Ben Sasse and the Political Illusion

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Ben Sasse is an accomplished man. He’s a devout Christian and proud husband and father. He has a PhD in History from Yale. He’s served for a decade or more in higher ed and another decade representing Nebraska in the U.S. Senate, where he earned the sometimes-unenviable reputation for not fitting in with any of America’s increasingly polarized camps.

He’s also a dying man.

Back in December, he announced on X that he had pancreatic cancer. As he noted in a recent interview with The Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, this is a disease with a 97% mortality rate, and he has a particularly aggressive case. His doctors gave him 90 days; he’s hoping to get a little more time with experimental treatments.

This kind of thing can focus someone’s thinking about what really matters in life. As he put it, “[W]hether you have 90 days, or 12 months, or 12 years, or 75 years left to live, we’re all gonna be pushing up daisies.” But knowing that he has fewer days ahead than he’d expected, he said he’s determined to “redeem the time.”

The entire interview is worth your time. It’s a profound conversation. Senator Sasse seamlessly and richly discussed the ideas of mortality, theology, education, technology, community, family, identity, and many other fields. What’s particularly interesting, given the years he dedicated to public service, is that he has one of the healthiest attitudes toward politics. He inculpated professional politicians of being more interested in becoming TikTok stars than doing their jobs and mourned the fact that for wider portions of the population, politics had become their meaning in life:

Don’t pretend that politics is the center of the world. The center of your world is where you’re raising your kids. It’s where you worship. It’s where you go to work next to somebody on the line for decades, or the farm next door.

These words are important, mostly because so many have sidelined them. It’s what the French philosopher Jacques Ellul called “the political illusion”: the idea that all problems are, at root, political and therefore must have political solutions. Everything is politics instead of everything is those you love and serve.

We see this in our daily lives more and more. It’s why people film themselves weeping after an election goes the “wrong” way. And why some cut off relationships with loved ones because they support the “wrong” candidate or aren’t as ideological as the mob demands. They don’t post the “right” things on social media, go to the right marches, and aren’t outraged enough about the cause of the day.

So much of this is the downside of our increasingly online world. As Sasse put it:

We have gazillions of people screaming all the time on the internet, and we pretend they’re representative. They’re not all representative. The loudest people have the most ridiculously outsized voice in American life.

For much of our culture, politics has taken on the role once played by religion. It can offer the same, though counterfeit, sense of meaning, morality, and justice. This is ironic because our little gods of political idolatry are too small that so many of us come unglued when they’re threatened. Our hearts are restless without God in our lives, and we’re searching for something deeper to fill that void.

When asked if his efforts in politics were worth it, Sasse replied:

Theoretically, absolutely. There is no doubt that a framework for ordered liberty is necessary. Power and coercion and restraint of evil are not the center of anybody’s loves, or they shouldn’t be. The worldview is pretty distorted if politics can become the central thing. And yet, because the world is broken, it’s important work.

Politics matters, and those called to work in that world serve God and their neighbors in doing so. But it’s not the only thing in life, or even the most important thing. Far from it. We can all thank God that, with the bird’s-eye view offered by the prospect of death, Ben Sasse has blessed us with a reminder of what matters most in life.

Related Article

Recognizing Cultural Christianity and the Idolization of Politics and Faith

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images / Win McNamee / Staff

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.