Today, most Americans lead siloed existences. Too many of us live in municipalities with populations that are self-selecting. Then we subscribe to social media platforms and news outlets that confirm our personal biases. We settle on faith communities by finding those whose members are most ideologically aligned with us. We are extremely well sorted nearly everywhere; we are mostly spared surprise encounters. Yet we suffer for that. Our suspicions of one another grow and the dividing lines deepen between us. We sacrifice communal practices of hospitality and jeopardize our democracy in the process.
Hospitality is a radical religious notion. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Showing hospitality becomes a spiritual mandate, especially around areas of evident difference. On our polarized political scene today, we tend to classify persons as either friend or foe. It asks too little of us to show hospitality solely to our friends. We have lost sight of the stranger almost entirely—and we have forgotten who we ourselves might become in relation.
Over the course of that day at Georgetown, I came to understand that I had been invited to the conference because of a connection I made last summer in Gettysburg where I served as a delegate to the 2023 National Convention of Braver Angels, a bipartisan organization devoted to facilitating civil discourse and civic renewal. Braver Angels always begins with work it dubs “depolarizing within,” by recognizing our unfortunate human tendency to demonize our opponents. Dedicated depolarizing asks people to be courageous enough to respectfully engage those they disagree with, sometimes vehemently. It equips and encourages them to remain in close proximity to one another in spite of degrees of discomfort. It allows them to move along a communication continuum from heated debate into open discussion and finally into the kind of dialogue that increases trust levels and actually promotes goodwill.
We are all acutely aware of the rancor that mars our political landscape today. Americans who regard their political opponents with disgust will notice that complete avoidance almost immediately follows. Repeatedly, Jesus directs his followers to bless those who curse them and to love their enemies. However mystifying this sort of love is, we can assume that at minimum, it confers upon every enemy a certain dignity and worth. But as a clergyperson, I too rarely hear this love being preached from colleagues’ pulpits on a Sunday. What I frequently hear is fervent conviction about the political issues of the day and partisan rhetoric pitched to secure ideological conformity among the faithful. Our congregations too often foster emotional climates charged with tones of contempt. To be clear: this is true among conservative and liberal factions, progressive and traditional, the red and the blue. Moderating voices are increasingly silenced, as are any dissenting ones. So our purplish spaces start to disappear, along with several helpful shades of gray.
At one of the assemblies in Gettysburg last summer, our speaker asked Braver Angels delegates to raise their hands if they thought the United States needed to change. Everybody’s hands instantly flew up. The speaker then asked delegates to raise their hands if they thought they needed to change themselves. Fewer hands went up, more slowly, as the crowd—to its credit—broke into uncomfortable laughter. Who, us? Yes, us.
We need interrupt our own echo chambers before we can interrupt others’. In the Gospels, Jesus instructs followers, “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” Mercifully, spiritual disciplines and liturgical elements in various Christian traditions can help us gain greater clarity about the roles we play in othering our opponents. We can encourage thoroughgoing examinations of conscience, for instance, and provide opportunities for the confession of our individual and communal errors. Of course there will be significant conflicts for us to manage and possibly resolve, but we will succeed in neither thing if the overall emotional climate remains hostile to such efforts, if no one has gotten adept at de-escalating anything.
The moral project of democracy (we must begin with that foundational recognition of its moral aims) involves our attempt to collectivize conscience. It is plainly an imperfect attempt. But our faith communities can be spaces where we take seriously the education and exercise of our moral faculties all the same, in an endeavor to make fitter citizens. I worry that we have instead made them additional sites for political indoctrination, that they now differ from secular settings in merely superficial aspects. As people of faith, we can stay deeply committed to fostering both humility and curiosity—in our pulpits as well as in the pews. We can stop conscripting foot soldiers for the ongoing culture wars, be they social justice warriors or militia members storming the ramparts. We can model reconciliation. We can encourage members of our congregations to seek to transcend political differences instead of heightening them—but only if we stop colluding with culture and aim instead to become a Church Universal, one that issues a clarion call to greater communion.
The countercultural challenge becomes holding open an embrace wide enough to accommodate internal ideological diversity among believers, quite independent of identity politics and sectarian loyalties. Counting individuals as beloved children of God automatically extends them a measure of grace. The church can remind religious Americans of their shared and flawed humanity when they are most in danger of overlooking its complexity. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the psalmist asks: “what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have… crowned them with glory and honor.” We might try doing that, too.
At its founding, Braver Angels was called Better Angels, in tribute to President Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural speech, given just a couple of years before the Gettysburg Address he famously delivered following the deadliest battle in the Civil War. Questions of copyright quickly led Braver Angels to a name change that was—in retrospect—in the best interests of the organization. Given the crucial moment in human history we currently face, suggestions of greater and lesser, superior and inferior, might prove counterproductive. We’re all rank and file now, and our best hope in these days is to call forth the requisite moral courage to create an Us in the absence of any Them. Rather than curate exclusionary “safe spaces” that make our individual sense of security the paramount concern, we need braver spaces that are ideologically diverse and unapologetically so. Sitting on the campus of Georgetown Law in late February, gathered around Table 2 with our assorted breakfast pastries and hot beverages, my compatriots and I got a foretaste of that and saw that brave was good. It was very good indeed.
Note: All scriptural citations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE).
