Template and Transcript: The Roles of Liturgy amid Rhetorical Polarization

What is polarization?

[1] As befits a preacher, I begin today with a quote from a great theological authority in these matters, Rabbi Leonard of Montreal, who wrote:

I’m sentimental if you know what I mean

I love the country but I can’t stand the scene

And I’m neither left or right,

I’m just staying home tonight

Getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags

That time cannot decay

I’m junk but I’m still holding up

This little wild bouquet

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

[2] These lines are from the song “Democracy,” from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 album The Future. Written and recorded in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, “Democracy” reflects an unstable post-Cold War world, increasingly defined by consumer culture and mass entertainment, and required to redefine democracy for a globalized reality riven with material struggles and spiritual yearnings.

[3] In this verse, Cohen places himself as the quintessential modern subject: he loves America but is alienated from its culture. He stands aloof from the big ideological contests. He is absorbed in the ephemera of television. And yet there is something enduring in this posture, a resistance to the dissolution of time, and the paradox of being oneself a sort of synthetic junk but holding up a little wild bouquet.

[4] Since these words were recorded, and even since Cohen’s death on the day before the 2016 election, the screen has only gotten littler and more hopeless. Algorithmic social media and the infinite scroll have subverted even the passive commonality afforded by mass culture. Everyone claims to love the country, and even to speak for its best traditions and truest essence, but we are all alienated from whatever we see as the dominant strain in religion, politics, or culture–no one can stand the scene. And while partisan politics is at a fever pitch, partisan self-identification is not historically high, with pluralities of Americans preferring to identify neither as Democrat or Republican, embracing neither left nor right as a position^[1]. Those who do lean into the polarization of contemporary party politics often seem to turn partisanship into a cultural or even pseudo-religious identity rather than a set of loyalties to particular positions or policy goals.

[5] My task is to address the roles that Christian liturgy plays and can play in the context of our present experience of extreme partisan polarization. By “polarization,” I refer to the reality and the perception that elected leaders and their core supporters are increasingly far apart on policy issues, that cooperation across party lines has become functionally impossible in many areas, and as a consequence, both elections and policy battles are intense, bitter, and described in totalizing or eschatological terms. Many, perhaps most, Americans do not identify with either “pole” of our partisan divide, but as the metaphor of “polarization” suggests, the poles exert a magnetic force, attracting or repelling, on everyone in between.

[6] In one sense, this is nothing new. Polarization may well be as intrinsic to political community as conflict itself. In other ways, however, our contemporary experience of partisan polarization is historically contingent, created and accelerated by certain features of our Constitution and the emergence of ideologically coherent parties, aggravated by cultural and technological changes such as algorithmic social media, ideological sorting at the level of states and even neighborhoods, and the decline of mass-market news media and social organizations.

[7] How is a worshiping community to respond to both the enduring fact and accelerating force of political polarization? I’m going to suggest two options, which amount to embracing polarization or attempting to transcend it.

Liturgy as Transcript

[8] As a ministry student, I remember hearing from an experienced local pastor about the dangers of bringing politics into worship. She told us about a colleague who had provoked the ire of a mostly liberal congregation after praying against “the evil of the Trident submarine” in the prayers. Members of this congregation complained to their judicatory authority that the pastor had “abused [their] bowed heads.” Both of those phrases lodged in my brain for their specificity: the particular nuclear-capable vessels that threatened to destabilize the Cold War in the 1980s, and the posture of the praying congregants that demanded reverence and respect from the person tasked with speaking to God on their behalf.

[9] Later on, as a young pastor, I became accustomed to seeing people on social media saying things like “If your preacher doesn’t address Issue or Event X on Sunday, stand up and walk out.” Before this phrase became a meme and then a joke among preachers, it exerted a kind of moral authority over me. I felt obligated to address big events at some point in worship. If I didn’t, it could be interpreted as indifference, cowardice, or tacit approval of whatever evil had occurred.

[10] This impulse to leave no tragedy or horror unaddressed within the confines of the Sunday liturgy reflects assumptions I never saw articulated: that the worship of the church was properly a commentary on current events; that liturgy and preaching formed people, either toward or away from engagement in political conflicts; that the priorities and rhetoric of the church are determined by and continuous with the priorities and rhetoric of news media, social media, and political controversies.

