8 Beatitudes for a Politically Anxious Age

We’re a week away from the presidential election and anxiety is running at an all-time high.

People are dreading the worst and bracing for an ugly fallout, no matter who ends up in the White House. And it’s become an addictive pastime to read every shred of news that promises to predict the future.

Bad news is good for the business of journalism, punditry and social media companies, and we’ve an embarrassing riches of bad news these days, making buckets of money for its CEOs.

And while these industries play a legitimate role in the shape of our civic life, we shouldn’t be naïve about their desire to keep us enthralled by imagining the worst.

There are two spiritual disciplines that I think we might adopt in order to resist this awfully exhausting reality. The first is to take long breaks from the consumption of both news and social media—a decent stretch at the start of the day, a lunch hour, an entire afternoon, a full 24-hour period.

But I don’t think it’s good simply to abstain from the news; I think we need to fill the hours with things that nourish our bodies and souls with life-giving beauty.

And we should do so not because we seek to escape the terror and ugliness of our world but because we seek to be more fully present to it by God’s grace.

The second spiritual discipline relates to a way that we might cultivate a counter-imagination to the default setting of our broken world.

Hence this list of beatitudes, which I’ve adapted from my book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage.

Unlike a prayer that summons our present selves before the God of all grace, a beatitude invites us to imagine our truest selves under the light of God’s grace and, by the Spirit’s power, to re-order our desires so that we might live out truest selves.

I’ve written the following beatitudes in conversation with Jesus’ own list from Matthew 5, without feeling the need to mimic them strictly.

My hope is that they’ll serve to rescue us from our worst selves, our faithless and fearful selves, amongst other things, and to guide us toward a more charitable and hopeful posture as Christians who retain a God-given responsibility to participate in the public life of our nation with faith, hope and love.