John Miller’s recent piece in the National Review on Ben Sasse’s efforts to gain the Republican nomination for the Senate in Nebraska is well worth reading. Here is a part that stood out from an OL perspective because it is silent about Sasse’s religion (which happens to be 2k Reformed Protestant):
After growing up in Fremont, where he was the high-school valedictorian, Sasse left for Harvard: “Not because of superior academics, but because of inferior athletics,” he jokes. He wrestled for two years and specialized in head-butting his opponents. Sasse has a long scar at the top of his forehead, along his hairline, from falling off a hayloft as a boy. “I have no feeling there,” he says. “It gave me a small advantage.” He left the wrestling team to spend his junior year abroad, and then earned a degree in government. Next came an itinerant career in business consulting, combining full-time employment with full-time study. He roamed the country, working with clients such as Ameritech and Northwest Airlines, while he also pursued a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and then a Ph.D. in history from Yale. His dissertation, on populist conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s, won a pair of prestigious campus prizes. “He’s insanely disciplined and incredibly hard-working,” says Will Inboden, a University of Texas professor who lived across the street from Sasse when they were graduate students at Yale. “It’s amazing how much he did.” The virtue of work is a constant theme in Sasse’s speeches and conversation. “Work is where meaning is,” he says. “I don’t know how capitalism and America function if people work to get beyond working, just so they can get to leisure.” One of his favorite recent books is Coming Apart, by Charles Murray, especially for its section on the importance of industriousness.
As a boy, Sasse embodied industriousness: He spent his summers “walking beans and detasseling corn” — i.e., weeding soybean fields and controlling corn pollination. He describes cool and wet mornings, hot and humid afternoons, muddy furrows, sore ankles, spider bites, sunburns, and “corn rash,” which forms on hands, arms, and faces when corn stalks deliver nicks and bruises hour after hour, day after day. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and the most formative experience of my life,” he says. “When you survive a season of this, you’re a different person at the end.” He worries that young people don’t learn the same lessons today. “We have a crisis in the work ethic,” he says. “Politics can’t fix our culture, but politics can lie to us long enough to keep us from focusing on the cultural issues in our own lives.”
Sasse’s candidacy presents 2kers with a potential problem — namely, endorsing candidates who agree with our political theology. And that’s a problem because it would mean we are like the BeeBees. The affairs of the civil and temporal realm are one thing, the politics of God’s kingdom another. Just because a candidate may agree with that theological proposition does not mean he is best suited to serve as a congressman.
For that reason, support for Sasse should come from concerns about our common life, not from a desire to have our theological position vindicated. And given Sasse’s understanding of health care and the crisis that it represents, he has real merits. But this is above my pay grade. It belongs to Nebraska.
Old Life 
support for Sasse should come from concerns about our common life, not from a desire to have our theological position vindicated…
Exactly.
And given Sasse’s understanding of health care and the crisis that it represents, he has real merits. But this is above my pay grade…
Don’t worry, I’m sure the MSM will help clarify Sasse’s merits.
It belongs to Nebraska.
That’s good since they’re moving the Capitol to Nebraska! http://youtu.be/V6TzKs2FRp4
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Yes and no. Nebraska is in our Republic. By analogy, I kind if have to care what goes on in other presbyteries. I may not have to vote in them. But being in a bit of a notorious presbytery myself, for GA to assign the committee etc was huge.
We all have to discern our role. I don’t blame anyone for taking silent stance as regards politics these days. But as for religion, well, those of us who read and live it, we answer to a higher authority. Could the stakes be any higher?
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Jack, careful. Political endorsements are frowned upon by our internal revenue service. OL could lose 501(c) 3 if we’re not on guard.
Kidding!
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DGH:
If a 2K voter is more likely to vote for a candidate who also ascribes to a 2K view (as it appears Sasse might), is that 2K voter giving his theology too much weight in the civil realm?
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If he’s 2K I imagine Rabbi Bret and the Baylys will ignore his many virtues and begin denouncing him as a dangerous fringe element any day now.