[11] And most importantly, this impulse reflects an assumption that the church is composed of citizens in the democratic sense. That is, that we are history’s agents, responsible for everything that does and does not happen in the political realm. The preacher, like the prophet Ezekiel, has the obligation to warn the people, so that whether they turn from their wickedness and live or remain obstinate and die, the preacher herself will be blameless.

[12] The demand for topicality and relevance in worship inclines us toward what I call liturgy as “transcript.” The worship of the church, whether in preaching, intercessory prayers, litanies, calls to worship, or purpose-written rites, becomes a record of the moment’s controversies, often in the precise terms set for those controversies by social media or social movements. The preacher and producer of liturgical resources, swimming as all of us do in a current of hashtags, shorthand, and all the symbolic language of contemporary politics, reproduces the passions of the day in the collective language of the church. This language sends signals quite distinct from its literal meaning, if it has any. Consider what you would know about a preacher or a church if you heard or saw each of the following words:  Systemic racism, Border Crisis, Border Enforcement,  Wokeness, Equity, Elites, Trafficking

[13] While this treatment of Christian worship as a transcript of public debates is widespread to varying degrees, two particularly vivid examples serve to illustrate the larger trend.

[14] First, in 2023, there was a furor over a church in Minnesota using a text authored by a UCC pastor called the ‘Sparkle Creed’ in worship: “I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God. I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.”

[15] We see here the use of the language of contemporary culture-war debates to recast certain aspects of the Scriptural and historical witness of Christianity. The usage is defensible in each case–it is true that God in God’s essence does not submit to human categories of gender; it is true that God is often (though hardly always) depicted in the plural form in the Old Testament; it is true that Jesus had both a heavenly Father and a human foster-father (though one might object that this statement of faith erases his human mother). Perhaps in the Transfiguration his clothing looked fabulous.

[16] Nevertheless, this text is not primarily a set of affirmations about the nature of God and the person of Jesus Christ. It is clearly an intervention in contemporary debates about gender and sexuality, with shorthand terms like “non-binary,” “pronouns,” “rainbow,” “diversity” and so on that are meant to evoke responses conditioned by those debates.

[17] From a very different ecclesial and political space, we saw in 2024 a Christian Nationalist festival called “Take Our Border Back.” This was a caravan from Virginia, where the organizers claimed America had been dedicated to God in 1607, to the U.S.-Mexico border.[2]

[18] Hostility to immigrants and fears about national boundaries are nothing new in American Christianity. What was notable about this event was its revivalistic, even Sacramental character. People were baptized at “the border,” a new convergence of national and political and sacred symbols. “God is a God of borders,” the organizer said, “of law and order.” Nationalist and partisan symbols abounded, becoming indistinguishable from whatever was being claimed for or about Jesus of Nazareth.[3]

[19] These are extreme examples whose significance depends much more on their social-media virality than the numbers of people directly involved. Despite their moral, theological, and political differences, I cite them as examples of the tendency to transcribe political and cultural polarization into the language and practices of worship. They are both documents of the current polarized rhetoric of American public life.

[20] What is gained when we treat Christian worship as a transcript of public debates?

• In each example, the Christian leaders involved have undeniably tapped into the zeitgeist. For those of us who worry that we are not speaking directly to contemporary concerns, copying and pasting those concerns into our liturgical practice solves the problem.
• Clear signaling. The language and symbolism in each example makes it very clear who is and is not a part of the worshiping community. The border revival event was explicitly partisan, while the use of the Sparkle Creed indirectly but unmistakably characterizes the community as belonging on one side of America’s partisan divide. The witness and values of the communities that preach and worship in these ways will appeal to people who share the stated views and ward off people who do not, allowing advocacy to happen with a single, unmixed voice.
• In-group mobilization. The culture-war transcript establishes the centrality of a given concern to the community. Liberal and conservative Christians may see sexuality and gender or immigration enforcement as one issue among many, but when leaders write those issues into defining statements and acts of faith, they may be able to weld their communities into more effective hubs of political action on those issues.

[21] There are also, however, costs to speaking in the language of partisan polarization.

