A Fractured People are a Vulnerable Nation
The cracks in our Union are widening
Source: bowie15 at Getty Images Pro. Edits by Aaron J. Anderson
We should all be deeply concerned about the fracturing of our nation. The snag in the fabric has torn all the way into local communities and houses of worship. The tear does not show any signs of slowing.
I am not pollyannaish about a “golden age” where America was completely united and whole. The celebration of Juneteenth this week is reminder enough of our nation’s divided history. We have always had our differences. Humans always do.
This week I read two particular pieces I would commend to you for background on my concern:
How America Fractured Into Four Parts by George Packer in the Atlantic.
The Six-Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism by Michael Graham in Mere Orthodoxy.
Packer’s Atlantic piece will provide you a historical angle on the socio-political fracturing of our nation.
Graham’s piece on evangelicalism will give you a flavor of the ways the socio-political divide intersects in one particular faith community. To be clear, I would suggest that evangelicalism’s divide has been hastened by numerous additional factors that are not exclusive to American politics, though political ideologies have been an extraordinary catalyst.
As a Dad invested in my kids’ future, and as a follower of Jesus, I am doing my part to raise the alarm about where we are headed. The divisiveness to which we are presently succumbing is shredding social bonds we desperately need to make the progress needed.
We have to get off the crazy cycle
A relationship author describes the “crazy cycle” where a couple’s feuding behaviors have a way of fueling an ongoing war. A husband’s failure to love his wife encourages a negative behavioral response. Her reaction reinforces the husband's decision to justify withholding love, which in turn justifies the wife’s irritated response.
Round and round the crazy cycle goes.
Of course, in marital conflicts, both partners do not always share an equal part of the blame for the dysfunction. Sometimes, one partner has really blown it.
In my experience, my wife and I could share testimony of the futility of diagnosing who is to blame for the original sin that spurred the war.
Our nation is spinning on the crazy cycle with warring factions pointing the finger at who is to blame. No question, there are some very guilty parties for the sins of our nation.
Church members are attacking each other as both the cause for the fight and for the complicity with whoever our side deems is the “true” enemy.
Please hear me: this observation is not to suggest that given our current state of division there is an equal distribution of blame.
Each of us must do the careful work of self-criticism and confession to determine what share we own in the fracturing of our communities. As Jesus said,
How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, 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. (Matthew 7:3, NIV)
What if we focused on our own eye first?
Perhaps a willingness to own my share of the fault might encourage my neighbor to do the same? When I first admit and confess to the one I offend the ways I have harmed a relationship, a reciprocal confession is often made that has a way of sharing some sense of the fault. Again, this is not a universal rule, and such reciprocity should never be the motivation for making the confession in the first place.
My hope and prayer is that all of us would desire to get off the round and round of the crazy cycle.
Four behaviors all of us need to immediately check
Let us naively assume for a moment that all of us shared an interest in healing our fractured communities by getting off the crazy cycle. Confession and repentance are inadequate if we immediately return to the same divisive and destructive behaviors.
Cautionary note: many of our attitudes and behaviors are deeply engrained due to years of conditioning. We would need buckets of grace and patience to begin walking a new path of unity.
There are four particular behaviors we would need to change immediately if we were sincere about repairing our fragile Union.
We would resist the idea that we are the ones who are objective
I am not that objective. I was born in a period of time in a particular nation with parents who shaped my attitudes, faith, and the way I see the world. My education was done by certain institutions imbued with a particular philosophy of the good life. Certain career opportunities opened up for me and others did not.
We are at our most naive when we believe we are the ones who are truly objective. Our vision is clearest when we take the opportunity to try to walk a mile in another’s shoes.
Can you imagine for a minute what it would be like to have been born in another period of time, to be of a different biological sex, raised in an alternate religion, or in a different culture?
Who would you be? Would you be the same person with the same beliefs and attitudes? Likely not.
Once we remove the mirage of objectivity, we are in a position to see different perspectives. Viewpoints that were not previously accessible become viable options.
This does not mean I was intentionally being false in my outlook, only that my view of the world was made narrow by my upbringing.
My father-in-law taught my wife to always ask a question in conflict: Help me understand why you think or feel this way.
Perhaps if we approached our neighbor with a “help me understanding why you think this way” attitude we would have a new openness and perspective that could help us get on our way toward healing.
2. We would refuse simplistic reductions of our neighbor’s beliefs
Nothing is more frustrating than witnessing your beliefs simplistically reduced for the sake of winning an argument. Your most cherished beliefs are reduced to strawmen that are easily knocked down.
A closed and defensive posture is the unnecessary result of poorly constructed strawman arguments.
Fear is what keeps us from fully recognizing the potential strength of an opponent’s argument. People who are seekers of truth, beauty, and goodness are relentless in their pursuit. The truth sets us free.
Your neighbor deserves to be fully and fairly understood. After carefully listening to an opposing viewpoint, can you articulate the belief back in conversation in a way that satisfies your debate partner?
