Humility: Democracy’s Necessary Virtue

Written for Covenant, blog of The Living Church, August 18, 2017

I‘ve written before about the problematic political sorting happening in America’s churches. People have a propensity to seek and attend churches that match their political convictions, rather than to be formed first by their faith and to let that direct their political engagement. This trend is detrimental to the Church, as well as society, and this sorting is part of broader cultural trends that relate to the way people identify with either of the two leading parties.

The origin of many of these trends bears moral scrutiny on the part of Christians, as each has resulted in more homogeneous, polarized, and partisan political movements in the United States. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, has been researching the key fissures in our common life; he and coauthor Sam Abrams put together a ten-point list summarizing the major systemic issues they have identified as being the root of many of our political woes.¹

1. Party realignment and purification 1964-92

2. Mass sorting of liberal vs. conservative voters by 1990s

3. Change in Congress 1995 — death of friendships

4. Media fractionation and the Internet (1980s and 1990s, respectively)

5. Residential homogeneity, urban v. rural 1990s

6. End of the Cold War, loss of common enemy 1990s

7. Increasing immigration and racial diversity 1990s

8. Increasing role of money in politics, negative advertising 2000s

9. Generational changing of the guard 1990s

10. Increasing education since 1970s

Christians should notice that the partisan realignment that began in 1964 was to a significant degree prompted by disagreements about racial equality and civil rights. The way this sorting led conservative white Southern Democrats into the GOP, and fundamentally changed the nature of the nation’s politics — leading to a more homogeneously conservative Republican Party, and a more homogeneously progressive Democratic Party — means that racial dynamics have been a largely forgotten foundation of the subsequent culture war, which matured into our current partisan impasse. The shift of the South toward Republican politics was a decades-long process, with the transition arguably beginning as early as Franklin Roosevelt, and continuing under Eisenhower, with a number of factors at work, but the relation to racial tension is undeniable.

{Read it all}

1. My summary is taken from YouTube; these are fleshed out a bit in Haidt and Abrams’s article for The Washington Post, found here.