Welcome. Glad you’re engaging, glad we can be your thought sauna. 🙂 Honestly, it’s really cool to hear you’re gaining yardage with friends and relatives through personal conversations. I think that may be our only hope. I’m having similar experiences as well.

It is so refreshing to hear a perspective like this on politics because i have struggled like a butterfly from a cocoon for the last year trying to emerge from my jack-assey conservatism.
Not that Im a democrat or liberal now. I feel like a citizen of Switzerland. The Lord has liberated me unto a kind emotional neutrality that has redirected my coal to the fire that truly deserves to be fed- love for all people on all sides. God has been showing me that peoples conscience and philosophy are shaped by many things that are out of their control and we can’t just expect them to swap out their worldview with ours on a dime.

Furthermore I am seriously concerned that something is happening to we Evangelicals. In my spirit I feel the church is reaching a pre AD 70 state of mind except we aren’t the ones fleeing to the hills for safety at the Lords direction. We are the ones trapped inside the city on Passover thinking God is going to finally restore our nation back to us and we will kill as many Romans as we have to in order to help God out.

I know that sounds fatalistic, but when you have the likes of Patriot Prayer going out and invoking the images of Christianity in armed confrontations with civil rights demonstrators and pastors running pundit podcasts in t-shirts with the word LOVE spelled out in a font made of guns, not to mention the sewage that Christians are spouting on social media in the name of Donald J (for Jesus) Trump. I fear for the witness of the church in America.

I have discovered that as I moderate my views and actually learn to understand, appreciate, sympathize and even AGREE with some my liberal friends and relatives viewpoints on non essential things, to my amazement I am actually able to begin moving the ball down the field for the gospel in their life. Go figure. All things to all men might actually be good politics.

I have to wonder when Paul told Timothy to watch out not to get entangled in civilian affairs if perhaps Timothy had been arguing on facebook a bit too much.