[1] Successful social change movements begin with persistence in bearing witness from a minority position with regard to the status quo. “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Luke 13:20-21). So it was in some Christian denominations with regard to women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ordination of women and sexual or gender minorities in some Christian denominations. Each of these movements expanded who may be permitted access to public spaces, to the exercise of political power, and to leadership. Other movements push back against a newly-emerging consensus, such as the view of reproductive justice expressed in the Roe v. Wade decision to make abortion legal in all U.S. states. In response, the anti-abortion movement was diligent for a half century in finding ways to restrict legal access to abortion, until the Dobbs decision reversed Roe.
[2] Polarization among Christians today continues to include debates about who may access reproductive care or religious leadership, and whose gender-related identities and partnerships will receive acceptance and blessing. But in the United States, political polarization is more about which of two teams one will join in relation to a wide cluster of issues that get packaged in relation to electoral politics. So polarized political energy gets redirected from policy issues to candidates and parties themselves. In this context, well-funded institutes create policy agendas that serve a variety of interests that may or may not touch base with the actual concerns that led voters to the polls. We see this with Project 2025, about which Trump said he knew nothing in order to appeal to voters who might be uncomfortable with its wide-ranging Christian nationalist agenda. As a result, around the globe, voting is something of an eschatological exercise: the pouring forth of a bundle of hopes and fears into an election for this or that candidate. Often the passion focuses on the national level—as if the whole shape of the country depends upon a presidential election.
[3] This focus on a presidential election to pick a single powerful leader is in tension with a vision of democracy as a system of checks and balances. According to The Economist, the “elected autocrat” of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is the most “admired leader” in Latin America.[1] Salvadorans feel safer after Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 and put 80,000 people—2% of the entire population—in jail. Despite torture and deaths of inmates, what matters to most is that “homicides have plummeted and Mr. Bukele was re-elected by a landslide in 2024.”[2] Surveys suggest that more than half of Latin Americans “would not worry … if an undemocratic government took over, so long as it solved their country’s problems.”[3] Similarly, hearing that Donald Trump wants to claim executive power and rule through political appointees did not seem to trouble the majority in the US who voted for him.
[4] It is as if, as a species, we still think of ourselves as at heart monarchists: we imagine one person can alter the economy, lower the price of eggs, and provide security and whatever mix of regulation and freedom we desire. What can emerge within democracies, then, is electoral authoritarianism: as if democracy at heart means primarily that we get to elect the next king or queen to rule over us. Insofar as this is true for at least half of voters in a country, another layer of political polarization is between those who do and do not want to defend a more robust democracy with checks and balances among different branches of government, and with bipartisan deliberations and problem-solving.
[5] When we think of practices of Christian faith in relation to political polarization organized around a competition among political teams and leaders, not only around ethical and policy issues themselves, we are asking not only about how to relate church and state, but also about how to relate our affective identifications with the church to our affective identifications with a political party or its leaders. Registered at the emotional level, and with regard to our senses of identity, we can see that faith always involves navigating how our feelings tumble together in regard to our hopes for the country, for ourselves and our families, and for the world and God’s creation as a whole.
[6] Just as it’s easy to elide a commitment to democracy behind our potent desires for what kind of life we would like to have for ourselves and others, so too it’s easy as Christians to shape our imagination about the Beloved Community around the particular issues of justice and ethical perspectives that are front and center for ourselves. Thus, if we value democracy, we need metacognition about its features and ways to support it. Toward this end, Timothy Snyder wrote a primer in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.[4] He stresses practices like truth-telling and defending institutions. Likewise, we could practice more self-awareness with regard to how our faith relates to our political identities and our ethical deliberations, respectively. We might cultivate something akin to Ignatian spiritual exercises to examine how our Christian visions of the Beloved Community relate to our visions for a nation–as well as how we interact with those holding different perspectives from our own.
[7] Even if we find ourselves zigzagging between anxiety about polarization and a fear of tyranny (or maybe a desire for it)—depending in part on how we feel about election results—being rooted in a faith perspective invites routine repentance in the form of self-examination about our ethical and public policy values, and our efforts to connect meaningfully with those who envision the norms of the nation and the Beloved Community differently. Both are forms of loving our neighbors as ourselves: checking in about our own vision of an “otherwise”—what the world ought to be—and touching base with those who disagree with our “otherwise” vision.
[8] We need a theological touchstone as we do so. Conversation about depolarization often focuses on the interpersonal level: building relationships with our neighbors and family members that allow each of us to feel seen and understood, even across disagreement. In Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times,[5] Christine Helmer and I presuppose that shared ethical deliberation across differences occurs best within a democracy with free speech protections—an ideal that is itself disputed in form and practice. But our underlying premise is that recollecting a theological framing of Christian identity matters with regard to any context for ethical reflection and involvement in politics or advocacy.
