More than anyone, Christians should be in the business of understanding the reality of people’s lives.
By the time this reflection hits the press, some months will have dulled the passions surrounding Election 2012. As it is, this mid-November, Americans find themselves in belated agreement about the reality of a social landscape just validated by the voting majority, and the narrative is set: Democrats are the deft, adaptable realists, Republicans the recalcitrant fogies. At least in Washington, there’s enough gloating and fretting to wonder if the middle’s bottomed out.
“It’s the end of the Republic,” I heard a married southern white woman despair twelve hours after the outcome was called. Within minutes my phone vibrated with an invitation from a young and single Wendell Berry urbanite: “Last night got you in good spirits?” it sang. “Come dance it out this Saturday at Club Heaven & Hell with a nine-piece Funk Orchestra!” I couldn’t help but laugh. One nation, indivisible?
In our splintered context, it seems as tiresome as it does critical to put a little time into cleaning up the aims and means of political persuasion. Tiresome because polarization seems too permanent a feature to overcome, critical because without a real effort to bridge our chasms, a country founded on ideas suffocates its own engine. If a democracy is to survive, we don’t really have a choice but to think anew about the purpose of persuasion, about the good that is possible when people’s minds are changed, about the even deeper good that can sprout in the overture process itself.
Reassessment carries special weight for Christians, who have tended toward a preaching model in their fraught history as advocates on the political stage. Not being equipped, somehow, to have their faith affect political expression other than to declare holy high ground and doggedly pound home the same arguments, those on the right and left have succumbed to didactic overreach as they’ve condemned and glorified whatever or whoever speaks to conservative or progressive theo-political priorities. Trusting that repetition is somehow effective, Christian lapels have instead earned the scorn of self-respecting thinkers who won’t stomach moralism beyond pulpit’s pews.
Anne Snyder is a member of the Humane Pursuits editorial board. She is currently living in Houston, Texas, where she is studying the assimilation patterns of the city’s growing immigrant population while also working for the Laity Lodge Leadership Initiative. She has started a biweekly column for the Orange County Register and freelances elsewhere. Before moving to Houston she worked in the Op-Ed department of The New York Times in Washington, DC, and before that at World Affairs Journal and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Originally from Boston but given the cross-cultural bug from a childhood spent in Hong Kong and Australia, she holds a B.A. from Wheaton College (IL) and an M.A. from Georgetown University.