What Do We Do When Nobody Is Listening?

Leading the Church in a Polarized Society

Robin W. Lovin

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467465205
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A trusted senior statesman in Christian ethics and ministry addresses the crisis of political polarization threatening the existence of the church.

Polarization and political gridlock have been the norm in the United States for decades. As that reality seeps into every aspect of our society, churches find themselves not only affected, but often at the very center of the conflict. Rather than remaining places of inclusive community and generous dialogue, our sanctuaries have too often become ground zero of the culture wars.

What can pastors do to restore the church's witness to the unity of all things in God—especially when it feels like members of the congregation would rather position the church's identity firmly on one side of the political spectrum or the other? And how can church leaders maintain peace while speaking the truth on important social issues—without either alienating parishioners who disagree or resorting to inane bothsiderism?

Widely respected pastor and ethicist Robin Lovin offers sage counsel in this helpful book, arguing that to resist the trend of polarization in our church we must rediscover how the gospel teaches us to understand ourselves, our neighbors, and the purpose of politics. In part one, Lovin provides an overview of the situation in which we find ourselves, showing how polarization developed over recent decades and how, in both our society and our churches, we have adapted to division as the norm. In part two, he considers how Christians can shape a different response by learning to listen—to the Word of God, to the world, and to those who are not usually heard. With questions for discussion and reflection aligned with the content of each chapter, What Do We Do When Nobody Is Listening? provides an accessible roadmap for navigating out of the morass of polarization into a brighter future of church unity, during election seasons and beyond.

PART I

Divisions

We live in a divided society. We are a people with many different backgrounds and interests. Through our different experiences, we come to value different things, and we end up working toward different goals. As a result, we often differ about how to educate our children, how to provide access to health care, and how to balance individual and social responsibilities for employment, housing, and the needs of everyday life.

Disagreements like these are inevitable in a democracy, especially one that spreads across a wide territory and incorporates varied cultures, traditions, and ways of life. The authors of the United States Constitution recognized this and tried to design a political system that could facilitate compromises and accommodate enduring differences. But at times of crisis, divisions run deep and sometimes, they reach the breaking point. That happened in the crisis leading up to the Civil War, as different ideas about slavery, democracy, and national unity that had been argued for decades could no longer be held together. In a similar way, the beginning of the Great Depression marked a crisis provoked not only by economic collapse, but by radically different ideas about how to deal with it. Deep disagreements like these mark points of decision and realignments of political forces that change the future.

Many worry that we are approaching another such crisis in these first decades of the twenty-first century. Since the end of the Second World War, we have disagreed with one another about civil rights, economic opportunity, and America’s place in the world. But in recent years, the disagreements have become so sharp that we seem to be drawn up in opposing sides that stare at each other across an empty space without shared purposes or values—perhaps even without shared facts.

But if this is a crisis, it is oddly unlike those earlier ones that shaped our history. No one great issue divides us, and no specific set of events drove us into our opposing camps. The pandemic of 2020 and the sharp economic downturn that accompanied it provided focus for our discontents, but the national divide over public health measures, economic policy, and civil unrest seemed less a matter of crisis response and more like two sides that were already lined up against one another, calculating how to incorporate unexpected events into a narrative they had already rehearsed. The language was sometimes apocalyptic, but beneath the rhetoric of an uncivil presidential campaign and a closely divided election, events flowed in familiar channels. Many of us worried about the aftermath of the election and predicted worse things to come, but few really expected anything different.

Instead of reaching a crisis point of unsustainable disagreement, our political parties, regions, social classes, ethnic groups, and attitudes have assembled themselves over the decades into two broad though barely coherent coalitions. Political scientists and policy analysts identify this phenomenon as “polarization” or “political sectarianism.”^* Like feuding religious groups or partisan ideologues, these “sects” continue to assert their claims to truth whether or not anyone is listening, so that our public discourse now seems devoted to energizing the faithful and to recruiting the diminishing number of unaligned people in the middle into one base or the other—red states and blue states, working class or professional elite, globalists and patriots. This does not quite live up to our civics textbook picture of politics, but if it is a crisis, it is a remarkably stable one, with each side dependent on the other for its identity and agenda. We are a divided society. Our candidates, elected officials, political strategists, and media specialists have simply adapted to this reality, with varying degrees of success.

Churches, too, have adapted to this polarization, and sometimes they have led the way into it. They have moved away from parishes and congregations built around local communities. They have sorted their membership along lines that reflect economic and cultural groups in the wider society. When the tensions within congregations and denominations became too much to continue together, they split up. A divided society also divides our congregations, denominations, and the way we see other people of faith. If Christianity itself is not to be redefined in polarized terms, we must rediscover how the gospel teaches us to understand ourselves, our neighbors, and the purposes of politics.

