for an awkward photo-op. When asked if the Bible was his he replied, "It's a Bible." These examples show people using the Bible, and it's cherry-picked verses, as political props--and it's been happening since the beginning of the United States. In The Ballot and the Bible Kaitlyn Schiess asks us to peer through the lens of traditional and contemporary American history to examine how Americans have used the Bible for both good and bad in the public sphere while asking the reader to examine their own tendencies to manipulate the Bible for their own political beliefs.