Editorial January 14, 1980 Issue

Love and politics

BEULAH M. ROEGGE

For many, Mary Baker Eddy gave a new approach to politics when she answered the question "What are your politics?" by saying, "I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 276;} Placing politics within the framework of what Jesus called the two great commandments, themselves a consolidation of the Ten Commandments, is to bring a centuries-tested moral and spiritual force to bear on our political involvement today. We need to exercise this force.

There may be no greater challenge in the months ahead, in the United States and in other countries where major political decisions are to be made, than to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind" and to "love thy neighbour as thyself."^{Matt. 22:37, 39;}

Partisan politics so often includes much that is diametrically opposite to this kind of love-centered politics. We make an unrivaled contribution to political harmony and social progress when we insist that our expression of impartial divine Love replace prejudices and misguided viewpoints in our own thinking. Love, understood as Principle, gives us perception.

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