The first step, part 1 of this book, is to get an overview of the situation in which we find ourselves. We will see how polarization developed over recent decades and how, despite all the conflicts and dysfunctions, we have adapted to a divided society (chapter 1). Next, we review how churches, in particular, have adapted to these social changes and sometimes tried to resist them (chapter 2). The dysfunctions of polarization in church and society lead, in turn, to part 2, which considers how Christians might shape a different response by listening to the Word of God (chapter 3), to the world (chapter 4), and to those who have not been heard (chapter 5). What we learn at each step will change the way we see the big problems, but the real test will be how these ways of listening reshape our congregations, vocations, and communities.

* Eli J. Finkel et al., “Political Sectarianism in America,” Science 370, no. 6516 (October 30, 2020): 533–36.

[1]

Polarization

Disagreement is inevitable in a modern, pluralistic society. People are shaped by different experiences, and they bring different needs and aspirations to places where they work together with others from different backgrounds. They share neighborhoods with people from different cultures, and sometimes they struggle just to move down the street together without getting too much in one another’s way. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded us that “social distance” is something that is hard to achieve without constant negotiations. People differ about the details of everyday life and also about the big ideas that determine what they want for themselves and their families and what they expect from others who dream and plan alongside them. Moreover, our different desires and expectations are not just a checklist we consult when we have a decision to make. We form our identity around them, so that our differences are always with us. We belong to an ethnic group. We have a certain kind of job and the life expectations that go with it. We have a family and a faith, whether or not these look like what other people expect a family or a faith to be. Our identity determines how others see us, and thus it becomes the way we see ourselves, too. These differences in background and experience and the identities we develop through them mark out potential disagreements, as different identities give rise to different interests.

The structures of modern life create other tensions within institutions between management and workers, or between “shareholders” and “stakeholders.” Other disagreements characteristically mark the relations between different kinds of institutions, as for-profit corporations, academic institutions, social service agencies, and community organizations vie for support, customers, clients, or favorable legislation. Still other conflicts arise from the different interests of urban and rural communities or from conditions that separate different regions of the country. It was not for nothing that the framers of our Constitution worried about whether its republican form of government could encompass so large and diverse a geographic area.

Reasonable Pluralism

Given the scope of today’s conflicts, it is important to remember that over the course of our history, we have usually been able to arrive at some working agreements, and even as the differences persist, we create systems and procedures designed to moderate our conflicts, rather than intensify them. Such interim answers are characteristic of life in a modern democracy, and troubling as our conflicts may be, it would be more worrisome if the disagreements disappeared—if they were forced underground by an authoritarian regime, or if a wave of populist enthusiasm silenced those who still felt marginalized and excluded. Partial answers and temporary fixes are the main political products of a modern democracy, even for those who keep hoping and working for justice, compassion, and equal opportunity. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, democracy is “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.”^*

For those who have a deep faith in the ideals of justice and equality, the compromises are frustrating, but learning to live with them is one of the conditions of what the philosopher John Rawls calls “reasonable pluralism.”^** A modern democracy will have some ongoing disagreements in its public life as long as it continues to exist as a democracy. Reasonable people accept this necessity and operate within the conditions.

Reasonable pluralism, however, is not an easy achievement, and there are moments that stretch its conditions to the breaking point. Sometimes an attempt at democracy fails at the outset. The United States Constitution barely survived the struggle for its ratification, as regions differed over the public role of religion, over the proposed federal government’s powers of taxation, and especially over slavery.^* The working arrangements that papered over the disagreement about slavery eventually broke down as a cotton economy built on slave labor grew and pressure mounted for its expansion into new territories in the West. It took a civil war to amend the constitutional arrangements, but the decades that followed the Reconstruction Amendments gave rise to a system of legal segregation that lasted nearly a century. Its effects persist in structures that divide opportunities and outcomes along racial lines today. Especially around issues of race, then, American democracy lives with the uneasy knowledge that disagreements held together by reasonable pluralism can give way to more intense conflicts that threaten dissolution.

The unavoidable question, after two decades of congressional gridlock, periodic government shutdowns, contested election results, and increasing urban unrest, is whether we have now come to one of those points where the politics of reasonable pluralism come up short and conflict escalates toward dissolution. To offer a word of reassurance at the outset, the idea I want to put forward in this book is that we are not yet at such point of crisis. But neither is the polarization we experience today simply a continuation of the usual politics of disagreement. The divisions run through our whole society, not just our politics. Our churches, neighborhoods, and universities are discovering that they live along the fault lines between progressive and conservative, just like our legislatures and political leaders. Pastors, professors, CEOs, and directors of human resources learn to adapt, along with the senators and representatives. Some, in fact, turn the divisions quite successfully to their own advantage.

