A recent article in The Wall Street Journal highlighted the growing polarity among Americans as we head down the home stretch of a strange and divisive Presidential election. According a recent Pew survey, there has been a sharp uptick in mutual disdain among self-identified Republicans and Democrats since 2016. Yet the same survey also shows over 50% of Americans make up what is often called “the exhausted majority” who are tired of the two parties and wish for more options.
This has motivated many groups, such as One America and Braver Angels, to create environments to help lower the political temperature. I have attended several Braver Angels events and have come away impressed by the group’s efforts to bring people together across political divides without asking them to give up their deeply held beliefs.
The political divisions afflicting America today are undeniably deep. Our political parties are the most polarized in terms of policies and personalities that they’ve been since the Vietnam War. We should not be surprised that American citizens, participating in the process, are making choices that line up with their values. As someone who has been a lifelong conservative and happily active in politics, I urge Christians to engage the public square. If we truly love our neighbors as Jesus commanded us to do, how can we not work to shape the policies that affect our neighbor’s flourishing?
And yet, there is a temptation in this age toward partisanship that goes beyond mere civic action, a totalizing approach that becomes less about stewarding citizenship and more about an all-encompassing social identity. The Wall Street Journal piece points to research that suggests people today are acting more on base instincts than careful weighing of political options. One expert frames it this way:
Instead of going into the voting booth and asking, ‘What do I want my elected representatives to do for me,’ they’re thinking, ‘If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done,’” said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. “It’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.
This is where, contrary to the common narrative among many observers, active Christian discipleship serves to temper, rather than inflame, partisan passions. The Gospel that compels us to advocate for good public policy out of neighbor love also reminds us that the dream of an ideal society ultimately comes not through a ballot box, but at the end of the age when Christ returns to fully consummate his kingdom. The Journal quotes Lilliana Mason further:
Today, our partisan identities have come into alignment with the other facets of our identity, which heightens our intolerance of each other even beyond our actual political disagreements, Mason said. Political party has become a “mega-identity,” she said, magnifying a voter’s political allegiances and amplifying the biases that innately come from belonging to a group.
This primal instinct toward identity is not, in and of itself, unhealthy. Humans are social creatures, this longing embedded in image-bearers from the very beginning by a Triune God who created humans to be in loving community with one another, even becoming incarnate through Mary to dwell among us in solidarity.
So the answer to a dangerously trivialized politics can’t require a retreat from the public square, nor can the solution be found in the false promises of expressive individualism. Instead, we should direct our tribal instincts toward the promise of family and identity offered in the Christian story. Here, humans are declared to be image-bearers crafted carefully by a loving Creator. We who were once alienated from this Creator by our own sin can now be reconciled to God through the saving work of Christ and baptized into a new and eternal community, the family of God.
A healthy approach to politics means we can and should vote according to our beliefs, join political parties, and advocate for our ideas in the public square. Yet we can do so in ways that both work for social change and yet hold our politics loosely. We should listen to Augustine who reminds us that it’s about ordering our passions rightly:
But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.
(On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)
When we engage the public square in this healthy way, we then see those who disagree with us, not as monsters, but as fellow image-bears. We can resist tribalism and instead direct those instincts toward the eternal, where Christ is gathering into one new family, people from every tribe and nation.