• A high-salience issue today may well be forgotten tomorrow. Faith formation depends on consistency over time, while partisan polarization depends on a constant churn of new issues of the day.
• Bad aesthetics. The language and iconography of polarized rhetoric tends to be ugly, cheap, and trivializing, especially as more and more of it is drawn from social media.
• Alienation of less politically active constituents. Most people do not define themselves in terms of the biggest debates of the day. The conditioned responses that mobilize the in-group can be instantly off-putting to anyone who is not already a part of it, and thus may sacrifice the opportunity to form their consciences in a deeper way.

Template

[22] There is, in my proposal, a second way to relate the language and actions of Christian worship to the fact of contemporary polarization, and that is what I am calling the “template.” If the liturgical “transcript” is an attempt to write liturgy in the terms of contemporary debates, with the goals of topical relevance and mobilized citizenship, the liturgical “template” is an attempt to write contemporary debates in terms of liturgy itself, with the goal of recognizing contemporary controversies in a larger trans-historical pattern, and cultivating an ethic of citizenship that is loyal not only to a polarized America but to a larger sacred community across time and space.

[23] Christian worship evolved as the work of people who took bad government, epidemic, natural disaster, war, migration, and pretty much any other upheaval humans experience as facts of life. To be sure, the enduring fact of polarization is encoded in the texts that have been passed down, from Arian and Nicene Christians to iconoclasts and iconodules to Protestants and Catholics. The liturgical texts of our own Lutheran tradition reflect the long-term influence of Enlightenment rationalism, political liberalism, gender egalitarianism, and discomfort with the idea of a “chosen people” among other sentiments.

[24] There is no expression of Christian worship, current or historical, that exists apart from the influences of the conflicts and contradictions of its social context.

[25] Nevertheless, it remains possible to use the language of liturgy, prayer, and even preaching as a template for understanding current conflicts. When we look at our resources, we see words and actions that place our moment in history in a larger pattern of God’s faithfulness amid disappointments and disasters. We see words and actions that cultivate courage and stoicism in the face of evils we may not be able to overcome and humility in the face of controversies in which we may be in error. We speak and act in ways that relocate historical agency in God. We counterbalance our culture’s emphasis on our own democratic agency with the patience that comes from faith.

[26] Like other clergy, I have from time to time relied on the Great Litany to address moments of crisis:

From all sin, from all error, from all evil;

from the cunning assaults of the devil;

from an unprepared and evil death:

Good Lord, deliver us.

From war, bloodshed, and violence;

from corrupt and unjust government;

from sedition and treason:

Good Lord, deliver us.

From epidemic, drought, and famine;

from fire and flood, earthquake, lightning, and storm,

and from everlasting death:

Good Lord, deliver us.

By the mystery of your incarnation; by your holy birth:

Help us, good Lord.

In all time of our tribulation;

in all time of our prosperity;

in the hour of death; and in the day of judgment:

Save us, good Lord.

Though unworthy, we implore you

to hear us, Lord our God.

To beat down Satan under our feet;

to send faithful workers into your harvest;

to accompany your word with your Spirit and power;

to raise up those who fall and to strengthen those who stand;

and to comfort and help the fainthearted and the distressed:

We implore you to hear us, good Lord.

To give to all nations justice and peace;

to preserve our country from discord and strife;

to direct and guard those who have civil authority;

and to bless and guide all our people:

We implore you to hear us, good Lord.[4]

[27] These are words that, in different forms and in different languages, have been used by Christians for centuries to appeal to God in the midst of distress.

[28] This is a quintessential liturgical “template.” It abstracts from the particular conflicts and crises of a given moment and re-casts them as part of a larger, trans-historical appeal for peace, justice, and holiness. It expresses the truth that God’s people have seen this all before and are likely to see it again. And it implies something else: that the triumph over destruction, chaos, and evil in the world is ultimately God’s to win, while our triumph consists in endurance and in faithful witness.

[29] Most importantly for my purpose today, it comes to us in a language that is not conditioned by contemporary controversies. That language may contribute to elevating us and forming us for faithful service. Or it may leave us unmoved and indifferent. But it does not activate in us the immediate awareness of which side of any given conflict we happen to be on.

