The first is to make the separation between religion and politics absolute. I agree with Victor that religion was intended by our founders to function as a moral conscience for our nation’s government, and this should still hold true today.

The other peril is to conflate the two or intertwine them so that there is no distinction. This fallacy, I find, inherent in Joecks’ commentary. He appears to claim the reason for our government gridlock (and now closure) is that while one side is devoid of truth, values and God, the other is rightly aligned in these three areas.

Joecks offers examples to illustrate failures of the one side (“the left”). But no mention is made of the faults of the other side (his political party?). Why not? Are his religious and political convictions so enmeshed that he becomes blind to the moral flaws in his own party?

Take his first area, truth. He makes a distinction between absolute truth (“objective and observable”) and relative truth (“subjective and self-selected”). The left, he says, depends on the latter (“personal feelings”) and denies the former (“reality”), and implies the right is the reverse of that. But what about truth in the 2020 presidential election which much of the right have denied or been complicit in that denial which led to so much “confusion, frustration, and failure”?

Victor Joecks’ column may indeed uncover a big cause for unresolved divisions in our government, but not in the way he intends. When our political allegiance takes on religious fervor, we begin to see everything in black and white, and there is no room for self-correction or recognition of anything positive about the opposing point of view. The moral compass of our religious faith becomes so entangled with our political persuasions that it is no longer free to serve as a conscience for our government.

Blurring that distinction is becoming endemic in America today on the left as well as the right. Gridlock then becomes inevitable and democracy is left in peril.

Bill Heersink

South Ogden