If not, you have not listened well and are prone to responding to a strawman that is but a caricature of your neighbor’s belief. You are ignoring the potential strengths and merits of an opposing viewpoint that could round out your view of the world.
3. We would stop shutting dialogue down based on “signal” words
Every ideological camp has a vocabulary they use to define their beliefs.
In my theological world, words like “inspiration” and “infallibility” are loaded terms depending on where you stand in the debate over the Bible’s trustworthiness. How you use, or even if you choose to not use particular lingo, may “signal” your beliefs to other people.
There are lots of signal words being used today in our most heated and controversial topics. A couple of examples: Critical Race Theory (CRT), gender, sexuality, American exceptionalism, evangelicalism, liberal, conservative, etc.
One could consult a dictionary to accurately define these words. Instead, most of us adopt assumed understandings of signal terminology that may represent strawman construction.
How many of us are convinced that the vast numbers of American people have taken time to actually read and study people who are ideologically identified by such language? I think we all know the answer to that one.
Unfortunately, operating with a shallow understanding of such signal phrase, we wrongly assume that this signal language gives us a hasty way to determine what our neighbor believes. A couple of examples:
“My co-worker identified herself as ‘liberal’ so she must support defunding the police.”
“That pastor talked about racial equity in his sermon, so he must support Antifa.”
“My uncle votes Republican, so he must be opposed to all gun control.”
We shut down the prospect of dialogue simply because of the presence of signal words. Far too many simplistic assumptions are therefore made about our neighbor’s beliefs and attitudes.
An astute comment was made by Edward Hamilton on the Michael Graham article cited above about the fracturing of evangelicals. He said,
Each side has a vocabulary that renders it repellent and alien to the other side. The opposing camps have created language categories that are so immediately non-conducive to even the discussion of compromise that the split is already a fait accompli.
We should not allow signal words to stunt the pursuit of the truth and dialogue with our neighbors. You might simply start by asking, “Can you explain what you mean when you use that word?”
4. We would stop rewarding and applauding snarky, vulgar behavior
Chrissy Teigen recently issued a statement about her online bullying called Hi Again. Some have accepted her response as sincere, while others have criticized it as an insincere PR maneuver.
I tend to not be a huge fan of judging hearts because I know my own motives are rarely pure.
Teigen admits to being a troll. What struck me was this part of her piece:
If there was a pop culture pile-on, I took to Twitter to try to gain attention and show off what I at the time believed was a crude, clever, harmless quip. I thought it made me cool and relatable if I poked fun at celebrities.
Now, confronted with some of the things that I said, I cringe to my core…Words have consequences and there are real people behind the Twitter handles I went after. I wasn’t just attacking some random avatar, but hurting young women — some who were still girls — who had feelings.
There is never an excuse for mean, cruel words. Meanness is never justified. You can disagree strongly with a public figure’s beliefs or behavior, but it never justifies your own nasty behavior.
A “pop culture pile-on” is a nice way of softening the bluntness of calling it a “mob attack.”
The problem is that we reward and applaud mean behavior. We “like” a sarcastic Facebook rebuttal and “retweet” vulgar attacks on public figures.
The one who issues the blistering attack is socially rewarded for bad behavior. That nasty comment received thousands of retweets, leaving the author with a sense of self-righteousness at the “take-down” of some worthy target.
Ugliness is applauded as courageous righteousness and fuels the kind of self-seeking narcissism that makes life in community impossible.
Chrissy Teigen was absolutely wrong for the horrific things she said to young women.
Our social media machine is complicit in her attacks. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” does not leave room for me to applaud, like, reward, retweet, or share vulgar words about my neighbor.
Every time we award and applaud vulgar behavior, we strengthen a platform that is making us weaker and more vulnerable as a people.
We are only as strong as our weakest bonds
In the midst of a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln repeated those famous words of Jesus:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. (see Matthew 12:22–28)
A fractured people are a vulnerable nation. How strong are a people who are busy attacking one another? If we continue to whittle away at the fabric of our nation, what will remain of our communities, political institutions, schools, churches, and even our families?
I am hard-pressed to believe that a rising sense of fear is not the direct fruit of a growing sense of vulnerability everyone feels.
Our attacks on each other have not only been verbal, but physical and violent. There are more videos than I would like to watch of violent encounters on public transit, fast food chains, grocery stores, sporting events, etc.
The news regularly reminds us of road rage incidents that result in gun violence. Mass shootings at parties, clubs, churches, schools and other gathering places don’t show signs of slowing down.
The Hebrew psalmist said it well,
How very good and pleasant it is
when kindred live together in unity! (Psalm 133:1, NRSV)
There is a good and pleasant way forward for a fractured, vulnerable nation but it requires brothers and sisters to desire unity and to do their best to walk in it.
May God grant us His grace to pursue a unity that might make our communities strong and whole.
