Open Letter to My Students 90: The Election of 2026: A Religious Perspective

I don’t write about politics. I am no political pundit.

I write instead about the human condition, as seen through the lens of a religionist, a liberal religionist, and a Jewish liberal religionist at that. From last week’s elections I extract lessons about the human condition.

Lesson 1: Life is One Vast Field of Surprises.

The surprising size of the Democratic victory is part of a larger picture: the extent to which life continually surprises us. I don’t remember actually being born, but I am willing to bet that my first taste of life outside the womb surprised me; and probably my parents also. No matter how much you know about your child to be, no one greets the actual birth with a yawning reminder that they knew it would happen. Falling in — or out of — love are surprises too; as is death, and the discovery of having contracted the disease that will kill you.

The bad surprises reflect the bitter truth of adages like, “Life is not a bowl of cherries,” and “No one ever promised us a rose garden.” But there are good surprises too: when we unpredictably meet a friend, or even just have a surprisingly good day. Stunningly good surprises are what religion calls miracles, not because the natural order bends to our preferences (it doesn’t), but because we are filled with gratitude at an unexpected gift of nature’s bounty on one hand, and humanity’s goodness on the other.

Lesson 2: Evil is Real

Liberals like me sometimes make the mistake of affirming the existence of good but not of evil. If the last two years have taught me anything, however, it is that evil too is real. I am not talking about policy decisions that I may personally abhor, but that allow for reasonable differences of opinion. I mean using power to advance one’s selfish ends while knowing they will be hurtful to others. Fiscal conservatives might genuinely believe that dramatically cutting taxes will produce beneficial results for everyone, not just the wealthy (the trickle down theory). I think that is wrong, but it is not evil. By contrast, cutting taxes specifically to further enrich the already uberwealthy, all the while knowing (and just not caring) that the poor will become ever more destitute – that is evil.

The religious word for the deliberate pursuit of evil is “sin.” Liberals like me tend either to avoid the word sin, or to domesticate it by saying things like, “Sin is just missing the mark, like an archer who aims an arrow wrongly.” That common etymological explanation is rooted in the biblical story of the Benjaminites who could sling a stone and not miss the mark (Judges 20:16). The Hebrew for “miss” has a family relationship to the word sin (chet). Christian scriptures carry over the idea by using the Greek word hamartánein, which can also mean missing the mark; and in his letter to Romans (3:23) Paul says, “All have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God”—“fallen short” can imply an archer shooting an arrow short of its mark.

But etymological arguments are notoriously unreliable. The word “nice,” for example, originally meant “ignorant.” That is hardly what I mean when I call you nice.

The more likely motive behind downplaying the concept of sin, at least for Christians, is the reaction to old-style evangelicals who preached hellfire and damnation. The Jewish case is a consequence of our adopting “enlightened” views of human nature as essentially good; so that wrongs that we perform get blamed on psychological or social factors, rather than moral ones.

Religion, however, insists on moral judgements — in our case, governmental policies that have knowingly reinforced racism; or extorting millions from law firms; and outright bribery of people in power. The words of the 8^th-century BCE prophet Amos should be headlines in our news feeds today. He was addressing the situation in the northern part of modern-day Israel, called Samaria. Especially given Ronald Reagan’s metaphoric image of America shining its best as a city on a hill, I reproduce Amos’s words substituting “America” for “Samaria.”

“Gather on the hill of America and witness the outrages”(v. 3:10) The powerful “defraud the poor, rob the needy” (4:1). They are “takers of bribes” (55:12).

This sort of thing is not just missing the mark. It is evil. It is a sin.

Lesson 3. And Yet, Most People Are Mostly Good Most Of The Time

About a month ago, I took a bad fall. Within minutes, a painter passing by stopped to help me. He called emergency services, and within minutes, two wonderful police officers joined him. Fire trucks appeared as well, and an ambulance, of course, with volunteers offering help. I am fine now, and still moved to tears of gratitude.

The election was a national outpouring of such goodness, ordinary people saying they had had enough of evil. Like me, America itself had taken a fall, a moral one, and its citizens decided to show up and offer moral life support.

So yes, life is filled with surprises, sometimes the way evil grows like a cancer among us. But sometimes too, the good in us persists and has its way. The newly elected members of congress will have to choose what kind of surprises they want to spring upon us: good or evil. Let us caution them not to become the next generation of the privileged, overly certain about their prejudices, overly ambitious about their future, and apt not just to miss the mark (politicians may be forgiven for not being good archers) but to cross the line into sin and evil.

Hence, one more religious value emerges from the election:

4. The More Powerful We Are, The More Humble We Need To Be

I charge the decision makers of both parties to back down from messianic certainties; and to take another verse from the prophets as their guide, this one from the 8^th-century BCE prophet Micah (6:9). It is so well known that it is quoted ubiquitously, but maybe because it is so ubiquitously applicable: “What does your God ask of you?  To do justice, to goodness, and walk humbly with your God.”

[Please don’t forget my newest, my 50^th, and, in many ways, my best book, due out any day now: Open Letters: On Life, Loss, Faith, and the Human Condition — a deeply personal dialogue on what it means to be human in our time. You can order it at https://ccar.co/openletters.]