Re: The "Biteback" Effect

I do not intend to do much with politics with this blog. But this struck me. I am especially sensitive to this kind of condemnation because both my wife and I have had different versions of it.

Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online [August 19, 2005] has an article [at the link below] titled, “The Biteback Effect."

The general thesis is that the left in this county has gotten itself to the point that its tactics have become self-defeating.

Take [for example] the recent boomerang effect of those critics who critique the war, but in the process achieve the exact antithesis of what they intend.

[snip]

In the age of utopianism we demand impossible standards of perfection [from our country or our governmentt]. Then when they cannot be met, we conclude that we are not good at all, but the equivalent of a Pol Pot, Hitler, or Saddam himself — an elected American president who is a worse terrorist than Osama bin Laden.

What struck me about this behavior is that it is typical for a person operating under deep condemnation: the intense belittling of one’s self, the self-loathing. A lot of Christians I know struggle with condemnation. It may be due to a quirk in their family or the church they grew up in, or just a personality issue that developed on its own. People who struggle like this can be set free.

Romans 8:1-2. NASB95
1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.

But here, instead of applying the condemnation to oneself, it is being applied to the government, or the country, or to “red-state” Americans, or whatever.

How do you deal with this? How can people be set free from this kind of bondage? How can a political movement be set free? Other than by the obvious answer of “Jesus.”