[9] In our book’s last chapter, we envision Christian life as a process of being centered, decentered, and recentered again. As we bear witness to our own value-laden vision for the Beloved Community and the country in which we dwell, and as we listen to what is at stake for those whose vision differs, we might find ourselves tacking in a different direction. In this way, justice-seeking can be disorienting. As Argentinian liberation theologian Enrique Dussel put it, our grasp on what the Kingdom of God ought to look like is always partial and in process, as new forms of injustice come into view.[6] As if to illustrate this point, Ada-María Isasi-Díaz suggested that “kin-dom of God” is a better term than “kingdom,” on egalitarian and interspecies grounds.[7]
[10] The Small Catechism teaching to remember our baptism daily—in repentance and renewal—is vital amid the shifts in perspective that accompany our efforts to live into the new creation, to bring right relationship and flourishing to the Beloved Community. Remembering our faith in Christ’s grace involves neither avoiding conflict, nor amplifying it—as can happen when we fix our gaze on own vision of justice as if it were itself an absolute to worship. Recollecting our baptism involves bringing to God all that we observe within and around us, in a dynamic of awareness and trust that our moral intuitions and conversions of perspective are both ordinary features of a life of faith in Christ within and for the Beloved Community.
[11] In our last chapter, “The Discipline of Ordinary Faith,” we describe several theological resources that can inform the spiritual exercise of Christian faith in the public square, or in conversations involving debate or disagreement on ethical or political issues. There we talk about a re-centering rhythm that imitates Jesus’ own back-and-forth between solitude in the wilderness and public engagement; we talk about Denise Rector’s invitation to use lament before confession in order to build empathic identification with those harmed as a motivation for addressing injustice, rather than beginning with a preoccupation with one’s own guilty conscience.[8] We discuss mindfulness about our pulls to presumption and despair, as ways of naming the sins of partisanship; we discuss the need to be alert for ways we might be drawn to idolatry by making ultimate our own political or ethical commitments at the expense of loving our enemies by seeing them as neighbors to better understand. Following James Gustafson, we recall that theocentrism, like orthodoxy, involves listening widely to integrate all the truths at play amid ethical or political conflict.[9] This can prevent our equating God with our own current vision of the Beloved Community. All such invitations to spiritual reflection amid our everyday efforts at justice-seeking aren’t intended to encourage quietism, but rather the metacognition that faith in our baptism can bring to the ways we pursue activism or other forms of community and political engagement.
[12] One premise is that seeking justice and the common good is not about cultivating the virtue of speaking truth to power as an ideal to aspire to—as if a heroic “Here I stand; I can do no other” moment is the pinnacle of every mature kind of justice-seeking. There are times and seasons when we might judge it best to resist an abuse of power in ways that risk martyrdom, or that draw us into the uncomfortable but (for some) exhilarating feeling of standing in public opposition to what we see as deeply wrong. But the only image in our book is Lucas Cranach’s The Vineyard of the Lord—a visual testament to the collective effort it takes to build up the Beloved Community. The painting illustrates Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20 about the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) by depicting various Reformers trying to replant what representatives of Rome’s leadership had uprooted. So, too, social change movements build on the contributions of many, often over generations, much of it out of the public eye. Rosa Parks did not just one day refuse to get out of her seat in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She had long attended routine committee meetings to organize for the end of segregation. Her “Here I sit; I will do not other” moment was a public flashpoint of a lifelong investment in working with others to end Jim Crow laws and to call the United States to become a more truly Beloved Community.
[13] Ending legal segregation proved easier than addressing economic disinvestment in Black communities, or police brutality, or creating a common historical narrative about racial injustice in the United States that isn’t itself a flashpoint for political polarization. We could each add to the list of problems we agree we need to solve but do not agree about how to (like affordable health care), as well as the list of ethical or policy topics on which we fundamentally disagree about what exactly constitutes right or wrong—often related to what we believe to be true or false. In each case, our faith as Christians can ground the kind of mundane, collaborative, nitty-gritty attention to interpretation and response that builds understanding, if not agreement—where there is mutual goodwill to do so. And where there is not mutual goodwill, an orientation to an eschatological vision of the Beloved Community remains as a horizon—as part of loving God above all else, above all our failures together as a species. Conditioning Christian identity on justification by faith in Christ frees us to discern how to tack in various directions in loving our neighbors and ourselves.
[14] To illustrate this dynamic, I will ponder two examples of efforts to depolarize that were not immediately successful in generating agreement, nor completely fruitless. One is about a recent ecumenical conversation about abortion. The other is about the yearning for Christian unity that animated the 16th century signatories to the Book of Concord.
