My political consciousness was awakened after the repeated revelations of the previous/current administration's mishandling of the Iraq war, relationships with oil companies, and incompetence and/or dishonesty regarding intelligence agencies and 'special' prisons, to name a few. It took this big of a shaking for me to go out and read God's Politics by Jim Wallis. The central idea I learned from those two experiences was that God and faith cannot be monopolized by a political party.