For that reason, the structures of polarization turn out to be surprisingly stable. Ours is neither a time of ordinary politics nor a moment of extraordinary crisis. This is something different, and it could continue for a long time. But before we settle into this “new normal,” we need to ask whether we are making use of the situation, or whether the situation is using us. In most cases, I think, the answer is that the situation is using us. Precisely because politics has adapted so successfully to its requirements, it is going to take some new ways of thinking in other institutions and communities to avoid embedding these divisions in our society for the long run.

What that might mean becomes starkly apparent when an emergency such the COVID-19 pandemic or an upsurge in police violence against people of color draws our attention to another kind of polarization. Set alongside the division into red states and blue states that is hollowing out the middle of our politics, we see the hollowing out of society as a whole, a widening gap between those for whom wealth and opportunities are increasing and a larger group for whom they are actually shrinking. In popular wisdom, death and illness are the great equalizers, putting rich and poor, powerful and weak all on the same footing. But it turns out that in the society we are creating for ourselves, death and illness fall disproportionately on the poor and weak. Political polarization alone does not cause this polarization of possibilities, but it is making it impossible for us to deal with it, and that sets us up for a real crisis which our busy adaptations to a divided society will not be able to prevent.

Disagreement and Social Transformation

To see what is different about the present disagreements, it is helpful to review how we arrived at this point. This is not a matter of specialized historical research. The main events are well known. But if we look back on them from where we are now, they may appear differently from the ways they appear in our history books or the ways we experienced them at the time.

If we look for transformative moments in American history, it is not necessary to go back to the Civil War or the ratification of the Constitution. The Great Depression that began in 1929 was marked by widespread failure of economic and political systems, and the sense of crisis was intensified by similar failures elsewhere around the world. The First World War had toppled European empires, destroyed their economies, and launched the resentments that would bring nationalist regimes to power in Japan, Italy, and Germany. After a Russian revolution that overthrew the czar, Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power and established the Soviet Union. Set against that background, talk of a possible revolution in the United States was not mere rhetoric or political fiction, though there was plenty of both of those.^* Christian social teaching responded to the moment in the work of Dorothy Day (1897–1980), John A. Ryan (1869–1945), and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). For Protestants, especially, Niebuhr captured the moment with the publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society in 1932. Here, the hope for a gradual transformation of society by Christian ideals gives way to a stark contrast between the attitudes of proletarian classes and the attitudes of privileged classes and a warning that the privileged will not give up their power unless they are forced to do so.^*

Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” would dominate social ethics in America for the next three decades, but the realistic assessment of the privileged and the proletarians would be replaced by an ironic view of global conflict between the idealistic “children of light” and the self-interested “children of darkness.”^** For a Niebuhrian realist, of course, the children of light are never as pure as they think themselves to be, but their democratic commitments offered the best possibility for containing the totalitarianism that results when self-interest is pursued to its inevitable conclusion. The conflict between the two forces is real, and it mirrors in some respects the opposition in Moral Man and Immoral Society, but during the Second World War and the long Cold War that followed, this global conflict helped the United States to maintain domestic political tranquility. It put a premium on symbolism that united us and downplayed the rhetoric of our deepest divisions, whether these were regional, racial, religious, or economic. This was the era of patriotism and the “Judeo-Christian” heritage.^* Even the grim realities of segregation could be covered by the expectation that the nation that was committed to secure human freedom globally would eventually have to make good on that promise for its own people.^**

Well before the end of the Cold War, however, deeper tensions in the democratic ideal resurfaced in mass movements directed toward ending racial segregation, poverty, gender discrimination, and other injustices. From the early 1950s, a strategy of litigation designed to make the constitutional requirement of equal citizenship real in practice began to dismantle segregation in political practices and, importantly, in public education. That legal effort led by Thurgood Marshall resulted in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled against legal segregation in public education and paved the way for federal intervention where required to end it. Changes won in the courts coincided with changes brought about by local efforts to desegregate public transportation and other services. The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) pioneered the model of a disciplined grassroots movement for change. Martin Luther King Jr. crafted a theology and a strategy for the movement that spread rapidly across the South, and expanded to include legislative goals, including voting rights laws and equal access to housing. In the 1960s, the movement made its appearance in Northern cities where discrimination was no less pervasive.^*

The strategy of mass protest and nonviolent resistance stretched democracy’s methods for handling disagreement to their limits, but it proved Niebuhr and other realists wrong when they worried that change was coming too fast and would provoke massive resistance that could undo what had been gained. One important reason for this success was the ability of King and his movement to build coalitions and make connections across a range of issues, resulting in a more comprehensive ideal of social justice. Part of the strategy of nonviolent protest was to meet the opposition in their humanity and to show them their human bond with those they were trying to dominate and exclude. King also eas...