[15] The first example is of a panel discussion in which I participated in fall 2024 on “Diverse Christian Perspectives on Abortion” in Macomb, Illinois. The idea was spawned by Jane Coplan, local president of the League of Women Voters, who had participated in a fall 2023 ecumenical conversation I had using the ELCA “Civic Life and Faith” six-week study guide.[10] Members of about five or six area congregations participated. At the end, Jane asked if we might host a conversation about a particular topic, and suggested we start with abortion. She would facilitate; I would describe progressive Christian perspectives on reproductive justice that include legal access to abortion; and I would find someone willing to be on the panel to describe Christian perspectives that view abortion as immoral and something that ought to be illegal. The person I found was LCMS pastor Chris Hull. We planned to each present, then leave time for questions and comments, with the option for audience members to write them on a piece of paper anonymously.
[16] Because my pastor, Youngshim Pitcher, and I had co-organized the Civic Life and Faith study sessions, and because she had led a congregational series earlier to discuss the ELCA’s statement on abortion, we originally planned to host the panel discussion at our congregation, Trinity Lutheran Church. But we wrongly assumed the church council would support such a conversation. Some council members feared violence, and that some members might leave the congregation if we hosted such a conversation so close to an election, thinking the intent of the discussion was a debate aiming to persuade people to vote a certain way. They did not want politics in the church. Some in the congregation feel abortion is simply murder—why discuss any other perspective? We had meaningful conversation belatedly. When council members learned about the history and purpose of the discussion, some of them attended the event after all. Chris Hull had immediately offered the LCMS Lutheran Student Center as an alternative location, and some 50 people came, from various churches in the area. We felt the conversation went well.
[17] I am unsure if anyone’s minds were changed that day. But here are some takeaways, in regard to depolarizing practices amid earnest efforts to express competing visions of what constitutes justice.
[18] First, it is important to communicate about the intentions and the context of difficult conversations. I became more aware that some prefer to see church as a place without political or controversial issues, while others are hungry for meaningful conversation and a chance to talk through their moral intuitions, uncertainties, and what puzzles them about why others would hold such a different perspective. An ecumenical space allows Christians to encounter those from other churches who also seek conversation, and who might come from churches that take a different stand from their own.
[19] Second, theological literacy is worth cultivating. Many Christians are not aware of progressive Christian arguments for reproductive choices that can include abortion. And those who did not accept them were thinking with them—interpreting the same scripture differently, or getting clearer on diverse ways to approach scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.
[20] Third, it is important to navigate to places of mutual appreciation and witness. On the panel, I could say that I supported the local Birthright, which meets at the LCMS Lutheran Student Center, for those pregnant women who sought it out as part of their own moral discernment, trying to imagine how they might be able to afford to welcome a child into the world. Chris could say that he liked the idea that the work they were doing involved moral discernment. Those who spoke in the audience also felt that we were bearing witness to one another, sharing our respective testimonies. The desire to feel heard in the presence of one another amid disagreement itself brought a sense of peace and rightness.
[21] Fourth, everyone should be willing to own the consequences of their position and to ask others to do the same. Chapter 4 in Ordinary Faith is about abortion. It includes contemporary Christian perspectives that morally center a pregnant woman herself, and explores the spiritual implications for women to hear abortion described as a demonic, feminist anti-sacrament. If those who support abortion as a legal, moral option for pregnant women need to reckon with the fact that a potential born human life is cut short, so too do those who would deprive pregnant women of the freedom to choose an abortion need to own the consequences such as the death of women when an abortion is medically necessary, the higher rates of poverty for those unable to access abortions, and the fundamental anthropological question: can women have the status of being fully human, possessing moral agency, if they must endure forced births? Women’s capacity to give birth might always leave human societies vulnerable to patriarchy. This is a cause of dismay for some of us, and of celebration for others—as if gender egalitarianism always runs against the tide of desire to control women’s fertility. Yet from the flip side: women’s fierce desire to control our own fertility—out of an instinct for what best preserves ourselves and our families—will always destabilize efforts of others to completely dictate the choices of pregnant women. Women want to be full persons, just as much as some want the unborn to be born at any cost. It is drop-offs into cognitive dissonance like this that can daunt me the most when I venture into thinking with those who draw the lines of moral rectitude very differently.
[22] In closing, I want to call to mind an apparent failure in an effort to depolarize, going back to the first century of the Protestant Reformation. The 1580 Book of Concord, the collection of confessional texts still used by Lutherans today, aimed to depolarize as much as to clarify Lutheran doctrines. The Preface indicates that the Book of Concord about the labor and longing of Lutheran Reformers who worked so hard to find common ground with the Catholic church, articulating where they shared a common understanding of scripture and tradition – such as holding to the Creeds, and opposing some ideas of the more radical reformers. They also painstakingly worked out doctrinal differences among themselves in the Formula of Concord, and sought “peace and harmony” with the Holy Roman Empire.[11] The list of those who signed onto the Preface of the Book of Concord include not only bishops, but also electors, princes, dukes, margraves, counts, mayors and city councils. This is the most moving part of the Book of Concord to me. Like Paul, they tried so hard to hold together the church, and to avoid war with the Holy Roman Empire and its Catholic allies.
