Note: From Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division (Lexham, 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Ours is a vastly different world than the world of the early church. The two are separated not merely by enormous technological, economic and political differences but also by how difference itself is experienced. In the ancient world, religions, cities and cultures were experienced objectively – arranged in a hierarchy of cultures and deities that was a taken-for-granted fact of the world and was also experienced in and through other taken-for-granted realities such as the homogeneity of the local culture, the universality of military might and the permanence of economic hierarchies. There was a certain “fixed” nature to the way the ancient world was, and it was not malleable to one’s own desires.
By contrast, our world has moved from fate to choice [Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 1979]. There are few fixed points in how we experience the world. In a democracy, our choices determine the future, which would have been an alien intuition in the ancient world. We are also witnessing the victory of the particular over the universal. We give our attention to fragments and individual interests. We are faced every day with virtually infinite options with an infinite number of details within those options. Think of how many different kinds of ketchup or soft drinks or breads fill our grocery shelves. The monarchs of the medieval world could not have dreamed of so many trivial choices. Condemned to fragmentary details, we seem all too comfortable with the loss of a universal context – regrettably content to relinquish an overarching purpose to life. Former President Barack Obama put it this way in 2006: “Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds – dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets – and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.” [“Faith in the Public Square,” January 2006]….
Polarization Is the Price of Freedom and Democracy
Modern political liberalism is built on the bare notions of individual rights and freedoms. For a time, certain kinds of cultural variety allied with these freedoms may have stimulated innovation and entrepreneurship, but they also generated considerable social friction and often downright hostility between the diverse subgroups within the culture. That social friction and those hostilities have not vanished in the present, nor are they any longer interpreted by an overarching moral vision that could, in part, inspire initiatives to overcome those frictions and hostilities. It is a common intuition that we have now entered a stage of such significant social polarization that no strategy exists to overcome it.
Our social lives are deeply fractured not only by diverse religious convictions but also by (and primarily by) a system wherein individuals are free to pursue whatever they desire as long as it does not conflict with others in their pursuits. This is as true inside the church as outside the church. This freedom to determine one’s own identity is the hallmark of modern democratic liberalism. As Mark Lilla puts it, “Personal choice. Individual rights. Self-definition. We speak these words as if a wedding vow. We hear them in school, we hear them on television, we hear them in stuffy Wall Street boardrooms, in Silicon Valley playpens, we hear them in church, we even hear them in bed. We hear them so often it’s hard for us to think or talk about any subject except in these self-regarding terms” [The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, 2017]. But we also realize that human decisions are often subverted by the commercial pressures of the marketplace; we are not nearly as “free” as public discourse would suggest. The desires that motivate our “free choices” are subtly undermined by consumer pressures. As Jeffrey Stout comments, “We obviously fall far short of the democratic ideals we espouse, on any reasonable interpretation of their substance. The ideal of equal voice, in particular, is hardly consistent with the dominant role that big money now plays” [Democracy and Tradition, 2003].
Freedom of self-determination carries with it an unintended license for greed and power. Democracy is supposed to check this very sort of behavior, but it is easily exploited by powerful economic entities. Late modern democracy lacks a common moral tradition that would give it the convictions to keep these sorts of behaviors restrained. The distinction between virtue and vice may not have relieved earlier times of moral decay, but the absence of any agreed-on distinction between them today makes it all the more difficult to sustain a commitment to anything resembling the “common good.” The polarization of our contemporary cultural conversation has resulted in the loss of confidence in democratic liberalism even as democratic liberalism provides the structures by which it is possible to complain about the polarization. Without a common civic morality to restrain large consumer forces, the public square is not only empty but also alienating. People tend to look for social reinforcement of their own self-identity in homogeneous communities when there is not a set of shared goals promoting the common good. Ironically, the greater the yearning for a common good, the more suspicion there is about any one group imposing its sense of the common good on others. The fracturing of the sense of belonging to others becomes the dominant paradigm. “If you are not for me, on my terms, then you are against me.” But the more tribal the search for self-identity is, the more polarized our common life becomes and the greater our tendency toward conflict. Without a larger perception of the common good, or at least of some form of commonality among all our differences, our social polity is doomed to failure. It is not an accident that democracy itself seems tenuous in an age of global capitalism, corporate corruption, identity politics and theocratic terrorism.
Church life is likewise polarized. Though the church has been freed from state control, it remains downstream from culture and has imbibed the same celebration of self-defining freedom as the wider public square. There are surely notable exceptions, but as in many eras, the church reflects the world it lives in even as it struggles to speak prophetically to that world….
