INDIANAPOLIS (RNS) “So what do you think of Obama?” asked my sister, as we sat around after a lovely birthday dinner.

I had an opinion, of course. I grew up in a family where having opinions mattered and we read newspapers and magazines to get ready for opinion sharing.

Soon, my brother, sister and I were off and running, expressing opinions about Obama-this and Obama-that. We made some references to Congress, took pot shots at radio and television bloviators, and had a kind word for the governor of Indiana, who courageously admitted recently that his critics had been right about a disastrous privatization program.

But mainly we talked about the one figurehead whose actions are widely reported, as if everything in the U.S. government resided in the one man and the future of America depended on what he chose to do next.

We delved little into context, into complex economic forces, into special interests working beneath public radar, into realities of home life, jobs, debt overloads, generational transitions and racial conflict, or into corrupt and hostile nations working against us.

It was easier — and more satisfying — to analyze the president’s actions and to give him a score.

This was entirely bogus, of course. A nation of more than 307 million residents can’t be reduced to a single politician, or an era in history given a single leader’s name. There is no such thing as “Bush’s War” or “Obama’s Economy.” Such labels are convenient shorthand for purposes of arguing, but all they accomplish is to provide political cover for self-serving behavior, to oversimplify the complex and thus make the complex frightening, and to make our democracy a popularity contest, not a reasoned balancing of self-interest, community interest and national interest.

I encountered this in parish ministry, when decades of a congregation’s mission and ministry were given a predecessor’s name, as if no one else had participated or made decisions, and a denomination’s fading fortunes were laid at the feet of a single officer or event, as if the daily affairs of 7,000 congregations and 2.1 million members and the difficult work they were or weren’t doing sprang from a single desk in New York City.

Eras do exist, but they have many players, and the departure of a single figurehead doesn’t change the system that much. Moreover, even when a single leader makes an epic decision, like Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, we remain ignorant if all we see is the single decision and whether we “like” the one who made it.

Christian history is a good example. When Jesus was leaving, he gave his ministry to a circle of several dozen friends and urged them to spread his gospel far and wide by perpetuating his one-life-at-a-time ministry. If they had stuck to that game plan, world history would have been substantially different.

Unfortunately, a coterie of ambitious institution-builders seized control, reconfigured Jesus as a larger-than-life hero and made fealty to his legend more important than carrying forward his ministry. They created a cult of personality that soon justified their own emergence as power figures and abruptly terminated the leveling, democratizing, load-sharing, circle-forming, and inclusion-centered movement that Jesus had intended.

It is our duty, as citizens and persons of faith, to put down our scorecards and to do the hard work of making the world better.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)