The Deification of Political Opinion

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic is discussing the legacy of Christopher Hitchens and the reactions to his death by various commentators, including discussion of whether "not speaking ill of the dead" should apply to public figures. I was struck by this quote of a quote:

As Cook put it: "it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong"

Is this someone being rather hard on Hitchen's strident atheism, which went to extremes such as loudly mocking Mother Teresa and her work in the most excessive and vulgar terms? Is some health nut going after his heavy smoking and binge drinking? Is some woman upset by the way his literary bad boy persona spilled over into his relationships? No, the topic is Hitchen's opinion on the Iraq War:

indeed: "People make mistakes. What's horrible about Hitchens' ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made..."

I could see someone arguing that the Iraq War was the "single most consequential decision" in President Bush's life, or Dick Cheney's life, or even that of some major military figure. But Hitchen's was a literary and opinion journalist. That his thoughts on the Iraq War could somehow end up being the most "consequential" in his life suggests a view in which simply having a political opinion on some issue of the day is more important in one's life than anything one actually does.

This seems like an increasingly common way of thinking. As people decide that they are "basically good people" and banish morality from the bedroom, the living room, and the board room, they come to see morality as being the alignment with larger groups on the big issues of the day. Only the scrupulous worry about the morality of the mundane. Instead, morality is determined by how one addresses the big capitalized phrases of the moment: the War on Terror, Poverty, Inequality, Gay Rights, the Environment, etc.

This, it seems to me, couldn't be more backwards. Sure, what one thinks on various matters of the day is indicative of one's moral and personal choices, but the most consequential decisions of our lives are those we make about how we treat those around us on a day in and day out basis -- and whether we accept as the ruler and guide of those decisions our Maker.