“We Must Live Together”: The Logic of the Gospel
How do we heal this fracturing and fragmentation, so deeply entrenched in our social polity and seemingly so arbitrary in its emotional attachments? The first step is to recognize that our task as Christians is to live as faithful witnesses in it. It is not realistic to suppose that fundamental social conflicts are going to be resolved anytime soon, whether nationally, globally or within the church. We must begin to cultivate the desire to live together in, with and through our differences. As philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff writes:
“We must live together. It is to politics and not to epistemology that we shall have to look for an answer as to how to do that. ‘Liberal’ politics has fallen on bad days recently. But to its animating vision of a society in which persons of diverse traditions live together in justice and friendship, conversing with each other and slowly altering their traditions in response to the conversation – to that, there is no viable alternative.” [John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, 1996]…
It is unlikely that any grand social strategy will alleviate the polarization. However, as a minority voice within our entrenched polarized communities, we Christians must ponder the internal logic of the gospel itself as a social strategy to pursue. This gospel affirms that human differences are given by our Creator in order to manifest the interdependence of the body as the very means to honor God with a deeper unity. The unique vocation of Christians is to express a commitment to justice and mercy, grace and truth, to our diverse neighbors inside the church and outside of it. Living this out rather than giving in to despair is our unique calling today, and is desperately needed for the church to flourish.
Much has been written in the recent past on the theological significance of the “other” – other nations, other communities, other people. In a time of increased scrutiny and anxiety about our polarizations, the language of the other has focused attention on the immensely important work of reconciliation in the context of these conflicts – a theme near the very heart of the gospel. The language of the other has provided us a way to think more clearly about the intensely personal nature of conflict and the impact of core disagreements about our own identity. Love of neighbor (the other) is a consistent theme in the teaching of Jesus. Loving our neighbors also entails that we hear the truth from our neighbors, even when we find it uncomfortable.
“Neighborliness” is just the name we give to the divine intention that humans are created to live together in communities…. The logic of communal life is straightforward. The greater the collaboration, the greater the opportunity for conflict unless there is a constraint on the self-interest of individuals in the community. But what could constrain self-interest? The gospel is the story in which Jesus sacrifices his human self-interest for the greater good – the greater good of his Father’s glory, and the greater good of those who would be reconciled to God by that act of sacrifice. It is the logic of the gospel that constrains self-interest.
Christians, who confess a large narrative moral arc from creation to redemption to consummation, have a unique opportunity for a humble prophetic witness to our late modern democratic secular culture. The difference of differences has to do with the nature of the communities in which those differences are played out and the constraints on self-interest imposed by the community or the goals to which the community aspires. The more significant the community, the more likely disagreement will be threatening, and the more important it will be to learn how to deal with the disagreement. Absent a larger narrative or moral arc that constrains self-interest, communities will inevitably lurch toward disorder.
On God’s Terms: Living with Our Disagreements
The mission of God as manifest in Christ does not seek the homogenization of the public square with the goal that everyone be the same, but rather the opportunity to speak about our disagreements in the public square honestly, graciously and humbly. Dealing with disagreements as Christians requires humility and wisdom. It requires a more thorough reckoning with the relationships in which God has placed us and coming to peace with the communities in which those relationships are embedded. It also requires a vigilance against resentment and cynicism – resentment against others and cynicism toward the present depth of the problems. It requires faith, hope and charity. Why should we suppose this is different for us when it has been the norm for Christians in every age of the church’s life? As Christians, we must engage the social world of polarizations on its own God-given terms rather than the terms being dictated by elites or culture warriors or even our own fears. The church ought not lose sight of its confession nor of its peculiar call to reflect the character of God in this world. Grace is more powerful than sin, and God’s grace is far more powerful than the principalities and powers of this age….
Learning to live with differences large and small, local and global, is part and parcel of the Christian calling today. There is no emperor who will impose unity on our cultural conversations (thankfully). There is no longer even the echo of an older common culture that binds us together. Ours is a time loosed from the politically artificial frameworks of cultural unity, a time when we are reminded of how much work is required to get along with our neighbors.
In the next chapter, I tell the story of the emergence of the racial and ethnic differences that serve as the interpretive key to every other kind of difference in late modern times. It begins with the story of the birth of democracy and the categories intrinsic to that political polity. It is not a set of abstractions, but a concrete narrative rooted in actual events in our past that continue to echo into the present. It is a narrative neither identical to the story of the gospel, nor one entirely absent the echoes of the gospel – if we listen carefully to hear it.
Richard Lints, senior distinguished professor of theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