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I played football in Fremont a few times while in college. Well, I mostly stood on the sideline watching other guys play football, but was there nonetheless. My freshman year our undefeated team went there and got down 28-10. Came back in the 2nd half to win 35-28.
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Footage of Erik earning playing time:
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Is work where meaning is? Is work an end in itself? Where’s that in the Gospel?
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Alexander, sure. Christ’s work. No hope without it.
Important qualifier, that, so point granted.
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There are a lot of people who have no work ethic: that is bad. There are a lot of people who work too hard; who are ground down by working, exploited by their employers; who work two or three jobs and are still on the poverty line: what’s he go to say to them? “Work harder”? I didn’t hear anything in those quotes about the Gospel or anything I wouldn’t hear from your rent-a-conservative.
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Andrew- I agree completely.
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In my second to last post the last line should have read: your bog standard rent-a-conservative.
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My proudest moments were getting on the field as a member of the “hands” kickoff return team, after spending three hours standing on the sideline freezing my ass off. I prayed the other team wouldn’t kick it to me. If they did and I got hit I would have shattered like the fragile ice cube that I was. Thankfully they never did.
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The coldest I’ve ever been in my life was standing on the sidelines of those games.
When we made the playoffs and I didn’t have to suit up I remember fondly listening to the game in a girlfriend’s dorm room while sipping hot chocolate.
I knew at that point my football playing days were numbered.
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Erik, so now you’re Uncle Rico?
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Chorts, you and your Napolean stuff. Watch out! Kenneth is present..
Cletus van Damme should have valuable insight. He lives in the boob tube..
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Erik, how on earth did people go full out for football practice every night for months when they really weren’t into playing the game?
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JP, yes. One, how does he know the candidate’s theology? Two, what are the candidates views on the issues? Theology is not an issue in our secular govt.
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Kent,
Before practice was the worst time of the day and after practice was the best time of the day. That feeling of heading from the locker room to the dining hall was the best.
I have a great short story in me about staying on campus freshman year over Thanksgiving break because we made the playoffs. Coincidentally my high school girl friend was in Sioux County with her parents to celebrate Thanksgiving with her grandparents. I ate Thanksgiving dinner with them, returned to campus for a night practice in what must have been 30 degree weather (I remember wearing short sleeves and running around like a maniac). After that I think I spent the night at her grandparents’ house. It’s a bit fuzzy after 25 years.
It seemed more compelling then than in the retelling.
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Chortles,
I was Uncle Rico as an undersized wideout.
Most of my glory days were on Mondays against the varsity d-backs when they weren’t trying because they were still sore from Saturday’s game.
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DG:
I’m with you on your points one and two — 1) we have a problem truly knowing a candidate’s theology and 2) that the concerns of our civil government are not theological ones.
That said, it seems to me a 2K voter could legitimately prefer a candidate who (perhaps because of that candidate’s 2K inclinations) views the magistrate’s role as governing the state according to common sense, natural law, reason etc. over and against a candidate who believes the Bible requires him to immanentize the eschaton by creating the Kingdom of God in the US of A.
No?
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The NYT poll in the other post (I was 84/16 conservative) was all about correlations. There is apparently a high correlation of cats and liberals as well as generally predictive correlations on the view of our country, pornography, etc. Well, there might be a correlation between a 2k perspective and certain positions as well. But clearly it is not a sufficient basis on which to case a vote. Correlations aren’t perfect, and people aren’t entirely consistent. Plus there is the matter of general competence & effectiveness. For a politician’s actual positions, look to his articulated positions and his history.
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“Erik, how on earth did people go full out for football practice every night for months when they really weren’t into playing the game?”
Typical Canuck question. But maybe you can tell us why they break up the occasional fight in American sports but in hockey the refs go off to get a coffee and mull over how much prettier the Canadian side of Niagara Falls is until the fighters get tired? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koR5SYrOgIU
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A hockey scrap is the best moment of the week up here
90 year old grannies take sides and jump out of their wheelchairs when a pier six breaks oot.
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Every red blooded Canadian man and woman get a double chill up and down the spine at the sight and sound of blood getting scraped off the ice.
As long as no one gets really hurt
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JP, yes.
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