[30] Like the liturgical transcript, the liturgical template has benefits and costs.

• Transcending the topical. Treating worship as a template for historical experience allows us a broader perspective, including the possibility that we ourselves may be in some kind of critical error.
• Decent aesthetics. Avoiding the hackneyed and boring language of contemporary politics is a good in itself.
• Speaking across lines of polarization. By avoiding the stereotyped rhetoric of a polarized polity, the template keeps open the possibility of forming the faith and conscience of people with diverse views.

[31] The costs are a direct consequence of the above:

• Loss of immediate relevance.
• Vagueness of political and ethical implication. People will be given cause to wonder “where we stand” on a given issue.
• Demobilizing the constituency. Worshipers who are invited to examine their own souls or dwell on the possibility that their moral instincts are misguided or misapplied are less effective subjects for activism.

Junk but Still

[32} Decreasing partisan polarization as such is not an appropriate purpose for Christian worship. Blurring differences, lowering the stakes of politics, or avoiding alienating worshipers are not worthy goals for the worship of God, either. Polarization is a deep dynamic of human societies, and at the same time, not every position in a conflict is equally insightful or flawed.

[33] Nevertheless, I perceive an estranged commonality in the loose categories of “Christian Nationalism” and “Progressive Christianity” that tend to take up space in the public discourse about religion and politics. Both treat civil law as a site of theological contestation and as an expression of theological principles, and the democratic politics of the United States as essentially sacral. They share a belief in a civilizing mission both within and beyond our own polity. They express a moralistic revivalism in public life and a meliorist approach to public policy. Together they express the conviction that we live in an era of unexampled and world-defining crisis, whether that is climate change and the rise of authoritarian politics or whether it is whatever Christian nationalists are on about today.

[33] It is notable, then, that the liturgical roots of most of our traditions don’t express these same assumptions. When the Didache instructs the assembly to pray “let grace come and this world pass away,” it is very hard to read it as having anything to do with election outcomes or policy changes. To the extent that we, as teachers and leaders in Christian communities, share the assumptions of Nationalist or Progressive Christianity, we are going to be obligated to resolve Christian worship, teaching, and discipleship to the priorities of contemporary democratic conflict. We are going to need worship to be a transcript of those conflicts. We are going to need to risk the ire of the bowed heads in order to appropriately condemn the Trident submarine. We are going to need to welcome people walking out of worship because we have offended their sensibilities.

[34] But if our assumptions are different–if we grant a larger role to human sinfulness that is not amended by correct views and public virtue, if we acknowledge ourselves to be essentially united with those we oppose as sinners capable of redemption, if we seek a reign of God that is not resolvable to an ethnically-defined “Christian nation” or a social democratic welfare state with room for all gender expressions and sexualities, if we believe that the Body of Christ endures beyond and apart from the gains and losses of the civil order–we will need to speak in different terms. We will need to borrow, adapt, or create forms of corporate worship that will serve as templates for the experience of a history that has always been defined by conflict. We will need to accept being less than useful. We will need to grant more sacredness to the bowed heads of the people and less pointed condemnation of the Trident submarine. We will need to accept that some people will walk out of worship because we have not said what they expect their religious community to say.

[35] In reality, every leader and every community is going to live with a mix of, even a tension between, these assumptions. Try as we might, we can’t exclude the demands of relevance and we can’t create such an ideologically uniform community that we don’t have to take differences into account.

[36] For our choices in this tension we are ultimately accountable to God in the first instance, and to each other in the second instance–to the whole catholic communion of imperfect historical subjects with misguided views, misplaced priorities, mismanaged attention getting sucked into an infinity of hopeless little screens. It is perhaps hyperbole to call this assembly “junk.” What it is capable of, in a world riven into pieces as ours, is not yet known. But we have to trust that it–we–can still hold up the little wild bouquet of our faith in a hostile and indifferent world.

^[1] See https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx (accessed 3/3/2025)

[2] https://www.reuters.com/pictures/take-our-border-back-inside-trump-focused-texas-rallies-blending-politics-2024-02-06/

[3] https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/army-of-god-robert-agee-border-standoff/

[4] Great Litany. Evangelical Lutheran Worship #238. (Augsburg Fortress, 2006).