Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm Timothy Padgett. Ben Sasse is an accomplished man. He's a devout Christian and proud husband and father. He has a PhD in history from Yale, and he 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, but only a little. This kind of thing can focus someone's thinking about what really matters in life. As he put it. Whether you have 90 days or 12 months or 12 years or 75 years left to live, we're all going to be pushing up daisies. But knowing now 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. Sass 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 towards politics imaginable. He chided professional politicians for being more interested in becoming TikTok stars than doing their jobs, and mourned the fact that for wider portions of the population, Politics has become their meaning and life.
As he said, 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.
Now these words are important mostly because so many have sidelined them. It's what the French philosopher Jacques Elou called the political illusion the idea that all problems are, at root, political, and therefore must have political solutions. Everything becomes politics, instead of everything being those people that 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 it's why some cut off relationships with loved ones because they supported the wrong candidate, or weren't as ideological as the mob demanded lately. Or maybe they didn't post the right things on social media, go to the right marches, and aren't outraged about all the right things all the time.
So much of this is the downside of our increasingly online world. As Senator 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 the little gods of our political idolatry are so small that so many of us become 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 of 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 world view 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.
For the Colson Center, I'm Dr. Timothy Patchett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.