[23] They failed, by one significant measure: The Book of Concord did not prevent the Thirty Years War in the 17th century (1618-1648), which killed one-third of Germany’s population. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 created separate regions for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.
[24] Despite decades of work by Reformers, the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire weren’t really interested in mutual listening, in finding common ground, in sharing power and authority and making space for new norms that emphasized laity, or tradition as amenable to an interpretation in a way that decentered papal authority. It is like a faculty college committee I chaired that took a year to prepare a report, which was then not even read by the provost’s office that made a decision without engaging its analysis and insights. I am reminded of something I learned from a retired school superintendent, Jon Heerboth, who had also left the LCMS instead of continuing with seminary after the exile from Concordia of faculty and students in the 1970’s who did not share a fundamentalist orientation. Once when I asked him about decisions in state agencies of education that seemed to ignore all thoughtful criticism, he said he had learned about state politics and state agencies that “good arguments don’t matter; political will matters.” In the case of Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, it would take 500 years—and Vatican II—for mutual listening to formally begin.
[25] But here are three constructive points illustrated by the Book of Concord and its signatories, with regard to efforts to depolarize across division.
[26] First, we always need to think about how we are responsible for relating religious identity and political power in any given age, within any given state structure. It is naïve to do otherwise, and prevents us from developing tools for responsible civic and political engagement—in one of what Luther called the three estates of church, state, and family in which love of neighbor is expressed. Today we would not have politicians signing ELCA doctrinal statements—but the Catholic mayor of Macomb did address my congregation at its kick-off 150th anniversary worship service. If there is any echo of the state church heritage among Lutherans in the US, it is not theocracy, but engaged citizenship as part of our service to the world. The state is not an enemy to conquer or to separate from, but a means of together making rules governing our common lives. Today that means thinking about how Christian identity and debates about moral norms can occur within a pluralistic political sphere.
[27] Second, even decades of collaborative efforts to work through theological debates might not bear fruit in the ways we want them to, in our own lifetimes. They might not prevent war – as in the Reformation era. Jesus’ own theological arguments about a kingdom of God that was not about anti-Roman Jewish nationalism – his compelling Torah interpretations didn’t prevent his own death. But the fruits of thoughtful, engaged theological reflection—including its ecumenical and interfaith forms today—are like seeds that are scattered, ready to take hold when they find fertile soil.
[28] Third, and for example, one gift of the Lutheran Confessional tradition is an emphasis on justification by faith as the heart of Christian identity. That was carried on when my Grandmother Pauline Rose, in the 8th grade, could not move north in Michigan with her family until she had memorized the Small Catechism. Globally, Lutherans who speak in tongues test the teachings of a charismatic leader with Luther’s Small Catechism. And, as we Christine and I tried to work out in Ordinary Faith, justification by faith in Christ’s grace is the basis of covenantal belonging in a way that interrupts equating Christian identity with one side or other of an election result, or with holding onto one side of a contested debate as a necessary mark of being considered among the elect ourselves.
[29] Justification by faith in Christ generates the covenant we share as Christians. It is also a legacy worth curating, a meme worth expressing anew as a theological orientation that frees Christians for ethical deliberation and political engagement with those with whom we disagree—for the sake of the Beloved Community.
[1] “Latin Americans Are Worryingly Relaxed about Authoritarianism,” The Economist, December 18, 2024, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/12/18/latin-americans-are-worryingly-relaxed-about-authoritarianism,
[2] “Will the ‘Iron Fist’ Model Spread in Latin America?” The Economist, November 20, 2024, https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/20/will-the-iron-fist-model-spread-in-latin-america
[3] “Latin Americans Are Worryingly Relaxed about Authoritarianism.” The Economist, December 18, 2024, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/12/18/latin-americans-are-worryingly-relaxed-about-authoritarianism
[4] Timothy Snyder, Against Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), available through Internet Archives: https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-the-twentieth-century-by-timothy-snyder-z-lib.org/page/n1/mode/2up.
[5] Amy Carr and Christine Helmer, Ordinary Fatih in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2023).
[6] Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Community, translated by Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 22, 47.
[7] Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 83 note 14.
[8] Denise Rector, “Race and the Gift of Lament,” Dialog 60, no. 1 (2021): 22-27.
[9] James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1, Theology and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
[10] “Civic Life and Faith,” ELCA, https://www.elca.org/faith/faith-and-society/current-social-writing-projects/studies-for-civic-life-and-faith
[11] Preface to the Book of Concord (1580), translated by Gerhard F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau, https://bookofconcord.org/preface/
