Popularity Contest

Acts 7:55-60

We have a serious politics problem. Instead of candidates who demonstrate a depth to their engagement with policy, we seek out surface level attributes like someone’s outward appearance, charisma, ability to crack a joke in front of a crowd or, these days, mock others effectively on social media platforms as our metric for effective political leadership.

Politics seems to be a popularity contest. Instead of answering substantially to questions surrounding values or policies, people are getting elected by avoiding any deep engagement with either, choosing instead to appeal to our worst appetites. Instead of common values, we are looking for leaders who have common enemies. Instead of serious engagement with complex policy, we are looking for sound bytes, short form videos, and sentence long explanations.

On top of that, we are collectively losing our tolerance for debate and disagreement. We are allowing a single point of disagreement completely cut us off from one another. We are becoming less resilient to feedback that is anything else but positive. We have no capacity, whatsoever, to hear from someone else who challenges our worldview.

Should someone dare to deviate from this, they don’t last long. I will never forget the time when a sitting president dared to wear a tan suit to a press conference meeting and how breathless and enraged the coverage about it was. We can’t seem to handle when someone deviates from what we expect!

And that is dangerous because sometimes we need to hear the voice that is saying something different than what the crowd is expecting. Sometimes we need to be told that we are on the wrong track, or that we have missed something.

In the gospel of Acts, we quickly are offered a gripping account of the martyrdom of the Apostle and Deacon, Stephen in chapter 7. He is dragged in front of the Sanhedrin, basically a council of the temple priests in Jerusalem, and he connects the long held stories of being liberated from slavery into Egypt to the, then recent, happenings in Jerusalem surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.


Of course Stephen was talking to the same body of religious authorities who were the actual voices crying out for Jesus’ crucifixion. So this was a courageous, bordering on foolish, thing to do.

It says in scripture that after Stephen proclaimed a vision he had of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God, the priests “covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.” (Acts 7:57-58 NRSVUE)

While we don’t stone the courageous prophets who dare to say the unpopular thing, we certainly find other ways to eradicate their voice if their honesty is offensive enough. And these days that can mean being doxxed (where your personally identifiable information alongside details like where you live become publically displayed for people to do with what they will), or being bombarded with thousands of hateful private messages on social media or through email.

Despite living in a nation that emphasizes the importance of expression as a fundamental human right, we have collectively lost our ability to tolerate any utterance of something that is offensive or problematic to us. And while I am sure our efforts to do this have been rooted in rejecting hate speech and unacceptable rhetoric, perhaps the pendulum has swung too far and has “covered our ears” to important but difficult truths we need to hear as well.

I wonder what we are missing out on because of this?